The Big Picture · Review · Top Five · Interview
October 8, 2021/ 109 min/ Sean Fennessey · Amanda Dobbins · Chris Ryan
Sean, Amanda, and Chris review Daniel Craig's Bond send-off, count down their top-five 007 films, then Sean talks to director Cary Joji Fukunaga.
24 films across 5 segments.
AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.
No Time to DieDaniel Craig's last Bond
Six years after Spectre, Craig's finale picks up where that film left off and kills Bond off for good. The panel loves the front half, the Matera car chase and the Cuba shootout with Ana de Armas, but thinks the Rami Malek poison-merchant plot loses the thread in the third act. They clock the ending as manipulative but effective, and compare its rocket-barrage climax to Armageddon and The Rock.
Sean's Top Five Bond Films
The unanimous No. 1. Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins made the series respectable enough to pull in Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, and Albert Finney; Sean argues it should have been Craig's last.
The blueprint: the car, Q, Oddjob, Pussy Galore, and a villain whose every scene with Connery verges on Austin Powers.
A first-time watch for Sean and a revelation: Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas as Blofeld, and cutting so modern it looks decades ahead of 1969. One of the only other Bond films with a true downbeat ending.
Sean's introduction to Bond at 13. Martin Campbell, Famke Janssen, Sean Bean turning heel, Judi Dench's first M, and Brosnan driving a tank down the street in a suit.
The Roger Moore that sticks: the ski-jump parachute opening, Jaws, Barbara Bach, and 'Nobody Does It Better.' Overstuffed in the right way.
Amanda's Top Five Bond Films
Also her No. 1: the cinematic ideal of a Bond movie and a critique of Bond at the same time.
The Craig-era experiment that worked; Eva Green's Vesper is the emotional payload the later films kept chasing. Amanda's favorite sequence in any Bond film is still the card game, poker gripes notwithstanding.
The most coherent Connery, and the one whose pieces have most fully atomized into the culture.
The only Roger Moore that stays with her, enjoyable and parodying the franchise at once.
Her Brosnan pick. Jonathan Pryce plays a Rupert Murdoch media villain starting World War III for ratings, and the ship-software-bugs gag reads as prophecy now. Brosnan looser here than in GoldenEye.
Chris's Top Five Bond Films
His No. 1 too. Raul Silva is the best villain of the series, and the interrogation scene between Bond and Silva the best-written moment in it.
The most espionage-forward Connery: Istanbul, Robert Shaw as a physical threat, Rosa Klebb and her spiked shoe. The deeply romantic, Len Deighton Bond.
One of the two that made him fall for the whole series; Goldfinger and Oddjob, and the golf-match style of Bond-villain sparring he loves.
A deplorable, gonzo film he remembers fondly from childhood chicken-pox TBS marathons: Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, a Howard Hughes plot, and a rare fish-out-of-water Bond stuck in Vegas and Reno.
The 'Sicario Bond,' a Dalton where 007 goes extrajudicial against a Robert Davi drug lord, with Benicio del Toro as a henchman and Wayne Newton as a televangelist. Goofy as hell, and the panel's lone Dalton entry.
In conversation
He took the job to build a final chapter (endings are the hard part, he says) and to mirror his favorite Bond, Casino Royale. Injuries and Ana de Armas's tight window forced him to shoot the Cuba sequence without Craig, 'half of a jigsaw puzzle' with no connective tissue.
His favorite Bond film and the one that brought him back to the franchise as a fan; he wanted this movie to mirror it.
He'd first spoken to Barbara Broccoli right after it came out, when Craig had sworn he'd never do another.
His crash course in English culture eight or nine years earlier, including a Peak District shoot capped at eight crew, two of them there to handle tea.
Written years ahead, unlike the improvisational pace the last few projects have demanded.
The kind of small, nimble film that can dodge an iceberg, versus a Bond production that steers like the Titanic.
The reason Broccoli wanted to return to Jamaica: roughly 60 years on, and Ian Fleming's birthplace.
The last great thing he'd seen, caught at a cinema in Hackney; it made him want to go eat truffles.
Also mentioned raised along the way
Other Craig-era Bond Quantum of Solace
Bond films in passing ThunderballNever Say Never AgainMoonraker
Comparisons and asides ArmageddonThe RockThe Girl with the Dragon TattooBlack WidowVenomThe Man from U.N.C.L.E.Mrs. DoubtfireWidowsDie HardThe Many Saints of NewarkOcean's ElevenThree Days of the Condor
Franchises name-checked Mission: ImpossibleThe Fast and the FuriousKingsman: The Secret ServiceJohn Wick
Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads
TV True DetectiveGame of ThronesThe Crown
Video games GoldenEye 007FIFA World Cup (Netflix)
Ads Boar's HeadWhite ClawAmerican ExpressDeath, Taxes and Bananas