Nearly 20 years have passed since the release of The World is Not Enough, Pierce Brosnan’s third – and some would argue best – Bond film. Along with Moonraker (40 years old this year) and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (50), the 1998 film was recently celebrated in a birthday Bond event at the BFI.
But watching The World is Not Enough now invited an uneasy realisation: somehow, it has aged even worse than much older Bond films. In fact, all of the Brosnan-era films have. In Pierce Brosnan, the series had a model James Bond. So why were the Nineties so unkind to 007? How did it become Bond’s worst ever decade?
After Timothy Dalton’s second adventure – 1989’s edgy-but-underappreciated Licence to Kill – the Bond series went into a state of limbo, due to litigation between production company EON and distributor MGM. There were six years before GoldenEye was released – the longest break between any Bond films to date (followed by the gap between 2015’s Spectre and the forthcoming No Time to Die, due April 2020, which, at just over four years, will be the longest gap between films starring the same Bond actor).
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As the incumbent Bond at the time, Dalton had been in line to star in GoldenEye. But as detailed in Some Kind of Hero, Matthew Field and Ajay Chowdhury’s book on the Bond film series, MGM had wanted to recast Bond for a new generation.
It’s true that by the early Nineties, 007 was already long in the tooth. Dating back to Dr No in 1962, it had 30 years of screen history in which four actors had pulled on the tux: Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, and Dalton. Bond was the sort of thing that dads slumped in front of on Easter Mondays, a reputation not helped, or so it seemed in this country, by television repeats dominated by a sun-wrinkled Roger Moore leaping around the Eiffel Tower and canoodling with ladies half his age.
The Broccolis – longtime Bond producer Cubby, his daughter Barbara and stepson Michael G Wilson – accepted MGM’s decision. By April 1994, Dalton’s original contract had expired and he stepped down from the part.
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Pierce Brosnan had been on the Broccolis' radar for a while – before Dalton, even. Back in 1986 Brosnan screen-tested and took publicity shots, but he missed out on the part when NBC effectively un-cancelled his television series Remington Steele at the final hour. He finally signed on as 007 in summer 1994.
With Bond in tow, GoldenEye, directed by Martin Campbell, made Bond relevant again upon its release in November, 1995. 007 was suddenly a slick British icon for a cultural moment steeped in Britpop, lad culture and Cool Britannia.
On a superficial level, Bond had indeed been renewed, decked out in Brioni suits and getting behind the wheel of a shiny, spanking BMW for the first time. Also, M was now a woman, played by Dame Judi Dench – she’d reprise the role in a further six films. “If you think for one moment I don’t have the balls to send a man out to die, your instincts are dead wrong, ” M warns Bond in a self-aware switch-around of the series’s traditional (ie rampantly sexist) male-female dynamic. Moneypenny, now played by Samantha Bond, even jokingly accuses Bond of sexual harassment in the workplace – an accusation three decades too late, of course – and M calls Bond a “misogynist dinosaur”, a line apparently borrowed from Barbara Broccoli.
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But GoldenEye’s shrewdest move was to frame Bond within a post-Cold War world, making him a redundant deadly weapon. Questioning Bond’s place in the modern world became a theme the series would ponder again with Skyfall in 2012.
These days, nostalgia for GoldenEye remains strong – and somewhat aided by the classic N64 shoot ’em up videogame. Nevertheless, GoldenEye has some excellent attributes. The opening stunt – a bungee leap from the 720ft Verzasca Dam in Switzerland – ranks alongside the Union Jack parachute ski jump from The Spy Who Loved Me and crane-top fight from Casino Royale as the series’s nerve-shredding best. Sean Bean as 00 agent-gone-bad Alec Trevelyan is shameless hammy fun – a sort of anti-Bond who’s just as adept with a gun and glib remark as his old pal James. Bond’s stolen tank jaunt through the streets of St Petersburg is a thundering set piece and the climactic showdown is a gripping punch-up between Brosnan and Bean, atop the Arecibo Observatory satellite in Puerto Rico, a real-world stand-in for the traditional hollowed-out volcano base.
