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I think that's probably his best overall performance too. True it's not perfect but he seems more comfortable than in it than a the others and the script played to his strengths more.
I still think Broz is excellent in the Kaulfman scene. It's a restrained performance.
That said I enjoy parts of TND but consider it a fairly weak Bond film overall. It's just cheesey and not very well written.
I actually do rank Sean and Pierce pretty much equally in the acting chops department. So if anyone is lumping him next to Laz, then they can lump Sean right there too. Which is to say, Laz actually has the last place position sewn up miles and miles behind the other Bonds, including Pierce and Sean.
Sir Rog and Dalton have always been underrated to me and I think both had a tougher time when in the role from critics and fans?
Curious, have you ever taken any sort of acting classes? I'll grant that Pierce's overacting is better than George's lack of acting, but you'd have trouble selling that theory for free on eBay.
Agreed, Pierce has a certain charisma that George lacks.
@identigraph- Count me among those who feel his reputation was made more by the media than the fans. He was serviceable through 1997 but didn't have the overall toughness to balance out the more human and emotional Bond they were presenting. Craig has managed to pull it off much better. Bond should be an individual you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley, and Pierce simply doesn't convey that to me. Just another reason he wasn't ideal for the part.
In all fairness @SirHenry the same COULD be said about Roger Moore. Can't really imagine Rog being a particularly intimidating or scary bloke. That being said I suppose he does have a slightly more commanding manner about him.
Even so even if you were to bump into him I can imagine he would try to help you find your way home.
I think that's very accurate. I know I overrated Brosnan when he was Bond.
As for Brosnan, I tend to view him in a time capsule. He was a good Bond for the second half of the 90s. Trying to compare him to the Bonds that came before and after, is unfair. The climates were very different when Dalton did his Bonds and have been very different since Craig stepped in. There couldn't have been a LTK or SF between '95 and '02 is what I think. Brosnan hovered on the fumes of the explosion of the electronic age. The Clinton era put a smile on our face. Dalton's Bond existed in a universe where the Cold War was still a hard fact. And Craig's Bond lives in a world that's ever so slightly trying to recover from terrorism whilst dealing with constant threads, domestic and foreign, including economical and ecological instability. Both Dalton and Craig need(ed) that darker edge, that rough side, that in-your-face realism. Brosnan lived the fantasy of the millennium celebrations. And as he was the polished catwalk model Bond, with his perfumed charms and aura of unconditional optimism, he served the films perfectly.
I'm not saying he couldn't have done a tougher film though. I think GE proves that Brosnan had it in him. But let's face it: we wanted to smile in those days. Every in-film conflict had to be resolved by the end of an act. We practically demanded the pop music Bond who made us smile. And that's what we got, in fact to unspeakable extremes... ;-) So when Brosnan was heralded as a great Bond, I think it was mainly a case of being the appropriate Bond for the times. When I watch TND nowadays, I don't blame the film for not being CR. (I do blame it for not being GE2 though, but that makes more sense, doesn't it? ;-)) I watch TND as a 1997 film. I think that's important. Otherwise every Bond film before CR will get an unfair treatment. Even MR makes sense if you think about it, from the perspective of what was popular in '79. How could one sit through OP today with a straight face when viewing the film through our SF blinded eyes?
It's easy for me. Connery was the perfect Bond for the 60s. Moore was the perfect Bond for the 70s. Dalton was the perfect Bond for the 80s. Craig is the perfect Bond for today. And Brosnan, well, he was the ideal Bond for audiences in the 90s.
***
Why yes, I have. Drama, theatre, and writing classes. Not many. But even if I didn't, I am a big movie fan and I have my own opinions. I do rank Pierce and Sean as pretty close to each other when it comes to pure acting talent, yes I stand by that. You and I will just forever disagree about Pierce. C'est la vie.
Curious, have you ever had French lessons? (oh, opening up that for so many puns ...!) ;)
I loved GE but I also still love TND, most of it, just not all of it.
The formula used in the 90's was indicative of the times.
Each Bond has had its own era which stressed certain things, as has been mentioned numerous times already.
The nature of fandom, it seems. Remember when Brosnan was Bond and the forums were swarmed with Dalton/anti-Dalton battles? It will be Craig's turn when the next fella takes over.
Those of us who continually find goodness in each era & tenure are a minority I guess.
I couldn't agree more with you about Moore being the same type of Bond, although I'd say Pierce's Bond is better in the action scenes. But here's the rub- Moore's version is original and his own, and not a greatest hits package. I like to see each Bond that comes aboard try to be different than the others in some way, with Brosnan I don't get that as everything he does someone before him did it already, and in most cases better.
