Nobody Does It Better? James Bond on Netflix [Lex]

Forgive me Ace (and others), but I am a Netflix subscriber. Have been for 20 years or so. I once told my son’s friend Netflix used to send DVDs in the mail. The little shaver was unaware Netflix existed pre-streaming. More to my bane was the inability to catch up, as easily as Netflix made it, with movies and shows I missed any given year. Though the streaming service does have older films and some TV series, it pales in comparison to what you could get via their immense DVD library.

Naturally, Netflix chooses to promote its original material, and there are some winners, but mainly the stream is not so merrily navigated—with a glut of not only original films and shows but also much dross from the last 30 years of cinema.

It was getting so bad, I had thoughts about trying another service. Enter not the dragon but 007 when, in January of 2026, Netflix added the entire James Bond catalogue. This comprises 26 movies, the first being Dr. No in 1962 and the most recent No Time to Die in 2021. With this move, Netflix succeeded in keeping me around for a little while yet.

As of this writing, I have not rewatched the 26 films. I believe I have seen them all over the years and many multiple times. Since the movies went live, I have mainly focused on the Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig pictures because I had never seen any of them more than once, and, after rewatching a few, remember why; these iterations of Bond aren’t very good.

I do like Daniel Craig as James Bond. He’s certainly the most muscled actor who played 007 and believable as a bruising secret agent, but the Craig-era films don’t feel much different than Jason Bourne or John Wick or any movie where a man kills his way through an onslaught of enemies. The action sequences are oftentimes as bad as a Transformers picture: that is, I can’t tell what’s happening it’s so fast and harried. Furthermore, Craig’s Bond lacks the jocularity of the previous portrayals. A perpetually dour and scowling Bond should not be on Her Majesty’s secret service.

Still, Pierce Brosnan is easily, for me, the least enjoyable Bond to watch. He possesses the wryness Craig lacks, but he can’t quite sell it the way Roger Moore did. He’s certainly more physical than Moore, but much of the time it doesn’t wash.

In The World is Not Enough, we are told Brosnan’s Bond has a bad shoulder, and once in a while he winces, but then the injury vanishes as he leaps and tumbles and falls and fights his way through myriad bad guys to no apparent effect. This scripting might not be Brosnan’s fault, but he doesn’t have the charm Moore did to convince a viewer charisma can outpace grit.

But let’s be frank: we would not have had Brosnan, Craig, or the others if not for Sean Connery. He made the franchise possible.

Connery was equal parts debonair and tough. He had skill, attitude, humor, and good timing. I don’t think you’ll find a more delightful sequence in any James Bond movie that demonstrate Connery’s range, than 007’s golf game with Auric Goldfinger and Odd Job. Daniel Craig probably wouldn’t even play Golden Tee, let alone a real game of golf.

Connery set the standard, and Roger Moore gamely took it up. It was a daring choice to succeed Connery with Moore. Bond became more dandified, but it worked. Connery will always be the best Bond, but Moore is easily a close second.

I also liked Timothy Dalton’s two-movie turn as Bond. He brought back a ruggedness to 007 that was absent for almost two decades.

I won’t discuss the one George Lazenby film, as it was silly and featured Bond wearing a kilt for thirty minutes and feigning a Scottish burr at Telly Savalas’s alpine seraglio.

The lousy writing of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service might only be rivaled by the inane stories cooked up for Brosnan and Craig.

I have little idea what happened in The World is Not Enough, Spectre or No Time to Die. Moonraker was far-fetched no doubt, but at least it was easy to grasp, as well as featuring one of the best Bond henchmen (Richard Kiel’s ‘Jaws’). The plots of the Craig and Brosnan films are so incomprehensible they are boring and make one want to fast forward to the end.

It’s natural that after 20 films or so, the Bond producers would look to go in different directions. I don’t mean the actor who plays 007, but some of the familiar background parts.

Throughout much of the Bond cannon, M, Q, and Moneypenny were only seen in glimpses— to give Bond a clipped reprimand, a testy lecture or a soft moment of flirtation.

