Daniel Craig's James Bond movies, ranked
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When Casino Royale was released in 2006, James Bond was something of a joke. Four increasingly daft (though nominally fun) Pierce Brosnan entries had culminated with 2002's Die Another Day, famous for its confusion between Greenland and Iceland but nonetheless the most innovative and consistent of the Brosnan entries. (EW raved in its A- review that Die Another Day was "the savviest and most exciting James Bond adventure in years, because there's actually something at stake in it. The director, Lee Tamahori, reestablishes the series' ominous pop sensuality.")
A few months before Die Another Day hit theaters, Doug Liman's The Bourne Identity introduced audiences to a visceral new style of action filmmaking that made Tamahori's work appear quaint when his Bond installment made it to screens six months later. In 2004, Paul Greengrass entered the Bourne franchise and turned the style up to eleven with The Bourne Supremacy. From that moment forward, action cinema has never quite been the same.
Veteran Bond producer Barbara Broccoli knew that Bond needed to evolve with the times or risk being lost in a new age of quick-cuts and whip-pans. First to go was the reliance on CGI that hobbled the Brosnan entries. Broccoli and Wilson decided that for 007's next outing, the effects would be accomplished in-camera as often as the budget (not to mention health and safety) allowed. Their next step was to find a Bond unlike any that preceded him.
Their answer came in the form of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed British actor named Daniel Craig, who was known at the time largely for his work in domestic indie cinema, notably Mathew Vaughn's searing gangster satire Layer Cake and his collaborations with the late and especially great Roger Michell, who directed Craig in 2003's The Mother and 2004's Enduring Love. When Craig was announced as the new James Bond, at a rather disastrous 2005 press conference, the backlash was swift and severe. It was one of the first instances of toxic fandom dominating the popular discourse, now an unfortunately common occurrence.
Critics were just as dubious as the fanboys leading up to the release of Casino Royale on November 17, 2006. In an astonishing show of how far the brand had fallen stateside, Royale lost the number one spot at the box office in its opening weekend to Happy Feet, marking the first and only time to date that James Bond has lost in a fight with a group of dancing penguins.
However, positive reception to Royale, specifically Craig's rugged-yet-empathetic performance that would redefine the iconic spy, quickly reset the narrative. In his review for EW, Owen Gleiberman wrote of the actor, "With his blondish hair trimmed to a thatchy bristle, [he] is handsome, and buff as hell, but not necessarily the most handsome guy around – he looks like a dyspeptic Steve McQueen… Craig, speckled with facial cuts, plays Bond with an almost bruised virility."
The massive success of Casino Royale ($594 million in worldwide grosses) quickly led to a less well-received follow-up, 2008's aforementioned Quantum, which despite mixed reviews grossed $591 million worldwide, with a $67 million North American debut that marked the biggest Bond opening at that time. It would be four years until the next installment, Skyfall (which turned 10 years old earlier this year), made it to screens, but when it did Sam Mendes' first film in the venerable series would go on to gross $1.1 billion worldwide, the first and currently only time a Bond film has achieved that box office milestone. Mendes' follow-up, Spectre, would come close, grossing $879 million during its theatrical run. Craig's much-anticipated final outing in No Time to Die, meanwhile, took six additional years to hit theaters after numerous delays, which kept movie theaters shuttered well into 2021.
In honor of Skyfall's 10th anniversary, James Bond's many years of dutiful service to HRM, and to celebrate Daniel Craig returning as Benoit Blanc in his subsequent Knives Out franchise, EW ranks his Bond pictures from worst to best.
5. <i>Quantum of Solace</i> (2008)
The Director: Marc Forster, best known for Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland and the overlooked dramedy Stranger Than Fiction. He also helmed the troubled (though ultimately quite successful) adaptation of World War Z, and is the director of the upcoming Tom Hanks vehicle A Man Called Otto.
The Title Song: "Another Way to Die" – Alicia Keys & Jack White. This is the first musical duet to score a Bond title sequence. It was nominated for Best Song at the 2008 Critics Choice Awards and won a 2008 Satellite Award for Best Original Song.
The Mission: In the wake of his great love Vesper Lynd's (Eva Green) death at the end of Casino Royale, James Bond takes to tracking down the men who blackmailed Vesper into turning on him. The search leads Bond to Dominic Green (Mathieu Amalric), an evil businessman (you can tell by the lack of socks in his loafers) who is attempting to stage a coup in Bolivia in order to harness control of the country's water supply.
Spaghetti Bond, anyone? Forster's notoriously troubled production hovers somewhere between an Italian Bond ripoff (the type of thing Rick Dalton might sign on for were he still alive today) and a Transporter sequel that is conspicuously missing Jason Statham. In either case, what's the point?
Coming after Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace was a stinging disappointment for fans and critics alike. It should be made clear, however, that even at the end of the '80s, or during the Brosnan run, Quantum of Solace would still have been utter pants. Perhaps better-looking pants, but pants it would remain.