@chrisisall- I feel I belong in the minority you describe, if there is such a thing at all. I'm not big on Lazenby, but I am mostly positive about the film itself and hail it as a classic. And I happen to enjoy Brozzer's first two films a great deal and thought he did a particularly good job of being Bond in TND, it's a shame he didn't seem to feel he needed to continue in that vein or try and improve what he had been given in 1999 or 2002 and show he had an idea about character development. So those are positives to be said for both of those eras, although George's one off isn't exactly what I'd call an era for which I think at least 2 films are needed to establish one.
@4EverBonded- I'm not interested in French lessons. I know a little about French women though ;)
The same could arguably be said about Craig though. I don't think he's bought anything to the role that hasn't been done before by Connery (charm and humour), Lazenby (emotion and physicality) and Dalton (darker, conflicted assassin side). Although whether he did all this better is down to opinion.
I don't mind that at all though. I think there's only so much you when it comes to bringing something new, because I don't think there's much left to bring.
Dark Bond has been done. Emotional Bond has been done. Jack of all trades Bond has been done. Light hearted comedy focused Bond has been done.
I don't think you can do a brand new approach anymore without making the character unrecognisable.
Say you were the next James Bond, what is it you would bring that's brand new and different that also stays true to what's already been established? Because I can't think of anything.
Tell a great and exciting story conveyed through great direction and the use if a great cast and no one will really give a crap about the originality if Bond's character. Bond himself is a cliche, after 50 years to think otherwise is naive. The trick is to avoid pastiche and to handle the characters and the material with a degree of seriousness that doesn't cater to 13 year old school boys with learning difficulties.
=D>
There's a lot of merit in this statement from my point of view. I've been saying this over and over about the peripherals being the reason OHMSS is such a great film. GE is the best example of this during the Brosnan era, even if you think Brosnan is a fairly weak Bond the movie short of having a great soundtrack is almost spot on as far as performances and direction, much like OHMSS. TND is not quite up to that standard and relies a little bit too much on action to cover the script deficiencies, but Brosnan worked hard to improve what he had done in GE and gave his best performance in the role. Since I love certain "popcorn" Bonds like YOLT and TSWLM and see TND in a similar vein, I can and do enjoy this one very much as well. My issue with Brosnan in this respect is that he did nothing to improve whatever vision he may have had in his last two films, the scripts were poor and I didn't recognize either performance as a positive tweaking of his first two. Your last sentence that I have bolded is something I feel the Brosnan era was guilty of too many times.
So if we are to accept that the Brosnan era was no more or less guilty of borrowing off of a prior interpretation, then I have to look at progression of the character during each era. Lazenby will be omitted because he only had one film.
CONNERY- Using a slightly different vision but one sympathetic to Fleming's ideals, Terence Young teaches a working class Scot a sense of style and mannerisms. DN and FRWL remain faithful to that vision. Guy Hamilton steps in and helps create the "superspy" in GF, then Young comes back and Connery melds both into what to me is still the ultimate portrayal of cinematic Bond in TB. The GF formula would be reintroduced in YOLT and a new style for the 1970's is introduced in DAF.
MOORE- Realizing he can't match all the attributes such as the physicality and sheer sexual magnetism that made Connery so big with both men and women, especially after TMWTGG makes him personally uncomfortable, he concentrates on a lighter version similar to the new style introduced by Connery in DAF and creates a "popcorn Bond" more reliant on humorous situations and skirt chasing, yet he does manage to reintroduce some of the tougher attributes in FYEO and OP while making them work better for him than they had in TMWTGG. Again, this is moving the character in another direction after his new approach burns up like a Drax space globe during Moonraker, so he hasn't settled for any sort of steady approach but one that reflects a nuanced progression of character depending on the script, one that will make the material work rather than simply work with the material. By AVTAK he's much too old and clearly out of ideas, so it's time to move on.
