Bond, ranked and mildly unhinged
Scene-level James Bond rankings for anyone who watches the timer instead of the explosion. How close did Goldfinger’s bomb inside Fort Knox really get to zero? What price would a bookie have offered on 007 at the start of Act Three in You Only Live Twice or Skyfall? Whose mistake cost Bond more, Felix Leiter’s or Valentin Zukovsky’s?
Goldfinger set the standard for villains who go after a country’s gold. About three decades later, Die Hard with a Vengeance sent Simon Gruber after the gold beneath New York, and anyone raised on Bond will feel a familiar tug watching it. We’ve already let Austin Powers into a Bond list, so a Die Hard … Read more
James Bond gets most of the one-liners in his own films. He has a quip ready for most of the henchmen he dispatches. This list is about everybody else: the people who hand him gadgets, sign off on his missions, try to kill him, or just happen to be standing nearby when he does something … Read more
Every Bond villain with a bomb seems to buy the model with the big, easy-to-read clock on the front. It’s a strange feature for a weapon. The countdown mostly helps the hero, and the hero usually gets there. So we went through the readings. The rule: a clock, display or spoken countdown the audience can … Read more
CIA men, MI6 colleagues, local contacts: most of the time they’re the support network that makes a one-man mission possible. Every so often, they support Bond the way a wet paper bag supports groceries. This is a list of bad moments, not bad friends. Several people below do real good elsewhere in their films. House … Read more
You know how a Bond film ends. That is exactly why we took away our bookie’s DVD collection. For this list we froze nine films at the moment the climax begins and asked one question: if you walked up to the betting window right then, what price would you get on Bond? The bookie knows … Read more