It's a film entirely cobbled together (and it is well and truly cobbled together) by the second unit, many of whom worked on The Bourne Ultimatum immediately before doing this film. Whereas the Bourne movies, handheld as they may be, have a grace and physical logic to the mayhem, there is absolutely nothing in Quantum of Solace for the audience to hold on to.
Each of the action sequences are rapidly intercut with other scenes, a tactic that unless it's being utilized by Christopher Nolan usually means that none of the footage was usable on its own. Former 007 Roger Moore himself weighed in, saying that "it was just like a commercial of the action. There didn't seem to be any geography and you were wondering what the hell was going on…There you are, call me old fashioned and an old fuddy duddy." In that case, you can call us a bunch of old fuddy duddy's as well.
4. <i>Spectre</i> (2015)
The Director: Sam Mendes, returning after his work on the critically acclaimed Skyfall and marking the first director since John Glen, shepherd of For Your Eyes Only (1981), Octopussy (1983), A View to a Kill (1985), The Living Daylights (1987) and License to Kill (1989), to helm more than one Bond picture in a row.
The Theme Song: "Writing's On the Wall" – Sam Smith. Radiohead's eponymous theme for Spectre was infamously rejected in favor of Smith's song, which was, surprisingly, the first Bond theme to reach number one on the U.K. Singles Chart. It also won an Academy Award for best song, marking the second consecutive win for a Mendes Bond song after Adele took the honor for "Skyfall."
The Mission: Bond must track down Madeleine Swan (Léa Seydoux, of Crimes of the Future and The French Dispatch), daughter of the venomous Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), who has haunted Bond throughout the series. With Madeleine's help, Bond inches closer to unearthing answers about the Spectre organization, but an unexpected personal connection with the evil mastermind, Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), whom he seeks threatens to upend 007's entire reality.
Spectre feels a bit like Sam Mendes saying, "All right, I've done my classic 007 movie. Now it's time to do my fun 007 movie." In many ways the most quintessentially Bond-ian of the Craig series, Spectre provides loads of spectacle and even a bit of emotional resonance. The fact that it cannot measure up to Skyfall shouldn't be blamed on the film itself. After all, Orson Welles never made another Citizen Kane after the first one. Mendes' follow-up is a lot of fun, but whether it's anything more than that is up for debate.
In his review for EW, Chris Nashawaty said of the end product, "Spectre is a blast of bespoke escapism, full of globetrotting action and thousand-thread-count opulence. But compared with 2012's stellar Skyfall, it feels both overstuffed and undercooked. The stakes are surprisingly low considering how high we're told they are. Bond is given a love interest, and while it's nice to see a female lead who's more than a damsel in distress, she seems like a plot device. It's possible that Skyfall created expectations that were too high for Spectre to match."
3. <i>No Time to Die</i> (2021)
The Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga, the indie auteur behind Sin Nombre, Beasts of No Nation and the first season of True Detective, for which he directed all eight episodes. He's the first American filmmaker to direct a Bond movie for EON, as well as the first Bond director to receive a credit for writing. (John Huston and Robert Parrish worked on the 1967 version of Casino Royale, while Irvin Kirshner directed Never Say Never Again (1983), though neither of these films were produced by EON nor are they considered "official" Bond films.)
The Title Song: "No Time to Die" – Billie Eilish and Finneas. The siblings won an Oscar for their eponymous track, in addition to a Grammy for Best Song Written for Visual Media and a Golden Globe for Best Original Song.
The Mission: After the events of Spectre, Bond has retired to Jamaica and is living an easy life at the resort's bar. His old pal at the CIA, Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), materializes and requests the super agent's help in tracking down a kidnapped scientist (David Dencik), which leads Bond to Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), a madman with a particularly nasty plan who happens to have a personal connection with Bond's estranged lover Madeleine (Seydoux).
No Time to Die is a bit of a mixed bag, though largely an appealing one. It contains some of the finest sequences and boldest ideas in any of Craig's Bond pictures, yet it's not particularly fun, nor is it tremendously re-watchable. The 164-minute running time contributes somewhat to the malaise; the other bit can be attributed to what EW's Leah Greenblatt identified in her review as "a [vague] kind of ennui." Many of the action sequences rely on a particularly wonky and weightless form of CGI, directly oppositional to the practical-is-better ethos that the Craig series began under, and at times this creates the feeling of a generic American action epic rather than a James Bond film.
On the plus side, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's much-hyped contributions to the script lend the proceedings vim and vigor unrivaled elsewhere in the canon. While a great deal of discourse was devoted to Waller-Bridge's assumed additions to the female characters, her influence on the script was much wider than many initially allowed. As Malek told EW for its cover story on No Time to Die, Waller-Bridge "had quite an impact on what I was doing. I'd have long phone conversations with her, giving her context as to what we were essentially looking for in the scenes, and she would turn things over incredibly quickly. We know her as a very witty and funny writer, but she's got a knack for drama and tension as well."
