Ranking Every Finale From Pierce Brosnan's James Bond Movies
While George Lazenby was a mediocre James Bond actor elevated by sharp storytelling and masterful filmmaking in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Pierce Brosnan was a great Bond actor dragged down by derivative plotting and bad CG effects in movies like Tomorrow Never Dies and The World is Not Enough. Brosnan’s stint as 007 got off to a fantastic start with GoldenEye, but in the three critically panned movies that followed, the producers never came close to recapturing that greatness.
In keeping with the franchise’s well-worn traditions, Brosnan’s Bond films all ended with a large-scale climactic action sequence. These finales can be a showdown at the villain’s lair, the last stages of a diabolical scheme that Bond must bring to a halt, or something else entirely. In the Brosnan era, these final set-pieces ranged from the intense satellite dish showdown in GoldenEye to the mind-numbing tidal wave surfing sequence in Die Another Day.
4 Die Another Day
Unlike Daniel Craig’s bittersweet send-off in No Time to Die, Brosnan’s tenure as Bond came to a more anticlimactic end. Much like Sean Connery’s Diamonds Are Forever and Roger Moore’s A View to a Kill, Brosnan’s final Bond movie ended his stint in the role, not with a bang, but a whimper. Die Another Day has a plot cobbled together from the existing clichés of the spy genre, it’s filled with blatant product placement, and its action scenes rely on bland, weightless CG effects. And, to top it all off, the final set-piece sees Bond surfing on a computer-generated tidal wave created by the MacGuffin.
It ranks among the most ludicrous action sequences in the franchise – along with Moonraker’s space battle and A View to a Kill’s Beach Boys-scored snowboarding scene – and asks the audience to suspend their disbelief a little too much. The movie had gone off the rails long before then, with a villain who changed his DNA to become North Korean, but the tidal wave surfing scene is unforgivably silly. Even the Moore movies never got that goofy (although, if they had CGI back then, they might have).
3 Tomorrow Never Dies
When it first hit theaters, Tomorrow Never Dies was panned by critics. Its ludicrous storyline of a Rupert Murdoch-esque media mogul trying to start World War III so he can have exclusive news coverage of the conflict was dismissed as being too far-fetched. But in the years since, it’s been reappraised as a cult classic whose satire of mass media – the dangers of the 24-hour news cycle, journalists fabricating headlines to get ratings, etc. – has been retroactively recognized as a prescient take on the current media landscape.
Unfortunately, the big finale of Tomorrow Never Dies isn’t a satirical gem like the rest of the movie. When Bond and Wai Lin track down and infiltrate Elliot Carver’s stealth ship, it settles into the familiar tropes of the franchise. Tomorrow Never Dies has all the hallmarks of a Bond finale – a diabolical lair, a damsel in distress, and a ticking clock (Carver is about to launch a missile at Beijing) – but it lacks the quirky, tongue-in-cheek humor that made the rest of the film stand out.
2 The World Is Not Enough
At the beginning of The World is Not Enough, Bond is tasked with protecting oil heiress Elektra King when she’s targeted by notorious terrorist Renard. Initially, this seems like a 007 version of The Bodyguard, but the midpoint stinger raises the stakes ahead of the finale. The twist that Elektra is actually a villain working with Renard turns her from a one-note love interest into a quintessential femme fatale. She wants to drive up the price of her oil by destroying Istanbul with a nuclear meltdown.
The final action sequence isn’t a mindless battle sequence; it’s an intimate showdown between a small handful of well-rounded characters. There’s an unnerving edge to Bond’s climactic fight with Renard, because his unique quirk is his inability to feel pain. Elektra’s betrayal of 007 creates an internal conflict between them as well as the external conflict of Istanbul’s impending doom.
1 GoldenEye
Brosnan’s first Bond movie, GoldenEye, got his stint in the role off to such a great start that he was never able to top it. Not only is it a crowd-pleasing action-packed blockbuster; there’s a tangible emotional arc for Bond. In the opening scene, fellow 00 agent Alec Trevelyan is seemingly killed in action and 007 spends the second act blaming himself for it. Then, the midpoint twist reveals that Trevelyan is alive and well – and he’s the villainous “Janus” that Bond is chasing. In the grand finale, Bond foils Trevelyan’s plan atop his big, extravagant satellite dish.
Brosnan fires off one of Bond’s coldest kill quips when Trevelyan asks, “For England, James?” and Bond replies, “No, for me,” before dropping him to his death. As with all the best Bond villain deaths, Trevelyan’s grim fate is tied to the grandiosity of his diabolical scheme. The opening Contra Dam bungee jump and the St. Petersburg tank chase set a high bar for GoldenEye’s action, but this brutal, emotionally charged, high-altitude dust-up managed to live up to all the thrilling set-pieces that preceded it.