Ever since Sean Connery donned a tuxedo and ordered a martini shaken, not stirred, James Bond has been one of the most beloved and recognizable icons on the big screen. For more than 50 years, Eon has been churning out crowd-pleasing adventures revolving around everyone’s favorite gentleman spy and despite seemingly endless COVID-related delays, the Bond franchise is currently bigger than ever.
In many ways, the Bond movies (or most of them, anyway) are classics of action cinema, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have plenty of problems. From oversexualized female characters to repetitive storytelling, the 007 franchise has a handful of flaws.
Great: Spectacular Action Sequences
Ultimately, the greatest asset of the James Bond franchise is its action. The reason audiences keep turning out to see these movies is for the escapist joys of watching an MI6 agent getting himself into fistfights, explosions, and vehicular pursuits all over the world.
From the opening cliff jump in The Spy Who Loved Me to the tank chase in GoldenEye, the Bond movies are rife with spectacular action sequences.
Problem: Repetitive Storytelling
The Bond movies tend to follow a pretty rigid formula. The best ones take this formula loosely, including an opening action sequence, a one-off love interest, and a megalomaniacal villain, and use the rest of the movie to do their own thing.
Unfortunately, on the flip side of that, the worst ones follow that formula to a T, to the point that they end up repeating plot points from earlier entries in the franchise and becoming painfully predictable.
Great: Memorable Villains
There aren’t many franchises with their own kind of villain. Star Wars villains are unique to that universe, for example. Bond villains are another example of unmistakable franchise-specific antagonists.
A Bond villain is usually a megalomaniac with an insane, far-fetched plan to get rich quick or take over the world. Where they differ from one another — and the greats stand out from the duds — is in their characterization. Bond villains each have their own dress sense, distinguishing physical features, and quirky manner of speaking. The archetype is ripe for parody, the best example of which is Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers franchise.
Problem: Oversexualized Female Characters
Every Bond movie has a leading role for a female actor, termed a “Bond girl,” but more often than not, these are one-dimensional characters who are ridiculously sexualized. They have names like Pussy Galore and Plenty O’Toole and their entire function in the plot is usually to sleep with 007.
It looks as though No Time to Die is set to fix this, as the great Lashana Lynch has been cast to play a new 00 agent, but the franchise is about half a century too late to the strong female character game.
Great: Bond’s Coolness
There’s one thing that ties all the Bonds together. Whether he’s played by Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, or Daniel Craig, 007 is a really cool guy.
He’s suave, he’s hypercompetent, and he always has the perfect one-liner. It’s a joy to watch Bond’s coolness in the same way it’s a joy to watch a Jedi using the Force or Iron Man throwing money at his problems.
Problem: Bond’s Everything Else
James Bond is a cool guy who kills bad guys and undertakes daring feats to save the day. On face value alone, it’s easy to root for him as the hero of a mindless pulpy spy story. But everything outside his suave persona is problematic.
For starters, he’s a sociopath. He has no emotions. He has no emotional attachment to the women he sleeps with, he feels no remorse when he takes a life, and he doesn’t need a second to mentally recuperate between killing a bunch of sex slavers and inviting himself into a shower with one of their victims and silently having sex with her (as seen in Skyfall).
Great: Catchy Music
From the iconic theme tune composed by John Barry to the theme songs by contemporary pop artists (the quality of these theme songs is pretty up and down, but mostly up), the Bond franchise is filled with catchy music.
Identifiable music is a sign of a franchise’s success — Star Wars, Harry Potter, Mission: Impossible, etc. — and the Bond franchise has identifiable music in spades.
Problem: Some Really Terrible Movies
For every bona fide classic in the Bond franchise (Goldfinger, The Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, etc.), there are some really dreadful ones (A View to a Kill, Quantum of Solace, The Man with the Golden Gun, Octopussy, Moonraker, Spectre, etc.).
Pierce Brosnan was a great choice to play 007, but most of his Bond movies — pretty much all of them except for GoldenEye, actually — are just generic action blockbusters filled with primitive CGI effects.
Great: Pure Escapism
With their globetrotting adventures, far-fetched narratives, and heightened depiction of reality, the Bond movies are pure escapism at its finest.
For a couple of hours, moviegoers can escape the mundanity of their lives by watching a semi-mythical figure shoot his way through leagues of henchmen in various exotic countries on the way to a spectacular climactic showdown.
Problem: Trying To Be An Interconnected Series
Until the Daniel Craig era, the Bond movies were all unrelated to one another. Aside from recurring characters like M, Q, and of course Bond himself, the movies were all standalone adventures with no indication of an ongoing continuity. Each movie is a new mission and no one has questioned the fact that Bond keeps changing who he is every few years.
However, in response to Marvel’s takeover of Hollywood, in Spectre, the 007 producers retconned all the Craig movies to be part of the same continuity. It just doesn’t work. Hopefully, that'll be backtracked in No Time to Die.
