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ONE IDIOT'S RANKING OF THE JAMES BOND MOVIES

Y'all playing 007 First Light yet? You digging it, but you need a primer on the Bond movies in case you want to check them out on the streaming-service-slash-torrent-site of your choice? Well, allow me to help you out.

Two things before we start, though.

The first? Just the twenty-five official James Bond movies. I will not be including the 1965 Casino Royale, nor Never Say Never Again. I will not buy those Blu-Rays, and you cannot make me.

The second? I will be calling out the movies with the BEST TITLE SONG, BEST HENCHMAN, BEST BOND GIRL, BEST BOND VILLAIN, and BEST INDIVIDUAL BOND PERFORMANCE. Because those are the most important and enjoyable hallmarks, against which all others can be judged.

You ready?

Let's go...

25. SPECTRE (2015) - Did you know that in addition to being the world's most dangerous spy, James Bond has the power to cure insomnia? Skyfall, this film's immediate predecessor, could afford to forgo action because it had enthusiasm, intelligence, and Roger Deakins on its side, and Spectre has none of the three. The major action sequences are staged with an indifference one can only describe as "comatose," but this film's major crime is making Blofeld, the name synonymous with Bond villains, into Bond's adoptive brother. Not only that, but he's been the man in the shadows, responsible for every bad thing to happen to Bond in the Daniel Craig era. This development disintegrates like a crepe paper skeleton in a flood the more you think about it. So much so that you almost miss great whacks of the movie thinking about it, and wincing at how stupid it is. "Wouldn't all that time, effort, and money Blofeld spent to set all this up have been for nothing if Bond did something with his life other than being a spy? What would Blofeld have done if Bond taught a pottery class to senior citizens on a cruise ship?" Are there more viscerally obnoxious Bond pictures? Sure there are. But at least I cared about how bad they were. On the other hand, I wouldn't give a shit about Spectre if my shits were tax deductible.

24. THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (1974) - Were I a professor at a film school. and I tasked a student that straight up hated Bond movies to make one of their own, I can't imagine a project more bitter and ornery than the final product of The Man with the Golden Gun. I am trying to conjure a way a Bond picture could be more slapdash, hateful and cheap, and for the life of me, with the exception of Christopher Lee's performance as the villain Scaramanga, I am coming up empty. Roger Moore, who had more growing pains than any Bond actor, is jammed into the rough-and-tumble Connery mold, and his discomfort is so palpable that you could use it to insulate your house. Not to mention a femme fatale arc that was so botched that they had to bring the actress back a few movies later by way of apology. Whenever I attempt a Bond marathon and fail, The Man with the Golden Gun is where I tap out. God in Heaven, does this movie suck.

23. DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002) - Roger Ebert once wrote that it's easier to believe the impossible than it is to believe the implausible. While I have no problem believing Bond can go to space, I have all the problems in the world believing in a magical DNA replacement machine, and that franchise-worst villain Gustave Graves could pop out of thin air, make a kajillion dollars, and get knighted by the queen all in fourteen months. The James Bond series rings in the twenty-first century with a wet fart, a screenplay that couldn't pass fourth grade science, and Pierce Brosnan ends his tenure in ignominy. Though the dodgy CGI and the poorly written (though well-performed, we love you Halle) Bond Girl get a lion's share of Die Another Day's bad press, it's the Michael Bay-esque editing that grabs my goat the most, as this attempt to modernize the Bond franchise firmly dates it. It'd be the most 2002 movie ever made, if it weren't too busy being the most 1998 movie ever made.

22. A VIEW TO A KILL (1985) - I don't have a problem with a movie about an old-ass James Bond. I have a problem with a movie with an old-ass James Bond trying to hide the fact he's an old-ass man. The rapidly withering Roger Moore took the money one last time, and the attempts by the producers and director to conceal the fact that he needs a whole army of necromancers sacrificing entire convents of virgins to keep him upright and ambulatory tank the entire experience. The tuxedos get baggier to hide his paunch, the film gets populated with older henchmen so it looks like Bond can take them in a fight, and Moore's stuntman (to repeat the old joke) gets more screentime than Moore himself does. Add to this Tanya Roberts as the worst Bond Girl ever, with a scream so shrill that dogs a few dimensions away in the multiverse can hear it. Its good qualities are the kinky energy between villain Christopher Walken and main henchman Grace Jones (which is used sparingly) and the opening theme (which, well, opens the movie). So meager are our pleasures. Coming after the reinvention of the 80s action movie that came in the advent of Arnold Schwarzenegger, A View to a Kill is an embarrassment.

21. DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971) - You cannot convince me that Diamonds Are Forever isn't an Elvis movie that James Bond just stumbled into. They broke the bank to bring Connery back after he skipped On Her Majesty's Secret Service, thus severely tightening the budget, and the center could not hold. There have been more unpleasant Bond movies, but none have been this amateurish. Flat action, crummy special effects, plot holes you could drive a moon buggy through, a central Bond Girl whose IQ is smaller than the the number of stars in our solar system, and a Blofeld who practically gives Bond a point-by-point seminar on how to foil his evil plan and had the goddamned gall to act shocked when Bond does so. At least Connery is an improvement over the last one he was in, as he's actually awake this time. The only unassailable asset that Diamonds Are Forever has? Fuck it, I'm breaking this one out early: Wint and Kidd are the BEST HENCHMEN. Putter Smith and Bruce Glover are delightfully creepy, and manage to develop a high body count on two separate continents in their first sixty seconds of screentime. And when they try to kill Bond at the end after the main villain has been defeated, it isn't out of revenge like with Tee-Hee or Nick Nack. They did it for love of the game!

20. QUANTUM OF SOLACE (2008) - Wow, out of the bottom five? I just don't think I can be as mad at this one as I used to be. I can safely say that Quantum of Solace is a relatively decent movie outside of the action sequences. Now is that bad for an entry in an action franchise like James Bond? Oh, yes, it's damning. But the supporting cast is genuinely remarkable, Olga Kurylenko is a wildly underrated Bond Girl, and the characters seem to have things to say to one another. But holy hell, does the editing for the action sequences suck, resulting in a kind of kinetic goulash that was common post-Bourne, but pre-Mad Max: Fury Road. Quantum of Solace kept all the explodey bits of a Bond picture but removed the grace, the charm... and the fun.

19. THUNDERBALL (1965) - Weird how with all the misogyny and racism on display in the first few installments of the series, the '60s Bond that aged the worst was Thunderball, by dint of simply being fucking boring. I'm glad they got the expensive cameras to do all the underwater stuff, but Jesus Christ is it tedious for a modern audience to sit through, leading to the first and only Bond film where it's okay to lean on the fast-forward button. There is a whopping ten-to-fifteen minutes of footage that straight-up does not need to be there. This is the film where one's youth is an enemy of one's enjoyment, because you could get away with interminable stretches of lavish underwater photography, as televisions sucked ass in the mid-sixties, and you couldn't get this at home. Oh, and coercing a woman into sex with the implication that she'll get fired if she doesn't comply? DUDE, THAT'S RAPE!

18. LIVE AND LET DIE (1973) - It would be easy to condemn Live and Let Die for having most of its Black characters behave like superstitious dolts, until you realize that Voodoo is real in this movie, and they're just sticking to an established META. Yes, Voodoo is real in Live and Let Die, and, by extension, the James Bond universe. Not a religion that people believe in, but an actual supernatural force that works and does the bidding of Yaphet Kotto and Geoffrey Holder. Everyone has a threshold and, yeah, that's mine. This is Roger Moore's first Bond film which means, after the Connery and Lazenby cataclysms, that this was the third Bond actor in as many installments. I guess the producers threw whatever they could at the wall to see what stuck after it looked, for all the world knew, like the franchise was dying a spectacular public death, but Voodoo being real? At least it sticks out, I guess. And Kotto and Holder are undeniably cool, there's that too. Oh, but tricking a girl into sleeping with you by stacking a Tarot deck in your favor in a world where the supernatural is real? DUDE, THAT'S RAPE!

17. TOMORROW NEVER DIES (1997) - This one just seems... off. There's nothing really wrong on a script level, or an acting level, but it's in the editing, and it's in the sound mix. The foley work seems off, the sound effects are weird, and there's one memorable sequence where Brosnan sounds like he's delivering his lines and doing ASMR at the same time. A thumping party to launch a new media venture sounds like a late night at a piano bar with only four or five people in attendance. And it wants to be fast and kinetic, but it's almost as though it didn't get enough coverage. When it cuts, there are only off-angles to cut to. I want to be excited by this movie, only to get stopped by a cut or an effect that just feels awkward. I don't want to say it's unprofessional, but it seems the director was dwarfed by the prospect of this movie. I expect more from the director of ::checks notes:: Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot and Turner & Hooch... Oh, well that explains it, then.

16. FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (1981) - It's the Bond movie that's just kind of there. Years pass between my viewings of For Your Eyes Only, and my mind can only recall that it's "The Brown One." It's a given that Bond actors start with a grounded, realistic film before things get progressively sillier, but it's Roger Moore's lot that his fifth movie is the serious one. It's not a matter of preferring comic Bonds to serious ones, but I do think it is a matter of the other back-to-basics Bond films being a damn sight better than this one. Of the serious, stale beer Bond adventures, this one is the weakest. It is possible to be so low-key that you become non-descript.

15. NO TIME TO DIE (2021) - Daniel Craig, for four fifths of his tenure as Bond, had no middle ground, with half of his films being genre-defining masterpieces, and the other half bad enough to curdle milk at fifty paces. Only for him to end with No Time to Die, which is simply, merely, okay. The first half is a belter of an action flick, only for the enterprise to grind to a halt in its attempts at emotional heft and its endeavor to connect to all the other entries in some way. Lea Seydoux's Madeleine Swann isn't the worst Bond Girl ever (not in a universe where Mary Goodnight and Stacey Sutton exist), but she is the most structurally damaging, as whenever she pops up, these movies stop being fun. Though I will say it's Craig's best performance as Bond, in that the natural collaborator and inveterate goofball gets to show off his charm and sense of humor. This is the best final film for a long-tenured Bond (as in case you haven't noticed, the other three are in the bottom five). And I will go out on a limb and say Billie Eilish's effort does make for the franchise's BEST TITLE SONG, which gets into the mindset of its lead in a way no other song did. Call it recency bias if you want to, but I was feeling this one.

14. DR. NO (1962) - It's the first-ever James Bond picture, and it's... good. This franchise rewrote the playbook for the action movie in terms of tone, but it had to build up to it. Dr. No had to adhere to the tenets of the early-sixties thriller, and those moved about as quickly as molasses in January. Connery's forceful, the Jamaican locales are lovely, and Ursula Andress is proof of a benevolent God, but this movie is a prototype: so basic that it's hard to figure out something to say about it. So... Uh... How was your day?

13. MOONRAKER (1979) - Oh, fuck off, this movie's fun. If you can power through the concept of James Bond going into space, then you can at least realize that Moonraker truly is the absolute best version of "The James Bond Space Movie." I don't differentiate between silly and serious Bond capers, but rather between good and bad, and Moonraker is silly done right. Granted, turning Jaws from a terrifying second banana to a comedy relief good guy disqualifies him from the Best Henchman race, but Richard Kiel has enough presence, and knows how to woo the camera well enough, to make it work, as comic relief isn't bad if it's actually funny. And the villain, Hugo Drax, as a eugenics-obsessed billionaire charisma vacuum with his own space program shouldn't have gone from endearingly goofy to nightmarishly prescient, but that's the world we live in now (THANKS, ELON!). If Moonraker is Velveeta, then it is Velveeta, but if you want a gooey grilled cheese, nothing else quite does the trick.

12. YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967) - Contrary to popular belief, the Austin Powers movies didn't spoof the entire Bond franchise, so much as this one feature. Bald villain with a scar? Secret Volcano Lair? Yeah, it's this one. Thanks to its most parodied aspects, this is the one that everyone thinks all the other Bond flicks are like. And while there are better Bonds, sillier Bonds, and better sillier Bonds, this one's still a fun watch, thanks to its immersive and evocative sixties Japanese locales and its eye-popping production design (oh, and the Little Nellie sequence kicks ass too). What's working against it, unfortunately, is the Yellowface segment where Connery's Bond has to disguise as a Japanese man, which isn't so much offensive to modern eyes as it is deeply weird. Like, how did this get past the first draft stage of Roald Dahl's script? And while I will call out the best individual Bond performance later in the countdown, the worst individual Bond performance belongs to Connery in You Only Live Twice, who comes off as stiffer and drowsier than the corpses he makes out of all those nameless henchmen.

11. OCTOPUSSY (1983) - You put off watching it because it's the one where Bond dresses up as a clown, and then you watch it and you realize it rules. You get some eye-popping action, you get some splendid Indian scenery, and you get to see what it's like when Roger Moore has chemistry with everyone! He and Maud Adams as the title character fit together like puzzle pieces, and Louis Jourdan as villain Kemal Khan is like the Shadow-Moore: his equal in charm and smarminess. And you know what? Moore did some damn fine acting in that clown suit. Other than an entirely ill-advised safari sequence, there isn't a whole lot I can say against this picture. It's the perfect send-off for Roger Moore as James Bond... provided, of course, you skip the one he made after this.

10. FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963) - The most laid-back Bond film by a wide margin, one that relies on human behavior, intricate plotting, and a screenplay-first approach. Lacking the bombast and spectacle of its franchise-mates, this is the one that made James Bond cool, cementing him as an odd duck among action heroes, preferring sartorial, sexual, and epicurean delights over bloodshed. He'll shoot a motherfucker, don't get me wrong, but From Russia with Love laid the template for the hedonistic superspy we all know and adore. Those who wish to tire us with their pleas for more Down-to-Earth Bond movies really want them to be more like From Russia with Love. And this flick is so good you honestly do feel like humoring them.

9. THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS (1987) - Saying Sean Connery is your favorite James Bond is like saying The Beatles is your favorite band or that Citizen Kane is your favorite movie: You're not making a values statement, you're just picking a winner. Be yourself, dude, get fucking weird with it! My guy's Timothy Dalton. Not because he's cold and Flemingesque, but because when he breaks with being cold and Flemingesque, it feels like it means something. When he smiles, it feels like a migraine is lifting, and in the central romance subplot of his first Bond adventure, The Living Daylights, he's nice to defecting cellist Kara Milovy not because of something as prosaic as "falling in love," but because he hasn't been nice to anyone in a while, and he fears the parts with which to do so are about to rot and fall off from disuse. He's a Bond that, unlike Moore in the last one, can actually partake in an action sequence, which catapults the franchise into the eighties a good seven years late. The only thing that keeps this one off the tippy-top shelf of Bond pictures is the central villain... mainly the fact that it doesn't have one.

8. THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (1999) - It's not the best Bond movie, but it is the most Bond movie... or at least the most Bond movie-shaped. The villain has a unique hook, the locales are breathtaking, the action rules, and the love interest has a name that can be worked into an eye-rolling double entendre. And just when you can put yourself on autopilot, out comes a twist that turns James Bond's proclivities against him. It's a kind of silly made seriously as the film's director, the late Michael Apted, may not be the best Bond director, but he is the best director to make a Bond film (he is, after all responsible for the British Up documentaries, and he directed Sissy Spacek to an Oscar). It's the last classical Bond picture, as literally every one after The World is Not Enough have been attempts to either modernize or reinvent. Everyone has a movie they put on in the background while they're doing something else because they find it comforting. With me, it's either Star Trek: First Contact, or The World is Not Not Enough.

7. LICENCE TO KILL (1989) - Another thing that makes Dalton my favorite? The weird streak of moralism. There are Bonds that handle the deaths of friends and acquaintances with the proper level of coldness, but Dalton? He seems genuinely pissed off that bad things happen to good people. Brosnan or Moore can play things off with a laugh, but Dalton will lose sleep, and he will feed you to a motherfucking shark. Which he does in Licence to Kill, the goriest and most violent of Bond pictures, which, of course, makes it well at home in the dying days of the 1980s. Can James Bond fit in with the era of action movie that was less about spycraft and more about loose cannon cops on the edge? Well, yeah, pretty damn well, actually. Robert Davi's Pablo Esca-like cocaine billionaire Franz Sanchez is, in my estimation, the single BEST VILLAIN the Bond franchise has ever produced. He achieves an immediacy that no other Bond Villain does. Ask yourself, of all the Bond villains, which of them could actually and physically kick your ass? And you couldn't even bullshit your way past it, like those guys who think they could win a fight with a Doberman. I don't need any further criteria than that.

6. GOLDFINGER (1964) - This is the one that provided the template for all other Bond pictures to follow, and it did it so well that only the churlish complain, with Sean Connery giving THE BEST INDIVIDUAL BOND PERFORMANCE in the franchise, exuding the God Mode Serenity of a man who's read the script already, and knows he's gonna win. What ages the film is its sexual politics, but there is something there worth mulling over. I'm not gonna DUDE, THAT'S RAPE! the post-judo coitus between Bond and Pussy Galore, as she's established as such an independent that she wouldn't have entered that scenario with Bond if she didn't want to. She was so hyper-competitive that she was protesting the judo loss, not the sex. Galore was ordered into the scenario by Goldfinger himself, and she views him with such obvious, wordless contempt that her sleeping with Bond and joining the good guys comes off, to me, as her quitting her job and stealing office supplies before she goes. Yeah, it didn't go that way in the book, but the book ain't the movie. It's a fascinating character dynamic between Bond Girl and Villain, but getting that means making Auric Goldfinger an ineffectual, creepy jobber who can't run a gin rummy scam or a golf hustle without Bond shitting all over it, and that's what makes Goldfinger slightly, marginally, microscopically overrated.

5. THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977) - This is the most important Bond film, as if this hadn't been a home run, the franchise would have died after the last four existed in a state of contention (and the record will show that of that previous four, I only really liked one of them). Moreso, I think The Spy who Loved Me is the best pure Bond film. All the higher entries on this list were reactions to the formula, or seismic change-ups to said formula, but The Spy who Loved Me elevated the quirks and eccentricities of what we know of as "The James Bond Movie" to grandiose heights. Y'know, sometimes we like things because of their goofy cliches, and not in spite of them. And thank heavens that Roger Moore, the most charming of all Bond actors, got a great movie under his belt before he started decomposing.

4. SKYFALL (2012) - This is what happens when you distill fifty years of a cultural institution into 143 minutes of unadulterated mood. Skyfall is light on the pyrotechnics, but heavy on the atmosphere courtesy of Academy Award winning cinematographer (and immortal God Emperor) Roger Deakins, who displays his monumental prowess by lighting the last ten minutes of an action climax with nothing but a burning mansion in the background. It's first half lays out a grounded adventure before laying on some gourmet high-end goofiness in the back half, with a bad guy straight out of a Batman comic. Director Sam Mendes hides the seam flawlessly by way of earnestness and sincerity. It's a sure-handed celebration of everything this series has given us, with its straight face almost-but-not-quite hiding the glee with which it makes the case for James Bond's relevance.

3. GOLDENEYE (1995) - The Cold War ends, the studio gets sold, and the last Bond bows out. What happens next has to be good in order for the franchise to survive. What we got was GoldenEye, which is almost perfect. Serving as a summation of Bond's past and a mission statement for his future, Martin Campbell (the best damn director this franchise has ever had) breaks the action out of the proscenium arch in a way the Bond movies hadn't seen since, well the number one movie on this list. And at its center is the new guy, Pierce Brosnan, who just brims with enthusiasm while still keeping his cool. There's a gleam in his eye and a lilt in his voice that tells you this is a Bond who loves his job.

2. CASINO ROYALE (2006) - Again, Martin Campbell, the best damn director this franchise ever had, breaking out the jumper cables and bringing Bond roaring back to life after Die Another Day left a dookie on the corner of the living room rug. This reboot doesn't so much strip Bond down so much as thread the hallmarks we know and love through an intricate, compelling, suspenseful story. It gives us Daniel Craig's Bond, whose brick shithouse build masks a deep well of vulnerability, and Eva Green's Vesper Lynd, equal parts prickly and tantalizing in a way that draws Bond onto her wavelength. Oh, and it gave us Mads Mikkelsen as Le Chiffre, a villain equal parts sniveling and smug. More than being the best Bond film of the latter half of the series, it's the single best action film of the whole of the 2000s. 1. ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (1969) - It's your favorite filmmaker's favorite Bond movie. And your favorite filmmaker is a smart motherfucker. George Lazenby's one and only turn as Bond has been criticized, but I think he gives the role a simple affability that leads me to believe that the Lazenby Bond is the only one that has off-the-job friends. The story's central kernel is the love story with Diana Rigg's Tracy, who is THE BEST BOND GIRL. She exudes charm and charisma, and when the chips are down, she'll be the best cinematic wheelwoman this side of Imperator Furiosa, and bump off a henchman to boot. It isn't that notorious horndog James Bond fell in love with Tracy that makes her the best, it's that he fell in like with her. Telly Savalas plays my favorite Blofeld, not as an eerie terrorist, but as a fascinating sophisticate who looks like he can back up his evil intentions. But it's the action in the last forty-five minutes that marks On Her Majesty's Secret Service as ahead of its time. Directed by longtime Bond editor Peter Hunt, he masters quick cuts while still maintaining a coherent geography, getting the audience's blood pumping without stranding them in empty technique. The final assault on Piz Gloria is of particular note. The shots through the open doors of the attacking helicopters over the Swiss Alps at magic hour (which must have taken weeks to shoot) are breathtaking, and just when the vibes couldn't get any more immaculate, the original recording of the Bond theme kicks in. Fuck. Yes. The James Bond series of films has never been shy about following the leader, from Blaxploitation, to the post-Bruce Lee martial arts explosion, to Star Wars, to The Dark Knight. But On Her Majesty's Secret Service is, to me, the one that actually innovated.

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