Over the years, Eon has defined a pretty rigid episodic structure for the James Bond movies to follow. They all have a megalomaniacal villain, a mission briefing from M, and a one-off love interest. They open with a pre-title action sequence to re-immerse audiences in the high-octane world of 007 and they culminate in a large-scale climax in which Bond brings the villain to justice.
From No Time to Die’s unprecedented death-by-nukes, Daniel Craig’s recent five-film stint in the role of Bond bolstered the franchise’s legacy with some spectacular finales.
Spectre
Sam Mendes was the only filmmaker to direct Craig as Bond in more than one movie. After taking the franchise to new heights of critical acclaim and box office success with Skyfall, Mendes returned for the much less celebrated Spectre is considered to be a low point in the Craig era – and that extends to its finale.
The narrative runs out of steam by then. The third act picks up when Bond and Madeleine are captured at Blofeld’s compound and break out while pursued by gun-toting guards. This escape sequence ends with one of the biggest explosions in movie history. After that, an anticlimactic confrontation on Westminster Bridge can’t compare.
Quantum Of Solace
One of the biggest problems with Craig’s second Bond film, Marc Forster’s Quantum of Solace, is that it doesn’t really feel like a Bond film. It plays more like a standard action thriller. Like most Bond movies, Quantum of Solace culminates in a final showdown at the villain’s lair. But that lair isn’t an inventive set like a space station or a secret base inside a volcano; it’s just a rich guy’s compound in the desert.
This set-piece does end with a beautifully bleak death blow as Bond leaves the heartless oil magnate that’s been terrorizing him alone in the desert with nothing to drink but a can of motor oil.
Skyfall
Mendes’ first Bond movie, Bourne-style realism of Casino Royale and the goofier, more traditional elements that fans missed from previous incarnations of the character. Instead of rejecting the old tropes, Mendes embraced them: Q gives Bond a gun matched to his fingerprints; Naomie Harris is introduced as a field agent version of Moneypenny; 007 drives an Aston Martin DB5 in the third act.
There are some huge action sequences in Skyfall – from a rooftop motorcycle chase in Istanbul to an exploding train in London – but its climax is surprisingly small-scale. Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva, one of the most acclaimed Bond villain performances of all time, has a subversively personal motivation. He doesn’t want to monopolize an industry or kickstart World War III; he’s a former operative who wants revenge against M for ignoring his plight when he was captured behind enemy lines. In the finale, he tracks down Bond and M to Bond’s childhood home in Scotland. At this point, the movie ceases to be a Bond film and becomes a Straw Dogs-esque home invasion thriller (if the bad guys had a helicopter and Dustin Hoffman was a trained killer).
It might not be the kind of large-scale battle sequence that fans are used to – and it reveals far too much about Bond’s backstory – but Skyfall’s finale has an emotional resonance that’s rarely found in 007’s action-packed spy adventures. Audiences didn’t need to know where Bond was raised, but they were heartbroken by the death of Judi Dench’s M.
Casino Royale
For the most part, Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale is a gritty deconstruction of the Bond mythos. Still, the final set-piece is as delightfully over-the-top and far-fetched as anything from the series’ more traditional fare – 007 is trapped in a building that’s sinking into a Venice canal – but there’s a suitably tragic bent. Usually, Bond saves his love interest and the movie ends on a sex scene with a crude double entendre. In Casino Royale, Bond fails to save Vesper and she drowns in the sinking building.
007 was so enamored with Vesper that he retired from MI6 just to spend more time with her, then he’s dealt with the double whammy of learning that she betrayed him (but only to save his life) followed by her untimely death. This sequence provides the final stepping stone in Bond’s origin story, explaining how he became a cold-hearted killer.
No Time To Die
Although it does many things that no other Bond movie had ever done before, like holding off the opening titles for 20 minutes and making 007 a father, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s No Time to Die marked a welcome return to the familiar formula. There’s a megalomaniacal villain with a diabolical plan to end the world and Bond infiltrates his secret lair to bring down his operation in the nick of time. Bond and Lashana Lynch’s Nomi, the MI6 agent who took up his 007 codename after he retired, share a great “buddy cop” dynamic in these scenes.
This sequence culminates in No Time to Die’s most radical departure from the Bond formula: the death of James Bond. On rewatches, it’s clear that the most heartbreaking part of this development is how early Bond realizes he won’t make it off the island and makes peace with his grim fate. After decades of escaping certain death time and time again, Bond was finally taken out with an onslaught of nuclear weapons.