Lashana Lynch (an Oscar-hopeful for her affecting turn in The Woman King) hits an absolute grace note as 007's replacement within MI6. If the producers are smart, Lynch should have her own Jinx-style spinoff post haste. Ana de Armas, Craig's Knives Out co-star, turns up and has a ball during the film's liveliest sequence, set in Cuba, which pays electrifying homage to both Hong Kong actioners and Nicholas Roeg's The Witches.
2. <i>Casino Royale</i> (2006)
The Director: Martin Campbell, who previously directed Pierce Brosnan in his first Bond outing, Goldeneye (1995). Campbell is an experienced director of better-than-average action pictures and thrillers (The Mask of Zorro, Edge of Darkness), though he has a few bombs (2003's Beyond Borders and the Ryan Reynolds-led Green Lantern) under his belt as well. In 2022, Campbell directed Guy Pearce and Liam Neeson in Memory, a nifty, old-fashioned exploitation movie that's well worth catching up with.
The Title Song: "You Know My Name" – Chris Cornell & David Arnold. Grunge icon Cornell collaborated on this catchy, moody rocker with Arnold, a veteran Bond composer who also worked on Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World Is Not Enough (1999), and Die Another Day (2002).
The Mission: Fresh off earning that coveted License to Kill, Bond is tasked by MI6 with beating terrorist financier Le Chifre (Mads Mikkelsen) at a game of high-stakes poker, the winnings from which Le Chifre's mysterious organization will use to bankroll their deadliest attack yet.
Casino Royale is top-tier Bond, and a perfect action movie unto itself. The first hour, before the plot properly kicks into gear, is largely devoted to increasingly intricate sequences of action without much dialogue, as if Brian De Palma had been given the reins to one of the biggest franchises of all time. Campbell does a tremendous job behind the camera, working with a taut script by longtime series scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. (Paul Haggis is also credited, though his contributions largely focused on shaping the final action sequence and fine-tuning Vesper's betrayal of Bond.) It's easily Martin Campbell's best film, indicative of what the director is capable of turning in with a strong script and an adequate budget on his side.
EW's Owen Gleiberman raved that Casino Royale was "the most exciting Bond film since On Her Majesty's Secret Service [and] has everything you want in a pop entertainment: physical audacity, intrigue, romance, but also a charge of personality that stayed with me for days." At the end of 2006, Gleiberman named Casino Royale the best film of that year, and in 2009 would christen it the 10th best film of the decade.
1. <i>Skyfall</i> (2012)
The Director: Sam Mendes, in his first entry with the franchise, who was one of youngest people to win an Academy Award for Best Director for his first feature, American Beauty He's also the director of the harrowing marital drama Revolutionary Road in addition to the painterly gangster drama Road to Perdition, which featured Daniel Craig in a villainous supporting role.
The Title Song: "Skyfall" – Adele, Paul Epworth, and J.A.C. Redford. An instant classic in the pantheon of Bond themes, Adele's track went on to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song. It was the first Bond theme to win the award, and only the second to be nominated after the title track from For Your Eyes Only. EW heralded the arrival of Adele's single with the proclamation, "Finally! A great James Bond theme."
The Mission: After MI6 is bombed and the identities of undercover agents begin to leak around the world, M (Judi Dench) has only Bond to turn towards. Their search, aided by fresh-faced recruits Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Whishaw), leads them to Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a cyberterrorist who has a decades-old grudge to settle with M.
Skyfall is an astounding achievement. Certainly one of the absolute best additions to the Bond canon, it's also a spectacular film without any qualifiers. One of Skyfall's great treats is that it stands alone as a rousing action movie (and a surprisingly nuanced character drama) while also paying off stories from both Craig's tenure and the greater series.
Bardem makes for one of the most formidable Bond villains of all time, a madman who feels entirely Bond's equal. Mendes' choice to center Dench in the plot, and to make her the film's primary Bond girl, is utterly genius and subversive in all the right ways without announcing itself as an innovative move. Even if Skyfall wasn't one of the greatest movies of its kind, it would be worth a watch simply for the Straw Dogs-riffing sequence in which a gun-toting Judi Dench dispatches a room full of henchmen using only light bulbs and nails.
Skyfall inevitably would go on to gross over $1 billion — the first and last time a Bond film has achieved that box office milestone. Regarding arguably the most emotionally fulfilling and viscerally thrilling Bond chapter out of the 25 official entries, EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum found that "of all the marvelous feats that make Skyfall such a thrilling addition to the James Bond movie canon, the greatest may be that the 23rd entry conveys the melancholy of loss, mortality, and future-shock anxiety, while at the same time leaving us plenty of space to enjoy one of the most complexly unhinged villains in Bond history… The most elegant feat in Skyfall, though, may be the way director Sam Mendes and screenwriters Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan bestow goodbyes and hellos."
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