In the newer films, M, Q, and Moneypenny are flushed out, but I don’t care for it. Does the M character become more compelling because we see her drawing a bath? Is Moneypenny more interesting because we catch a glimpse of her casual sex hookup pouting in bed as she talks to Bond, who is on the other side of the world? Giving these characters more play not only adds to the run time of the movies, but also makes the plots messier.

Prior to the Craig 007 movies, one could probably drop in on any Bond film and not have to know anything inside baseball. But during the Craig years, one film bled into the next, and you felt lost if you didn’t know who Vesper was (I still don’t).

This is likely the influence of television. Bond movies, either by design or incidentally, felt as if they had to mirror their idiot box brethren by making the films semi-episodic.

But there was also a clear cinematic influence on Bond occurring as well. A 007 picture always promised a flavor of spy-craft, but the more recent movies evolved away from patient spook-work into generic action films. James Bond movies have not waivered from offering exotic locations (and women), but the early films were well paced. The latter-day Bonds became too busy, globe-hopping at breakneck speed.

I came of age in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, so I’m trying to divine if my appreciation for the Bond films of those decades is the product, not of objective analysis, but some unknowing attachment to and association with my youth.

Even though I’ve looked in the mirror, I reject that diagnosis. The earlier films were simply better.

Not just 007 himself and the villains but even the secondary characters such as the henchmen. In the more recent Bond movies there are some bruising killers, but they have no flare (or even interesting names that I recall) such as Odd Job, Jaws, Nick Nack and the gay duo of Mr. Kidd and Mr. Winn.

In that same vein, can a fan of the more current Bond films hum any title song? A Bond song –setting aside the iconic 007 leitmotif—once stood out. I didn’t find any of the recent Bond intro songs memorable. And even if one or two are decent, they don’t compare to ‘For Your Eyes Only,’ ‘Never Say Never Again,’ ‘Live and Let Die,’ and ‘Nobody Does it Better.’ Adele’s ‘Skyfall’ (the only Bond song to win an Oscar) is nice, but it doesn’t come close to the crème de la crème of 007 songs, ‘Goldfinger,’ which never received any of Oscar’s Midas love.

That brings us to which Bond film is second best because there is no debate that in first place is Goldfinger. The song, the style, the villains, the plan, and yeah that golf game. My top ten 007 films are ranked as such…

• Goldfinger
  
• From Russia With Love
  
• The Man With the Golden Gun
  
• You Only Live Twice
  
• The Spy Who Loved Me
  
• For Your Eyes Only
  
• The Living Daylights
  
• Never Say Never Again
  
• Dr. No
  
• A View to a Kill

There have probably been more famous directors to take the helm of Bond movies, but they haven’t handled the material as well.

Perhaps the best season of television ever was True Detective Season One, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. A star was born then, and as a result Fukunaga has been handed a lot—including 007 in No Time to Die.

But, as previously mentioned, this film is sloppy. Like many who attempted to take on Bond, he was foiled. Fukunaga clearly could not handle a sprawling, lively action piece and so we got a weak, banal action piece with a brooding, unfunny Bond.

This begs the question: where will Bond go next? I don’t pay much attention to the development of 007 films, but it has been five years. Will Bond be a women or gay, or a gay woman? Neither would surprise, though a lesbian Bond would at least make the sex scenes decent.

However, one might also ask is another Bond movie possible? 007 was a stand in for Britain, and the UK has fallen very far since 1962. England is collapsing from within, so how can we believe any of its agents can save the world or accomplish daring missions overseas?

For a long time nobody did it better when it came to producing a James Bond film, but somewhere in the early 21st century, when too many large-scale film productions ceased to be enjoyable, Bond got dragged down with the times.

Time will tell of course, but for now it seems Commander Bond may have met the one foe who could vanquish him: corporate, post-modern filmmaking. That villainous moniker doesn’t quite have the ring of Ernst Stavro Blofeld or Francisco Scaramanga, but it’s succeeded, for the moment, in putting the most suave and scrappy Englishman ever on his back.

While I wait for Bond to resurrect, I can at least enjoy (mostly) his earlier exploits via Netflix.

posted by Open Blogger at 07:30 PM

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