The Brosnan Era '1995 - 2002'

He still plays it tough, the difference is that he's no longer forcing it (heavy breathing, fidgeting, gritting teeth, PANFACE). He's a lot more at ease in the role. There's that bit where he encounters Zao in the lab "caught your attention huh?", with a hint of glee, portraying him more like a bastard, then he cuts to the chase.

Contrast that with his encounter with Renard, which is pathetic.

http://screenmusings.org/TheWorldIsNotEnough/pages/TWinE_0677.htm
http://screenmusings.org/TheWorldIsNotEnough/pages/TWinE_0680.htm

Looks like he's about to shit himself in that second pic

Overall, I agree with Harms' summary of Brosnan in TWINE: A second rate Moore combined with a fourth rate Dalton.

I personally find him neither tough, sympathetic, funny or likeable.

Is it fair to say he was popular because he was pretty?

Maybe it was his hair.

Makeshift Python wrote:

Contrast that with his encounter with Renard, which is pathetic.

http://screenmusings.org/TheWorldIsNotEnough/pages/TWinE_0677.htm
http://screenmusings.org/TheWorldIsNotEnough/pages/TWinE_0680.htm

Looks like he's about to shit himself in that second pic

I just re-watched TWINE and felt more disappointed than usual. Elektra and Renard are fascinating characters and easily the best villains of the era but the film, like all the other Brosnans, feels more like a rough story sketch than a truly fleshed out screenplay. I still don't have a problem with Denise Richards being thrown in, and actually with each successive viewing think that the Christmas character works better. Zukovsky does little more than plot advancement and is played almost entirely for laughs it seems, which makes him seem a bit moronic. And the score, save for the title song, is relatively useless.
I think the real problem the film has (besides the spotty script) is the breakdown between first and second unit scenes. Michael Apted is a very interesting choice to direct a Bond film, and had the second unit not gone overboard with the action scenes, there would have been breathing room for the performances, which they badly need. If you look at some of the scenes between Bond and Elektra, Elektra and Renard or Bond and Renard, they cry out for more time to develop and delve into these really flawed beings.
I still rate it as the best of the Brosnans if not for the possibility of depth in the great scenes which to me are those like: The torture chair, Elektra's end, bed scenes, and virtually all of the other quiet moments of dialogue between people. What I really enjoy are the little things that make it seem terribly real, what with reverse Stockholm syndrome and all.
And the end fight is truly lame, sadly, I even thought so as a 9 year old in the theater.

For GE, there should have at the very least been more between getting from Russia to Cuba, and more to Alec's plot. This would have aided in fleshing out the story instead of devolving the thing into the standard megalomaniac out to strike back at the world in some random base hidden away. Best thing in film: The 90's Euro post-Cold War style.
TND should have had a different climax. It reeks horribly of a lame TSWLM attack, and the set is rather unimpressive. Carver's end unravels his threat as a villain, Teri Hatcher is rather annoying-as is the entire way the Paris subplot is played, Stamper is a bad stereotype that in no way resembles Grant, Bond discovers who is behind the plot far too quickly, the teaser is stagey, and...I still resent the inclusion of Wai Lin. Why was this necessary? I get the idea behind it, but must it include every single "we hate each other but eventually we'll work together because she's a kung-fu warrior" cliche? Best thing in the film: Bond on a motorcycle and the throwback guitar line in the title song.
DAD has no idea what it is doing. Purvis and Wade managed to enhance and magnify every problem in their TWINE script and place it in an attempt to send up all the "big" Bonds of the past. Unfortunately in doing this they also magnified all of the problems of the big films-if not handled properly they can lumber about and become very tiresome.
None are bad films, but all are disappointing when you think about what could have been. Brosnan never gets a fair deal in any of the four, and after watching 5 minutes of him elsewhere (The Matador and especially Tailor of Panama) you can see a glimmer (couldn't resist) of what a truer Brosnan Bond would have felt like. Why did they have to hold back all the super-seriousness mentality until now?
GE-3/4 stars
TND-3/4 stars
TWINE-3/4 stars
DAD-2.5/4 stars

hegottheboot wrote:

None are bad films, but all are disappointing when you think about what could have been. Brosnan never gets a fair deal in any of the four, and after watching 5 minutes of him elsewhere (The Matador and especially Tailor of Panama) you can see a glimmer (couldn't resist) of what a truer Brosnan Bond would have felt like. Why did they have to hold back all the super-seriousness mentality until now?

I suspect the person they wanted to play Bond was Remington Steele and not Pierce Brosnan. However the bigger issues are consistent extend beyond this era imo, those being an overall lack of confidence or even distaste in those aspects that make Bond different/stand apart - the real template from GE onwards has not been Bond but rather the testosterone fuelled generic American actioner, and against that presentation neither Brosnan nor Steele were a comfortable fit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmPrt_gn-eM&t=22s

Brosnan jut isn't my cup of tea I suppose

The only Bond film where I like Brosnan is DAD. He just seems a little more relaxed. He's passible in parts of TND because he had more confidence than in GE. But I find him utterly awful in GE and TWINE. GE because he's totally green (watch him in the casino with Famke Janssen for a larf). TWINE because he's trying to ham it up and also be convincing.