But even this can’t hide the fact that in tone, GoldenEye has more in common with the Roger Moore-era Bond than it realises. Bond talks almost exclusively in sexually charged one liners (he manages “One rises to meet a challenge, ” “How do you take it?” “I used to shoot in and out, ” and “I like a woman who enjoys pulling rank, ” in the space of three minutes). Any attempt by the film to reference Bond’s history of toxic womanising is counter-balanced by some, well, toxic womanising: Bond cons his own psychologist into sex – a highly-educated doctor, don’t forget, working for MI6 – with a couple of filthy eyebrow raises and a bottle of Bollinger. This is Bond for the lads’ era.
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After GoldenEye came Tomorrow Never Dies, released in November 1997. It has 007’s weakest ever villain, Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce), a media mogul who plans to start World War 3 just for the catchy headlines – but who’s also not above racist chopsocky imitations of Chinese agent Wai Lin, played by Michelle Yeoh. Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, Tomorrow Never Dies was fast-tracked into production with a script that was rewritten while it was shooting. The result is a bland, by-the-numbers Bond notable only for an exciting motorcycle chase and some poor-even-by-Bond’s-standards one-liners (“They’ll print anything these days, ” quips Bond after feeding one of Carver’s cronies headfirst into a printing press, leaving the morning newspapers splattered with blood).
The World is Not Enough followed. At the time it was Brosnan’s best yet; but now it’s a dreary slog of a Bond film, with Robert Carlyle as Renard, a baddie who can’t feel pain because of a bullet lodged in his brain, Denise Richards as unlikely nuclear physicist Dr Christmas Jones (presumably named for the sake of Bond saying, “I thought Christmas only comes once a year”), and John Cleese as the buffoonish R, the impending replacement for Q and one of the worst things from any Bond film.
Finally came 2002’s Die Another Day, remembered by popular consensus as the worst Bond film of all time. With a borderline science fiction plot that involves an invisible car, “gene therapy” (science talk for face transplants), sky lasers, and Bond kite-surfing on a CGI tidal wave, Die Another Day descends into parody that goes beyond 007 disguised as a crocodile during the Carry On Roger era.
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Though not made in the Nineties, Die Another Day is the product of the sins of Nineties cinema – a time that began the Hollywood obsession with primitive, poorly dated CGI. Director Lee Tamahori – who insisted on both the invisible car and kite surfing nonsense – admitted that he saw this film as competition for CG-powered popcorn movies, when superheroes were just starting to suit up and take over blockbuster cinema. “CGI is just another tool, ” he recalled arguing about kite surfing scene, “and you’ll have to embrace it sooner or later or you’ll be overtaken by other action movies.”
None of this is a criticism of Brosnan himself. The Broccolis wanted him in the role of 007 with good reason. In almost every way, Brosnan is a perfect Bond engineered from the brogues up. Rugged and immaculate in equal measure, Brosnan’s is a Bond who’s as convincing doing the rough stuff as he is romancing. His is a Bond who can match Roger Moore in his delivery of an innuendo-plus-raised-eyebrow combo (“I have been known to keep my tip up”) and a Bond who, in his quieter, more pensive moments (“making things personal” as he does in every film), masks some darkness behind the easy charm.
Brosnan’s performance brings unprecedented complexity to Bond’s relationships – see his inner conflict over old flame Paris Carver (Teri Hatcher) in Tomorrow Never Dies and sexual conquest-turned-baddie Elektra King (Sophie Marceau) in The World Is Not Enough – and he delves into the psyche of Bond with the delivery of a literal killer line. “I usually hate killing an unarmed man, ” says Bond, about to shoot Renard in the back of the head. “Cold-blooded murder is a filthy business.”
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It’s a performance with a critical awareness of Bond on-screen. As recalled in Some Kind of Hero, the first film Brosnan saw at the cinema, after moving to London aged 11, was Goldfinger. Indeed, Brosnan is a great Bond – but he was always a great Bond in search of a decent movie.
Because, much as Brosnan is the ultimate Bond personified, his films are cloyingly textbook, replaying the same formula wheeled out since Goldfinger in 1964: the opening action scene; the early sexual conquest; the macho
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