Many lists put Die Another Day last
One from each, excluding Lazenby (who happened to make my favorite) and non-canon (Never Say Never Again):
Connery - Diamonds Are Forever
Moore - A View To A Kill
Dalton - License To Kill
Dalton - Die Another Day
Craig - (I’m about to commit sacrilege here!) SkyfallOverall top worst:
Diamonds Are Forever - the tone change between On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and this is jarring to the extreme, the fake-hip dialogue stinks to high heaven (“forget it, Charlie! You had your chance and you blew it!”), the mafia types were obsolete, quaint and flat cinematic caricatures, a deficiency amplified exponentially when The Godfather came out just a few months later.
Bonus negative points for an unfit and disinterested Connery, seemingly in constant self-amused form at how little effort he can get away with onscreen for a then record million-and-change dollar salary.BUT…! There is another one, so much worse, but mercifully non-canon: 1967’s spoof Casino Royale, with David Niven, Peter Sellers and Woody Allen. Oh my GOD is that thing unwatchably awful!
Casino Royale… no, not that one… the other one. :)
No, not that one, the other other one.
Quantum of solace
Die Another Day was meh, but I really didn’t care for Skyfall and No Time to Die. The plots were too contingent on inorganic and out of character details. Q wouldn’t be stupid enough to plug a USB drive into an MI6 networked device found on a known hacker supervillain. The convenience of the targeted DNA nanobots just magically being declared to have no solution without anyone doing any testing of theories was unbelievable and just revealed the obvious “we need to kill Bond in this one so come up with a reason for him to die nobly” pitch meeting pitch. It ruined the suspension of disbelief entirely. I feel like they just tried too hard to keep upping the stakes and outdo themselves that it just got ridiculous.
What killed No Time to Die for me were the nanobots being declared unsolvable in the same movie that explicitly shows EMPs being used. I thought for sure that was a Chekhov’s gun being set up but no, just bad writing.
EMP, MRI, or what about anti-nanobots? If you can program nanobots that kill people with particular DNA, couldn’t you program nanobots that target other nanobots? I would assume they hadn’t yet built in a self-defense protocol for the nanobots since they were cutting edge and not assumed to have any countermeasures yet. Anti-nanobots seem just as plausible as DNA targeting nanobots.
I was going to say “the one where he’s a rapist”, but weirdly that only narrows it down a bit. 🤮