But I think he's fantastic in movies like THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR and THE TAILOR OF PANAMA. If his Bond movies had been more in that tone, he'd probably have been a much better Bond.

As it stands, TND, TWINE, and DAD were misfires. I like how Lazenby. calls them "greatest hits" films. They're not tailored to Brosnan's strengths, and on top of that they're not written well anyway.

The Brosnan era. The more time passes, the more I find it complete shit.

Funny, during the Dalton & Brosnan eras, that's what people said about the Moore era...

Meh. I never said that. With Brosnan I said it was shit at the time too. It just looks even more shit now.

Brosnan was the era of quickly diminishing returns. He made one worthwhile Bond movie at the very beginning of his tenure, but then the movies as well as his own performances got increasingly worse, culminating with the disaster that was DAD.

I'd say DAD was his best performance.

Fortunately. I don't know from performances. An actor has to be really bad before I'll notice (paging Ms. Roberts...) and one bad performance can make subsequent mediocre performances easier to bear.

There's a reason Purvis & Wade get to write the scripts and I don't - they're better at it than I am. They're also better than the MMQBs who complain about them on these and other forums.

The directors - however much we may despise their finished products - are also professionals. There's more to directing than just saying "Okay Pierce, enter from left and say your line, then John, that's the cue for your explosion..." If that's all there was to it, then I could do it. You have to have a superb head for logistics as well as vision before anyone willl trust you with a $100m+ production.

So as much as I was looking forward to and enjoyed GoldenEye, I found that I enjoyed the incompletely-scripted, last-minute-location-changing, scramble-to-finish-in-time TND even more. I did notice the unevenness in the pacing of TWINE, which I put down to Michael Apted's directing the actors and Vic Armstrong directing the action sequences. DAD I found delivered everything I enjoy in a Bond movie, and I love it as much as I love TB, YOLT, OHMSS, DAF, LALD, TMWTGG, TSWLM, OP, TLD & CR. Make of that what you will.

In the meantime I'm ignoring the pre-release nay-saying of certain posters and looking forward to Skyfall, with no pre-conceived expectations. I find I enjoy movies much more if I don't go in expecting them to be bad (self-fulfilling prophesy) or having my own idea of what it has to be to satisfy me. I'm certain Skyfall will knock my socks off.

So am I too easily satisfied, or is my problem that I'm just not judgemental enough?

It doesn't take a chef to know bad cooking.

Largo's Shark wrote:

It doesn't take a chef to know bad cooking.

You - or someone - said that already, last time I defended DAD.

True, you don't have to be a chef to know bad cooking, but you do have to be a competent cook before you can claim to be able to do better.

I'm just saying that I don't consider myself qualified to bash Lee Tamahori, Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry or Purvis & Wade.

I know what I like, just as I know I didn't like AVTAK all that much, but I'm not arrogant enough to believe that I could have done a better job of writing or directing it myself - even if I could travel back in time and somehow convince EON to dump Tanya Roberts, Roger Moore, Richard Maibaum &/or John Glen and put me in charge (isn't hindsight wonderful?).

As for DAD, I wouldn't change a thing, except the wonky CGI in the parasurfing scene - and even that I can live with, if I'm willing to live with the wonky back projection in DN, FRWL, OHMSS, MR, etc. (which I am).

AMC Hornet wrote:

Largo's Shark wrote:

It doesn't take a chef to know bad cooking.

You - or someone - said that already, last time I defended DAD.

True, you don't have to be a chef to know bad cooking, but you do have to be a competent cook before you can claim to be able to do better.

Claiming to be able to do better is very different from just criticising.

AMC Hornet wrote:

As for DAD, I wouldn't change a thing, except the wonky CGI in the parasurfing scene - and even that I can live with, if I'm willing to live with the wonky back projection in DN, FRWL, OHMSS, MR, etc. (which I am).

While I'd be seriously inclined to take issue with your whole notion re: the 'not being able to better than the pros' aspect, I'll just focus on this for now.

Studio filmmaking being what it was in 1962 or 1964, there would have been very little likelihood of shooting the driving scenes live and for real, unless you were Sidney Furie doing THE LEATHER BOYS or Orson Welles shooting TOUCH OF EVIL. So the RP is largely a given, not a lot of option. Whereas the parasailing scene in DAD could and should have been done using miniatures shot high-speed, a la the flying figure in BRAZIL, comped over real water plates with additional practical water atmospherics. So you've got a series of misjudgements, from the choice to use CG for the sequence to their not just abandoning the sequence once they realized how horrible it looked. It might or might not be as utterly flawed in execution as the plane crash into water at the end of AIR FORCE ONE, which absolutely ruins an otherwise enjoyable movie, but it is a seriously bad call.

trevanian wrote:

AMC Hornet wrote:

As for DAD, I wouldn't change a thing, except the wonky CGI in the parasurfing scene - and even that I can live with, if I'm willing to live with the wonky back projection in DN, FRWL, OHMSS, MR, etc. (which I am).