DALTON- Realizing he needed to be as different from Moore as Moore was from Connery, Dalton returns to Fleming and brings us a burned out Bond who finds his work to be disagreeable and one that is slowly robbing him of his soul. This Bond is very introspective and would be later resurrected during the Craig era (yes I agree with fans who think Craig and EON looked back at this portrayal, which is especially obvious in SF, and finally realized it's merits). More physical than Moore for sure, but not at the level of Connery nor Lazenby. This Bond doesn't exactly chase after women either, and this approach is very humanistic on many other levels. LTK ups the physicality from TLD but gives us a very different Bond, one consumed with rage over the maiming of his personal friend Leiter exacerbated by the senseless murder of Leiter's wife, also his friend. Some don't like the ultra personal approach, but this Bond brings full force a side of his persona M reins in during GF after Jill's murder, and one that never gets more than lip service after he has even greater reason to show this side after OHMSS. We'll never know what he would have done in his 3rd or even 4th film short of his statement that he wanted to go back towards TLD in tone, but this is a thinking man's actor who is looking at every conceivable way to improve or at least be subtly different than last time.
BROSNAN- Here we get another humanistic Bond, one more emotionally vulnerable than his predecessors including Dalton and one trying to figure out the new world order now that the Cold War has ended and his enemies are not so obvious. This one is a skirt chaser along the lines of Connery and Moore and is exceptionally coiffed to the point that he could be on the cover of GQ. I see a difference and progression between GE and TND, because like Craig in QOS he had to step up during TND and take an active role in the character who would be on screen, after that this actor does nothing to up his personal game as an actor nor actively challenge the producers with his own ideas, at least to the point that they take him seriously, and his era suffers to the point that the franchise hits it's lowest point ever on an artistic level. Once in awhile like when he kills Dr. Kaufmann, you can believe he is dangerous. But then and again, Moore could pull that off too and that's where Brosnan eventually winds up, a fun Bond that ticks all the Bondian boxes enough for him to have fans who are satisfied, but not one you necessarily believe all the time as a dangerous 00. Yes, it isn't Brosnan's fault that the scripts are as bad as they are thanks to Purvis and Wade and the failure of the producers to see it- but he doesn't do anything to be a game changer. He always seemed to be just happy with living his childhood dream and to me it seemed he rested on his popularity too much in his later entries. He went from being a Bond I initially enjoyed to one that was a caricature of what he'd done before, and his acting visibly deteriorated as a result. Ultimately a "popcorn" Bond like Moore and later Connery, without the creativity.
CRAIG- Humanistic Bond continues here. Except that this Bond obviously has the advantage of a lot more meat to chew than Brosnan did in his last 3 films. Like Moore and Dalton, this Bond has a plan of his own that makes EON have to sign him on his terms and one that makes them comfortable with giving us a movie that they aren't comfortable giving Brosnan. Granted the CR/QOS story arc is a mostly blank canvas that allows him to redefine the character in his image and show how Bond became Bond. He gets to show the vulnerability of Brosnan's Bond, but is a million miles more convincing because, quite frankly, he is a better actor and is looking ahead. He is physically imposing despite his height and brings back a Bond you don't want to meet in a dark alley, one that fights like Lazenby and one that like Connery and Dalton you can look into their eyes and know they will kill you with little to no regret. A "man's man" Bond. Then we get to SF which allows him give us a progressed Bond who exhibits many of the traits missing in the first two. He doesn't rest in snobbish fickleness but is a man who knows still knows fine food and drink yet can be the "every man" when he chooses to be. He brings us a return to Dalton in his distaste for his job and more specifically his boss' methods as hinted at in GE, yet he is still Her Majesty's "loyal terrier" and ultimately does what he does out for Queen and country as he always has. He's also subtle with the ladies like Dalton, yet he knows what he likes and is more likely to indicate immediate interest and pursue that during the course of his mission. He shows more of a joy for life here but is still not a man you want to mess with and one you have to take seriously. Next time out we'll see if Craig is happy with where he's at, or if there is more to come. If I read him correctly, he isn't quite done bringing Bond where he wants him to be and may yet have the complete package ready and waiting.
The above is, of course just my opinion but I believe I have reasonably defined each Bond and their era and given ample reason why I feel Brosnan was not as good as the other Bonds save Lazenby, who might have surpassed him with more experience and opportunity, for which he has himself to blame.
I hate to agree with this but this aspect seems true. In a lot of interviews he often harks back to his first viewing of GF and how that stayed with him. You sometimes get the feeling he was just happy to be there.
I have my issues with Dalton and STILL think Broz has more screen charisma than him BUT Dalton did at least try to take the character back to his roots and do something a bit different.
I have a job lot for Christmas presents
Absolutely. Some were clamouring for him in the role as far back as his Remington Steele days. The media sort of chose him and bigged up their man. No matter how weak the films were he didn't get kicked and at the time he was called the best Bond ever by whatever Fleet Street reptile which had stumbled out the winebar.
Some of us wern't fooled from the beginning though.