Every ‘Bond’ Film Ever, Ranked

Over the past six decades, the 007 franchise has put its stamp on cinema like no other movie run of films. Arriving in the midst of the Cold War, it invented and continued to define the Hollywood action movie. There were groovy gadgets, sensational set pieces, luscious locales, sinister seductresses, venomous villains, and, of course, Bond…James Bond as the straw that stirs the drink (a vodka martini shaken not stirred, naturally).

During that time, only six men have played the British superspy, and each brought their own unique interpretation to the role—often for good, occasionally for ill. Now on the eve of the franchise’s 25^thinstallment, Daniel Craig’s final 007 outing No Time To Die, Esquire went back and ranked the entire series from worst to best.

So sit back, grab a cocktail (you know which kind…), and see if your opinion lines up with ours.

24. Die Another Day (2002)

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Pierce Brosnan’s fourth and final turn in the tux kicks off well enough with 007 being tortured in a North Korean prison. But once he gains his freedom, it’s all downhill. Directed by Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors), this bloated, whiplash-toned film has its moments (namely Halle Berry’s Jinx emerging from the surf in Cuba). But the villain (Toby Stephens’ Gustav Graves) is a snooze, and its stabs at Moore-era comedy (John Cleese as Q, Bond’s invisible car) are as funny as a stubbed toe. A Madonna cameo as a fencing instructor doesn’t help matters. Die Another Day isn’t a complete disaster, but someone gotta be last, right?

23. Moonraker (1979)

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For Your Eyes Only was originally slated to be the follow-up to Roger Moore’s career best The Spy Who Loved Me. But those plans were scrapped after Star Wars came out and became an overnight global sensation. 007 producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli wanted a piece of the intergalactic money pie, so Moonraker was rushed into production. Big mistake. This is commercial trend-chasing at its most shameless as Moore’s Bond squares off against Nietzschean uber-villain Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale) in space with his tongue jammed so far in his cheek that it’s a miracle the actor didn’t gag. Moonraker is silly sci-fi hooey. It’s biggest sin: turning The Spy Who Loved Me’s giant, razor-toothed henchman Jaws into a gentle giant looking for love in zero gravity.

22. The World is Not Enough (1999)

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I swear I’m not intentionally picking on Brosnan, he was a solid Bond and he sure looked dashing in a dinner jacket. But his third outing is also a dud. There are a few decent action sequences courtesy of director Michael Apted, but the nefarious double-whammy of Sophie Marceau’s Elektra King and Robert Carlyle’s pain-immune Renard don’t add up to much, villain-wise. It says something that the most memorable thing in the film is the egregious miscasting of Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist (no joke) named Dr. Christmas Jones (also no joke).

21. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

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Okay, I guess maybe I am picking on Brosnan since he occupies three of the four bottom spots on this list. Tomorrow Never Dies isn’t a complete waste of time—the delirious motorcycle chase with Bosnan and Michelle Yeoh is a thrillingly engineered bit of popcorn escapism—but with a daffy plot that revolves around a power-mad Rupert Murdoch-like media tycoon (Jonathan Pryce) looking to goose his empire’s ratings, the stakes feel awfully low.

20. Spectre (2015)

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Some may be surprised to see a Daniel Craig entry so low on this list, but let’s face it, Spectre was a massive comedown after Skyfall. It’s hard to believe both films were directed by the same guy (Sam Mendes). There was a giddy sense of anticipation surrounding the casting of Inglourious Basterds’ Christoph Waltz as the film’s villain. But when he turned out to be—spoiler alert!—Blofeld, what should have felt like holy-shit twist simply fell flat. Craig’s Mexico City opening sequence is a honey and Lea Seydoux is a stellar addition to the double-o universe. Still, the whole Blofeld thing is a disaster. It felt like a franchise short of ideas grasping at old straws. (And clocking in at 148 minutes didn’t exactly sweeten the deal.)

