By I love Pierce Brosnan. You love Pierce Brosnan. The world loves Pierce Brosnan. We're living through the Brosnaissance. Don't try to fight it. It's happening. Wherever you look, he's there, somehow smouldering and twinkling at the same time – or else his handsome large adult sons are, ready to carry on the noble family tradition of spreading easy charm around at entertainment industry events.
But why? Why Brosnan and not one of his mid-Nineties contemporaries? Where's Ioan Gruffudd's Indian summer? Before we ask 'why is Brosnan?', though, we need to ask 'what is Brosnan?'
There's the James Bond factor, obviously. He's the Bond a lot of people grew up with. Like Corinthian Pro-Stars and rumours about the death of children's TV presenter Neil Buchanan from 'a big 'art attack', he's an anchor of millennial childhoods, but one who's blithely carried on in the same way he always did. He never seems angsty about having been Bond, hasn't attempted a laboured reinvention in the last 15 years, and he's aged with extraordinary panache. He was a great Bond too, a seamless blend of the best bits of previous incarnations but with an undercurrent of extremely Nineties irony. He did the quips, but added air quotes.
But there's something beyond that too. At his best – at Peak Brosnan – his leading man vibe was somewhere between Robert Redford's easygoing playfulness and Brad Pitt's coolest-guy-in-the-room confidence, but with a righteous hardness beneath it. His Irishness, and particularly the way his English schoolmates took the piss out of it, might be the source of that.
"They make you feel it," he said in 1997. "The British have a wonderful way of doing that, and I had a certain deep sense of being an outsider."
Then there's the fact that he's had an absolutely bizarre, handbrake-turning career. He's made absolutely loads of films, and a great number of them have been utterly ludicrous. Many more are absolutely wonderful. There's some in the middle, too. We're going to put them all in order, from unwatchable to go and watch it right now.
55. Some Kind of Beautiful (2014)
Professor Brosnan's favourite kind of beautiful is the kind who's under 20 and over whom he has the power to make or break an academic career. He passes his time between English lectures by ogling his undergraduates, until his comparatively desiccated 25-year-old girlfriend announces she's pregnant and they marry. It's as deeply awful as it sounds.
54. Urge (2016)
The only thing worth seeing in this hollow film is Brosnan going full ham as a creepy nightclub owner peddling designer drugs.
53. Live Wire (1992)
It's hard not to want to see a film in which Brosnan is a bomb expert who investigates a spate of cases of unexplained spontaneous human combustion, but please control yourself. Given the quality of Live Wire, he might might have been better advised by Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnell, who said of their spontaneously exploding drummers: "The authorities said, best leave it... unsolved."
52. I Don't Know How She Does It (2011)
I don't know why he did it.
51. A Long Way Down (2015)
So far down, in fact, you can just make out the bottom of the barrel. Unnoticed Nick Hornby adaptation.
50. Remember Me (2010)
Robert Pattinson leads this maudlin romance as it trudges toward one of the most staggering twist endings of all time. Honestly, it completely overrides everything that happens before it (normally we'd say spoiler alert here, but this film spoiled itself as soon as it was released).
Everything feels like it's wrapping up as Pattinson's character heads into the office and mopes about a bit. But then, in a school, a teacher writes a date on the board: "Tuesday, September 11th 2001". The camera lingers for ages on it too. "Do you see?" the film says, jabbing you in the ribs. "Do you get it? Veeeeeery clever." Oh, and Patto's office? You'll never bloody guess where that is. Overwritten, under-thought, far too pleased with itself.
49. The Deceivers (1988)
An underwhelming and messy period drama about an English officer who goes undercover as a member of the murderous cult in 1820s India. If you've just involuntarily said, "Erm?" then you'd be correct. Brosnan spends quite a lot of the film in brownface.
48. Grey Owl (1999)
"At last," Brosnan must have thought when he got on board this Richard Attenborough film. "At last, my break with the consummate actor's director. He'll bring the best out of me." Sadly, Dickie made this environmentally minded tale of a white man who pretends to be a Native American trapper, which after costing $30 million it took just $632,000 at the box office. The RSPB would have had it put down.
