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Tom Fordy 01 November 2019 12:17pm GMT > _PIERCE BROSNAN WAS ALWAYS ONE OF THE BEST-EVER BONDS, ARGUES _TOM > FORDY_, SO WHY WAS HE LUMBERED WITH SUCH TERRIBLE FILMS?_ 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). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.” 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 postulating with the villain; and the gimmicky henchman (leg-squeezing Xenia Onatopp in

GoldenEye, diamond-studded Zao in Die Another Day, and, erm, bleached blond Stamper in Tomorrow Never Dies). As well as the increasingly daft scene in Q’s laboratory introducing all the

latest gadgets – a trope which had felt out of place since Roger had hung up the double-0s back in 1985 – and the final fight to the death. The most interesting Bond films made since

Goldfinger are the ones that dared to steer away from that formula: Lazenby’s stylish and tragic On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Roger’s cold-blooded espionage thriller For Your Eyes Only 

and Dalton’s brooding and violent Licence To Kill. That’s not to say the classic Bond formula wasn’t still lots of fun: You Only Live Twice, Live and Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me and The

Living Daylights are all great examples of it. So what makes the Brosnan entries different – and why have they aged so badly? The answer is probably the very same thing that helped Brosnan

make Bond cool again with GoldenEye: trying to bring Bond up-to-date. The hi-tech villainy of Tomorrow Never Dies now looks embarrassingly naff. The World is Not Enough also suffers from 

rubbish tech – MI6 study a giant hologram of Robert Carlyle’s head – and stages its opening action sequence around the all-new Millennium Dome. And Die Another Day goes all-in on virtual

reality and terrible CGI. Perhaps it’s also the Nineties themselves, a decade with few stylistic virtues and that now jars in both its distance and proximity – old enough to have dated, but

too recent to not feel painfully un-PC. Admonishing Bond for his less-than-PC behaviour in the Sixties, Seventies, and early Eighties is futile – within the context of the time, it’s all

laughable in its ignorance and outrageousness and accepted as part of those eras. When Roger Moore says it, he sort of gets away with it – it’s Roger Moore, after all – but when Pierce

Brosnan says it, there’s a sense that Bond should know better by now. Perhaps it’s a reflection of how uncomfortably close we are to some of those attitudes. Brosnan’s era feels like a Bond

out of time, a 007 that promised to take the franchise forward with GoldenEye but instead regressed to the campy old Bond shtick. In hindsight, the Timothy Dalton films – darker, grittier,

more like the Ian Fleming books – did far more to reinvent James Bond. Of course, every Bond has its place, and every entry is an integral part of the series’s history. When Alan Partridge’s

long-suffering PA Lynn suggests he should leave some less important films out of his ill-fated Bond marathon, Alan quite rightly sneers: “Which are the less important Bond films Lynn? I’ve

got to hear this.” (“One of the Welsh ones,” she replies, meaning Dalton.) That Brosnan's era spiralled into self-parody is part of the natural cycle of Bond that necessitates a

stripped-back, more grounded rethink: after Moonraker came For Your Eyes Only; after A View To A Kill came The Living Daylights; and after Die Another Day, of course, Casino Royale. You have

to question how the current Daniel Craig era of Bond will be viewed in 20 years. With its “back-to-basics” take – minimalist gadgetry and live-action stunt work – it’s hard to imagine them

dating quite as badly as tech-heavy Brosnans, but that’s easy to say in the moment. I would argue that Craig’s tenure has already circled back to self-parody with Spectre, which returned to

a superficial by-the-numbers adventure – a disappointing step back after Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall had tinkered around with the formula. No Time to Die could have been the

moment to reboot. Perhaps it still will be. Personally, I say bring back Pierce Brosnan for one more go. In Frank Miller’s seminal Batman comic The Dark Knight Returns, an ageing Bruce

Wayne pulls on the cowl to clean up the streets of Gotham one last time. Let’s have Brosnan’s Bond come out of retirement to atone for the sins of the past. And why not? The brilliance of

James Bond is that he can take risks. Win or lose, the mythos is more important that continuity. James Bond always returns to, well, die another day. There aren’t many action heroes who

could get behind the wheel of an invisible car and still come out bulletproof.