19. The Living Daylights (1987)

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Welcome to the Timothy Dalton years. Diehard fans weaned on Sean Connery and Roger Moore may have found Dalton a bit by-the-numbers and bland, but his brief tenure now looks a good deal better with age. Still, this initial outing is hardly top-shelf Bond. The Reagan-era plotline nods to the Iran-Contra shenanigans with a diamonds-for-drugs-for-arms network involving the Russkies (Jeroen Krabbe), the Yanks (Joe Don Baker), and a beautiful cellist (Maryam D’Abo). It’s every bit as convoluted as it sounds. Plus, 007 gets to ride with the Mujahideen a decade-and-change before the war in Afghanistan would end up coming home to roost. Not awful, not great. The definition of a gentleman’s C.

18. Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

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Here is where things start to get tricky. From this point on, these are all at least decent movies, which tells you something about the excellent batting average of the Bond franchise. After taking a single-film hiatus from the saga (during which he was replaced by the one-and-done George Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), Sean Connery reluctantly returned to the role that made him a household name. (Thanks to a very large paycheck.) Too bad the movie wasn’t quite on the same par as his previous turns. The Las Vegas scenes are time-capsule eye candy, Jill St. John is hilariously untrustworthy as Tiffany Case, and the ambiguously gay duo of Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd is subversively sinister. But the moon buggy climax is pure camp.

17. The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

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A case could be made that this deserves to be slotted a couple spots higher mainly due to Christopher Lee’s classy turn as Francisco Scaramanga—a natty villain with a super-groovy island lair, a diminutive henchman named Nick Nack (Herve Villechaize), and a superfluous third nipple. But in his second go-round, Roger Moore was still finding his sea legs as 007. Not to mention that Lee’s whole solar death ray thing felt like old hat. I could take or leave the movie’s blatant attempt to ride the coattails of the then-fashionable kung-fu craze, but the thing that works the best is the trippy hall-of-mirrors funhouse finale featuring a climactic showdown that pays homage to Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai.

16. Quantum of Solace (2008)

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Can we all just agree that the title stinks and move on? Good. After coming out of the gate like an angry rodeo bull in Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s sophomore outing is a bit of letdown. Mathieu Amalric is a fine actor, but he’s a bust as a Bond villain. And oil politics may be riveting to Financial Times subscribers, but it’s hardly the sexiest subject for a 007 tentpole. Still, there’s at least two indelible Bond sequences in the film: the foot chase across the red-tiled rooftops of Siena and a hauntingly beautiful oil-coated corpse that seems like a wink to Shirley Eaton’s gold paint-covered victim in Goldfinger.

15. Live and Let Die (1973)

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In which Roger Moore makes his 007 debut only to realize that he’s been cast in a more posh version of Shaft Goes to Harlem. Seriously, what a bizarre 007 film! From its bombastic Paul McCartney and Wings title song (which still slaps!) to its funky-but-kinda-uncomfortable Blaxploitation vibe, Live and Let Die only hints at the cheeky air that Moore would bring to the role. Instead, we get him tangling with Yaphet Kotto’s heroin-pushing heavy Kananga and his hook-handed henchman Tee Hee (Julius Harris). There’s voodoo on the fictional island of San Monique and a clairvoyant Jane Seymour. But best of all is Kananga’s death scene—a wonderfully cartoony, Tex Avery-style demise where he explodes after being force-fed a shark-gun pellet!

14. You Only Live Twice (1967)

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Okay, first the good…and man, is it good. Donald Pleasence soars as the ultimate Ernst Stavro Blofeld (a villainous role that many actors would try on for size, none of whom would fill it out with such bespoke perfection), his slow-tease reveal is for the ages. And his volcano lair is absolutely dope, right down to its in-house stainless steel monorail. Less good: Sean Connery going yellowface. Presumed dead, Connery’s 007 gets a Japanese makeover that stops the film dead in its tracks. Which is a shame, because otherwise this is pretty kick-ass stuff (from a Roald Dahl scri pt, no less).

13. For Your Eyes Only (1981)

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Anything would have felt like Citizen Kane following Moonraker. A British spy ship carrying a classified transmitter is sunk off the coast of Albania. Meanwhile, a crossbow-wielding Carole Bouquet’s father is murdered. Are the two somehow connected? Take a wild guess. Roger Moore’s 007 teams up with Bouquet to exact vengeance, which involves scaling a seemingly impossible cliff in Greece and being chased on skis by Euro-goons on motorcycles. Underrated Sheena Easton theme song; painful-to-watch Margaret Thatcher impersonator in the final scene.