While I'd be seriously inclined to take issue with your whole notion re: the 'not being able to better than the pros' aspect, I'll just focus on this for now.

Studio filmmaking being what it was in 1962 or 1964, there would have been very little likelihood of shooting the driving scenes live and for real, unless you were Sidney Furie doing THE LEATHER BOYS or Orson Welles shooting TOUCH OF EVIL. So the RP is largely a given, not a lot of option. Whereas the parasailing scene in DAD could and should have been done using miniatures shot high-speed, a la the flying figure in BRAZIL, comped over real water plates with additional practical water atmospherics. So you've got a series of misjudgements, from the choice to use CG for the sequence to their not just abandoning the sequence once they realized how horrible it looked. It might or might not be as utterly flawed in execution as the plane crash into water at the end of AIR FORCE ONE, which absolutely ruins an otherwise enjoyable movie, but it is a seriously bad call.

I agree with you, Mr. T.

There were all kinds of alternatives, but Tamahori seemed so determined that CGI be the future of Bond films that he overlooked them in his quest to fake everything.

I still maintain that I could not have written a better script, nor coaxed a better performance out of Halle Berry. The "Your mama" line did not not bother me at all - it was only "Wow - now there's a mouthful" that sticks, and only because of the unnecessary glance downward (Bond could at least have had the book in his hand).

Moreover I enjoyed the story P&W told. I can even buy the invisible car, even though it was too perfect for the time (I don't hear a lot of bitching over the notion of taking a GFRP-bodied Lotus Esprit and stuffing it with enough machinery to turn inoto an armed dry-submersible, and that's still sci-fi fantasy thirty-five years on).

There have been movies I didn't like (Starship Troopers tops that list), but since I'm not a Heinlein purist or a dedicated fan of the genre I don't waste my time obsessing over what I would have done differently - for all I know any alterations I might have made might have ruined it for everyone else, and as I know many other people love that movie the way it is, I leave them to it.

Fortunately I seem to have DAD almost to myself, along with DAF and TMWTGG, so everyone else can go ahead and try to rain on my parade - I have my brolly.

You know what, I don't mind DAD. The first half is very promising and at the very least stays on the straight and narrow, but its when we get to Iceland that the film just goes to pieces. It's as if the film, which is light hearted (despite the somewhat dark opening twenty minutes) and a little over the top has to try and top itself and in order to do that it throws in everything at the film. Invisible cars, sneering villains, bad innuendo (not the first time that a 007 movie has engaged in such a thing) but it's just whilst there have been other over the top Bond movies (YOLT, MR, TSWLM), those movies had charm and a bit of wit and DAD has none of that as it goes on, it just becomes another empty headed, charmless, CGI riddled action spectacle.

As for the Brosnan era as a whole, I grew up with these movies, I was eleven when GE came out and 18 when DAD was released so, they are an important part of my pop cultural rite of passage, and I like them. GE is wonderfully done, TND is a lot of fun (a good example of being over the top and genuinely fun) and TWINE is an interesting take on trying something a little different, not sure if it works totally but I gotta give them effort for trying. In fact if they tried to keep going in that direction instead of where they went with DAD, I don't think Brosnan's last film in the role would have been so controversial.

Sir Dalton Craig wrote:

You know what, I don't mind DAD. The first half is very promising and at the very least stays on the straight and narrow, but its when we get to Iceland that the film just goes to pieces. It's as if the film, which is light hearted (despite the somewhat dark opening twenty minutes) and a little over the top has to try and top itself and in order to do that it throws in everything at the film. Invisible cars, sneering villains, bad innuendo (not the first time that a 007 movie has engaged in such a thing) but it's just whilst there have been other over the top Bond movies (YOLT, MR, TSWLM), those movies had charm and a bit of wit and DAD has none of that as it goes on, it just becomes another empty headed, charmless, CGI riddled action spectacle.

As for the Brosnan era as a whole, I grew up with these movies, I was eleven when GE came out and 18 when DAD was released so, they are an important part of my pop cultural rite of passage, and I like them. GE is wonderfully done, TND is a lot of fun (a good example of being over the top and genuinely fun) and TWINE is an interesting take on trying something a little different, not sure if it works totally but I gotta give them effort for trying. In fact if they tried to keep going in that direction instead of where they went with DAD, I don't think Brosnan's last film in the role would have been so controversial.

Absolutey agree with you! DAD was a very weak point, but GE, TND and TWINE are wonderful! GE and TND are my #1 and #2 faves respectively.

That's great to hear about TND, Nicolas! It currently holds top spot in my ranking, and have GE and TWINE floating in my top 8 or so.

Stick around Bond and Beyond... we need you. :)

By describing GE and TWINE as 'floating', you may be handing ammo to those who say the Brozzer era was ... well, shit. ;)

I'll just tell 'em they're full of crap. ;)