5 Most Dismal Bond Films

Last summer, I did a fascinating and informative exercise wherein I listed my favorite, and therefore the best, James Bond films. At the end of that article, I promised then that a follow up of the worst films would come when you all least expected it so… SURPRISE! The time has finally arrived for me to settle with the house as it were, and give you my personal examination of the most terrible, deplorable, and absolutely unwatchable Bond films. As we can all hopefully agree, the line between a good film, and a terrible film is often very thin, and a lot of movies try to push that limit in order to create something fresh and new for their established audiences. When it works, movies can be awesome. When it doesn’t movies can be absolutely atrocious. This list represents those Bond movies that, in my opinion, not only crossed that line, but also caught the last train to Crazy Town. Some are more subtle, and some are just audacious about it, but all of them took a wrong step somewhere that landed them in the land of bad movies. Last time, I established some fairly concrete criteria upon which I was going to rate each film. Those criteria included minimized use of cheese, having a good villain that has a somewhat believable plan and isn’t a Mary Sue, use of a legitimate theme in the film, and attempts at giving Bond more depth as a character. I think it only fair to hold these films up to the same standards and see how they measure up. Also, just like last time, I made a genuine attempt to cover the majority of the Bond eras because every Bond is fair game for nitpicking. Without further adieu, let’s jump into the worst of the worst! Once again in no particular order…

#5: You Only Live Twice:

You Only Live Twice was the fifth entry in the franchise coming after Thunderball, and being the last film that Sean Connery would do before George Lazenby temporarily took over for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I went pretty easy on this movie because overall, it wasn’t terribly terrible for the time that it was made, but it still has some pretty glaring flaws. Flaw number one stems from the premise. In this movie, SPECTRE is working with a Japanese company to kidnap US and Soviet orbital capsules while in space in order to get the two superpowers to go to war with each other. In the 60s this premise might have worked fine, but in context of more recent times, and with all of the US vs USSR movies that have been made over the years, it just feels tired at this point. However, it was all the rage in 1967 so I mostly gave it a pass for that reason. Flaw number two stems from the very opening of the film. After we see a giant space PacMan eat a US space capsule, we see Bond getting his Bond on with a woman. Everything mostly goes as expected except that at the last minute, she folds up the hide-a-bed and some goons light it up with some machine guns. It was at this point that we switch to a nice funeral and eventually see that Bond’s death was all an elaborate hoax to convince his enemies that he’s dead so that some of the heat can be lifted off of his shoulders. I had to ask myself, if Bond is so terrible at concealing his actions that they had to fake his death, was he really worth all of the trouble. I’ll let you decide the answer to that question. The other big issue I take with this movie is its pacing, both as a film on the whole, and within the events of the story. We’re told toward the beginning that Bond has three weeks to find out who was stealing space capsules, and put an end to it before global armageddon ensued. It sounds pretty dire, but that’s still plenty of time for Bond to take the most roundabout method ever in order to actually contact his guy in Japan, and then do things that involve the most egregious aspect of this movie:

Bond reconsidering all of his life choices up to that point.

I honestly think that the face says it all. Remember that time that Mickey Rooney dawned Asian face and we all collectively went ape crazy and deemed that movie terrible? Yeah, Bond doesn’t get a pass on that either as far as this blogger is concerned. They turn Bond Japanese, wed him to an operative, give him ninja training, and there’s time for the newlyweds to go on a literal stroll through the countryside even though there’s only supposed to be three weeks until armageddon. And that, friends, is why this movie made this list. I actually thought that other than the slow pacing, it was a pretty decent film. It’s the first film where Bond and Blofeld meet face to face, and it’s pretty standard Bond faire overall, and the theme song is really good. But that face. Surely, there was some other way that they could have hidden Bond’s identity.

#4: Live and Let Die:

If feel like this is kind of an unfair entry because this movie is so steeped in the fads of the day that it dates itself pretty much immediately. It’s like buying a computer in the early 2000s. You go to the store, consider your options, then make your purchase, only to get it home and see on TV that that “state-of-the-art” machine is now obsolete. Live and Let Die is the early 2000s Compaq computer of the Bond franchise. Ironically, it has one of the more memorable theme songs from Bond history. I’m even able to forgive its egregious grammar, usually. Once again, I really feel like this would have been an okay film except for one major problem:

Those are the villains of the film. Now, on the surface, one might feel the urge to applaud the film for its racial diversity, but in context of the day, I would caution against it. The 70s were an interesting transitional time for our culture, and transitions tend to attract a lot of vultures looking to cash it before a thing becomes unpopular. Such was the case with Hollywood and their series of blaxploitation films. For those of you who don’t want to read such an in depth explanation of the word, here’s a more succinct definition. What I’m saying is this movie was playing into the stereotyping of a rich culture, and it did it so badly that the whole filme kind of rubs me the wrong way. It’s really too bad too because the main villain Kananga has an intensity that just seethes onto the screen, Jane Seymour is in it, and she’s gorgeous, it’s got kind of a dark streak that would have been advantageous to explore more, and some of the vehicle chase scenes are pretty cool. But none of that can make up for terrible puns like, “Oh Cult Voodoo Shop,” or, “genuine Felix lighter,” said as Bond is talking to Felix through a car lighter, or the fact that Bond uses a rigged deck of tarot cards to take the virginity of a hapless innocent woman. Not to mention this:

Forty year old spoiler, that’s the animatronic get up for the death scene of Kananga. He literally blows up like a balloon and then explodes. I swear, this movie’s tone is all over the map! Let’s just move on…

#3: Moonraker:

Aw… COME ON!! Are we kidding right now? Yeah… We all knew this was coming. No worst of Bond list would quite be complete without Moonraker. There are a lot of really specific reasons why I think this is one of the worst Bond movies ever, and then there are some broad strokes things going on. But to put it bluntly, there are a lot of egregious sins committed during this movie without any of the redeeming qualities that make other bad Bond films at least tolerable. First off, would a 747 be able to fly a fully fueled orbiter shuttle? I did the math, I might be able to, but I can’t find a straight answer as to how many pounds of fuel a fully fueled orbiter carried, and there’s only a margin of about 80,000 pounds so maybe not. Either way, no one in their right mind would ever opt to fly a shuttle while it was fully fueled. Also, shuttle orbiters can’t generate enough lift on their own to actually fly, and I’m not sure that this one would have had enough altitude to glide to where it was eventually launched in freaking South America. I hate that the whole movie is spent doing things to Jaws that should kill him, but that he survives. Jaws has never been one of my favorite Bond villains, but to see him relegated to comic relief was just sad. It pains me that they made Moneypenny look so old in this movie. I have to admit to thinking that Miss Moneypenny the first one was a pretty striking woman, but in this movie, she reminds me more of a grandmother than anything else. Perms always have been, and always will be a terrible idea. I’m not entirely certain that there really is much of a story going on here, and the villain, Drax, is boring too. The fight scenes are boring, and the entire movie spends all of its time plodding from one locale to the next. We start in London, then we go to California, then Venice, then Rio de janeiro, then France I think, then back to Brazil, and then freaking space. It’s very confusing, and not very entertaining. I can’t stand all of the music that was optioned for this movie because it was used badly. We hear “Also sprach Zarathustra”, or the theme song to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the jingle from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the “Romeo and Juliet overture”, just to name a few. It’s silly and lame. There was copious bad usage of sped up playback that just looked fake and silly. The one liners were killing me, and I spent the entire movie wondering why Jaws was even there in the first place. Did Drax hire him? Because no one ever showed Drax hiring him. He had zero motivation. He could have died at the beginning and that would have been fine because I had no clue why he needed to be there. I will say that once the space stuff started, the special effects were decent. This movie was lauded for its special effects, but I’ve never bought into special effects extravaganzas so.... And on the downside of that, when the US Marines shuttle troops into space go have it out with Drax’s small army, it reminded me of a bad episode of G.I. Joe. Oh, and the actress playing Dr. Goodhead couldn’t act! K. Done.

#2: Die Another Day:

I took a surprisingly small amount of notes for this movie, and at first, I wondered if I had made a good choice to include this film. I hate the theme song, but that only lasts a few minutes so I can tolerate that, but I spent the first half hour of this movie thinking that the initial premise wasn’t half bad. Then Bond got out of prison, and we started the actual movie. There are so many one liners, and everyone is making them! I swear, the film can’t go five seconds without someone making a one liner. It’s awful! I thought that the bird guide book was a nice nod… Until we got into the rest of the movie, and I started get bombarded by them! I’m okay with a few subtle nods from time to time, but don’t beat me over the face with them every other scene. If you’d like a preview of what a female Bond might look like, look no further that Jinx, and then look the other direction. I know it’s not exactly a fair comparison, but the only thing she lacked as a prototype female Bond was about 15% of the screen time. She made terrible one liners, she used sex as a tool, she swaggered her way through every set piece, and she got in a pissing match showdown with the female henchwoman at the end. All I gotta say is if MGM does ever decide to make Bond a woman, I hope they do a fair bit better with her than they did with Jinx. John Cleese makes a terrible Q. I know that Desmond Llewelyn had recently passed prior to filming, but that wound was still too fresh, and the situation mishandled so badly that it just left a bad taste in my mouth. There’s an unforgivable amount of bad slow motion used throughout. I swear, the director must have fallen asleep during the class where they learned other methods of punctuating action. The cyber suit that Colonel Moon, I mean Greaves, wears is just ridiculous, and its reveal is really dumb. The CGI is poorly rendered. And this happens:

Who in their right might thought that that was a good idea? Fire them! Fire them, and murder them. It’s pretty much a film that’s offensive to all five of the human senses. It did, however, have a couple of positive things going on. The car chase scene was kind of cool. The nod props are fun to pick out, but only the first time through. They lose their charm immediately. Zao was a pretty cool henchman. And the aforementioned henchwoman was a nice twist at the end. Unfortunately, those little nuggets aren’t enough to save this film and so here it is on my list of the worst Bond movies.

And Surf Ninjas had already been done!

This exercise has become exhausting! My brain feels like it’s on fire right now! What say we take a break and I’ll finish this gods forsaken list next week. I have a lot to say about this particular movie, and I want to have plenty of room to fully express my loathing and disdain for this stinker. Also, it give you a week to muse on which movie could possibly top this list! Yay for games! Stay tuned to see which film steams worst than the rest!