12. A View to a Kill (1985)

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It was really only a matter of time before the deliciously creepy Christopher Walken would be cast as a Bond villain. And he does a lot with only a little in Roger Moore’s 007 swan song. (Moore was 57 during filming and it shows.) It’s also remarkably easy to spot his stunt double with a finger on the pause button. But this is Walken’s show from start to finish. As Max Zorin, the super-intelligent offspring of Nazi eugenics experiments, he schemes to destroy Silicon Valley to corner the market on computer chips…or something like that. Grace Jones adds an extra dash of eccentricity as Walken’s bodyguard, May Day. The casting makes perfect sense. After all, who else would Christopher Walken hire to do his dirty work?

11. Dr. No (1962)

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Here’s where it all started. And you have to give Dr. No a lot of credit for constructing the cinematic world of James Bond so perfectly. Still, 60 years on, I have to admit that it feels a little slow. Joseph Wiseman’s villain of the title oozes sadistic mandarin smarm and his Jamaican lair is super-cool. But Dr. No is, was, and will always be most memorable for all of the signature Bond tropes is sets in motion: the slinky Monty Norman guitar theme, the mandatory-if-outdated easy-on-the-eyes “Bond girl” (Ursula Andress’s Honey Ryder), and of course, Sean Connery’s purring introduction, “Bond…James Bond.” This is the blueprint for the next six decades.

10. License to Kill (1989)

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Welcome to the Top 10, folks. Are you surprised to see a Timothy Dalton film here? Me too. But License to Kill rewards repeated viewings. It would have been interesting to see what Dalton would have done with a third Bond film if he got the chance because this is a quantum leap from his debut in The Living Daylights. The best thing about this one, though, is how overtly more violent it is than its predecessors. (Then again, when you cast Robert Davi as the bad guy, that pretty much comes with the territory.) Also, if you squint, you’ll see a young Benicio del Toro as a hit man, which is just the antidote you’ll need to erase Wayne Newton’s cameo from your brain.

9. GoldenEye (1995)

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Finally, a Pierce Brosnan Bond film that’s better than serviceable. The Irish smoothie’s debut as 007 was as good as it would get for him at MI6. But it’s excellent enough that it almost makes up for the rest of his outings. Named after Ian Fleming’s Jamaican estate, GoldenEye features a first-rate villain (thanks to Sean Bean’s British Intelligence turncoat, Alec Trevelyan) and all of the action-film thrills Bond fans once took for granted. Loyal audiences always rooted for 007 without thinking twice about what made him tick. But his face-off with Trevelyan, in which the heavy asks Bond if all those vodka martinis manage to silence the screams of all the men he’s killed, made you question the price tag that came with our hero’s license to kill.

8. Octopussy (1983)

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I know, I know, he dresses up in a clown suit. But this is easily the most undervalued Roger Moore Bond film. I have to assume the silly title has more than a little to do with that. I’ve always loved Octopussy, mainly because I think it shows off Moore’s skillset the best: he’s smooth as thousand-threadcount sheets with the ladies; he’s got the guts of a cat burglar when he switches a phony Faberge egg for the real thing at an auction; he kicks Louis Jourdan’s ass at backgammon just for spite; and, oh yeah, he defuses a nuclear warhead…a split second before it detonates…while wearing a clown suit!

7. Thunderball (1965)

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Once again, SPECTRE gets its hands on a nuclear warhead. Yawn, right? Wrong. Because this time around Sean Connery gets to bust out a jet pack, kill someone with a spear gun, and negotiate his way out of a swimming pool full of sharks. The underwater scenes still look cool. And this is the film that really upped the ante on gadgets and ensured that they would become an integral part of the franchise from here on out. All of this plus Adolfo Celli as an eye-patched villain that’s part Ahab and part the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island.

6. Casino Royale (2006)

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As I’ve written elsewhere on this site, when Daniel Craig was named as Pierce Brosnan’s replacement as 007, fans had a hissy fit about him being too blonde and too short. The outstanding Casino Royale is a raised middle finger to all of the naysayers. This was a back-to-basics reboot of a wheezing franchise that needed some adrenaline and balls. Craig delivered both (although the latter would get pretty bruised in Mads Mikkelsen’s torture chamber). Facing off against Mikkelsen’s blood-weeping Le Chiffre, Craig’s skinned knuckles and wounded heart would resurrect the series. He was the 007 that the new millennium needed.

5. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

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It’s truly unfortunate that George Lazenby has become little more than a trivia-night answer after his one-and-done turn as 007. And the Aussie’s blink-and-miss-it tenure might lead you to believe that he was a dud in the role. Au contraire! Lazenby was a totally respectable Bond in a truly remarkable Bond film. That’s right, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service absolutely belongs in the Top 5. More than just a placeholder filling in for Sean Connery while he was off dithering about whether or not to return to the series, Lazenby took 007 in a new, more vulnerable direction (but, mind you, he could still throw a punch). While going head to head with Telly Savalas’s Blofeld and his “angels of death”, Bond falls in love with and marries Diana Rigg’s troubled Contessa Teresa di Vicenzo only to see her cruelly taken away. Lazenby’s Bond showed the price he had to pay for his job and thus showed the first glimmer of an existential 007.

4. Skyfall (2012)

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This is it, Daniel Craig’s crowning achievement as Bond. It was also the Best 007 film in 35 years. Craig’s interplay with Judi Dench’s M is so lived in and layered, they almost have a romantic edge. Javier Bardem’s Silva is one of the most colorfully twisted villains the series has ever conjured. New additions shine in their debuts (Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, Ralph Fiennes). And Bond’s backstory is served up with nuggets of nostalgia and Easter eggs targeted to the faithful—the faithful who had been waiting a very long time for a 007 film this fantastic.

3. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

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Roger Moore’s finest hour, hands down. After two mediocre outings, this is where he finally earned his 007 stripes. Curd Jurgens’s maritime megalomaniac Karl Stromberg hijacks Soviet and British submarines, forcing the mutually distrustful nations to team up. Naturally, Bond’s Russian partner is a knockout (Barbara Bach), ensuring that there will be work and pleasure on the mission. The opening credits ski-chase-and-parachute-escape sequence is a showstopper. Bond’s amphibious Lotus sportscar is the ultimate Q branch gadget. And the whole middle section in Egypt is fantastic and taut, especially when Richard Kiel’s Jaws is on the East-West couple’s tail. This is the first 007 film I saw in the theater and it was love at first sight.

2. From Russia with Love (1963)

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The second Bond film and the first appearance of SPECTRE (The Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion). With the Cold War heating up off screen, Sean Connery managed to make it even cooler on screen. This is real a toss-up for No. 1 on this list—it frankly could have gone either way. But we here at Esquire sometimes have make the tough decisions, so this is mine. If Dr. No set the table for what a 007 movie would look, sound, and feel like, From Russia with Love was the first installment in the series that was truly thrilling. There is so much to fall in love with here: Connery’s brawl with Robert Shaw aboard the Orient Express; Lotte Lenya’s sadistic Svenga li Rosa Klebb; Daniela Bianchi’s naïve fatalism; a cool Lektor decoding device; and the fact that it was one of JFK’s favorite films and the last one he would ever see. Perfection.

1. Goldfinger (1964)

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I guess this is a little like choosing Exile on Main Street as the best Stones album. It’s obvious. But it’s also obvious for a reason. Pun very much intended, this is the gold standard of all 007 films. From the opening moment when Sean Connery’s Bond, on a deadly mission, emerges from the water in a frogman suit and unzips it to reveal a crisp white dinner jacket, we knew this is going to be a hell of a ride. Gert Frobe’s Midas-minded villain Auric Goldfinger is perfectly devious in matters small (cheating at gin rummy and golf) and large (trying to knock off Fort Knox for its stash of bullion), and his hulking, bowler-hatted bodyguard, Oddjob (Harold Sakata), is the quintessential Bond villain henchman. The caper’s plot is complex without asking you to think too much, the locales are gorgeous, Shirley Bassey’s theme song is timeless, Frobe’s delivery of “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!” while aiming a laser at his crotch is iconic, and 007’s tricked-out Aston Martin DB-5 burns rubber for the first time. Honestly, how could you ask for anything more?

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