47. No Escape (2015)
Brosnan is back on Her Majesty's Secret Service, this time busting some American family headed by Owen Wilson out of a violent uprising somewhere in south-east Asia. Brosnan's fine in it, but its attitude towards south-east Asia is pretty bluntly xenophobic.
46. IT (2015)
Do not confuse this with the superior killer clown horror It. IT is not It.
45. After the Sunset (2004)
Brosnan can do comedy and action, but this action-comedy didn't have anywhere enough of either. Still, it's basically harmless and everyone got to go to Nassau for a few months to shoot it.
44. Taffin (1988)
Mark Taffin is perhaps the biggest bastard in the Brosnan filmography, and only partly because he looks like Bono. This uncompromising debt collector and lothario is the tiny Irish town of Ballymoran's foremost martial arts expert, and he spends his days doling out vigilante justice at extreme volume.
When a syndicate threatens to buy a sports field and turn it into a chemical plant, he uses his fists of fury to sort out the planning application dispute.
An outhouse is blown up to frighten someone.
Unaccountably, this film is scored by Hans Zimmer.
43. Laws of Attraction
42. Nomads (1986)
In this supernatural horror Brosnan plays an anthropologist who dies on the operating table, but whose memories suddenly jump into the head of the doctor treating him at the moment of death. She sees the last week of his life play out, in which he discovered that much of LA's antisocial behaviour was being committed by trickster spirits including Adam Ant.
In many ways, Brosnan's first lead role set the template for the sideline that would run throughout his later career, as a source of suave gravitas in slightly daft thrillers. But zis time, 'e is Fraaaarrrrnchhhhh. Well, avec un peu de Austrian et South African. Le Nomads, eet eez, 'ow you say? Une grande catastrophe.
41. The Only Living Boy In New York (2017)
Nowhere near as good as the song.
40. A Christmas Star (2017)
More enjoyable if you think of it as a heist film, in which Liam Neeson and Brosnan try to get away with stealing as many bits of other Christmas films as they can. Blah.
39. The Match (1999)
A plodding British comedy in which two pubs play a football match to decide who has to forfeit their bar to the other. You need to know a few things about the plot. One character, Wullie, has a special brain power called Total Football Recall, meaning he can remember everything about football ever, but refuses to manage one of the teams because his brother died when they were kids. Neil Morrissey plays a character called 'Piss Off'. Richard E Grant is the bilious owner of a fancy-schmancy new French restaurant. Alan Shearer has a cameo. Do what you want with that.
38. Salvation Boulevard (2011)
37. Quest For Camelot (1998)
Squeezed in between the vastly superior animations Space Jam and The Iron Giant, Warner Bros farted out this nonsense. Brosnan is the voice of King Arthur, and somehow the cast includes Eric Idle, Gary Oldman and Sir John Gielgud.
36. Die Another Day (2002)
Slightly unfairly, memories of this film focus on the space laser, the invisible car, Madonna turning up as a fencing instructor, and Miss Moneypenny's descent into a tragic spinster who uses MI6's virtual reality simulator to have a wank on a disused Tube platform. Most of all, they tend to remember the bit where Bond uses the body of a rocket car to kitesurf along the wave of a tsunami, an extraordinary sequence realised using leftover sets from Steps' 'Heartbeat' video and CGI from SSX Tricky. Gustav Graves, the bad guy played by Toby Stephens, is revealed to be the North Korean Colonel Moon after extensive 'gene therapy'.
TOBY [CLAP EMOJI] STEPHENS [CLAP EMOJI] IS [CLAP EMOJI] MEANT [CLAP EMOJI] TO [CLAP EMOJI] BE [CLAP EMOJI] A [CLAP EMOJI] NORTH [CLAP EMOJI] KOREAN [CLAP EMOJI] COLONEL.
It is not a great film. The 20th official Bond film dials up the silliness and the self-referential smugness, and though the car chases are great it feels more like a Bond parody than an actual Bond film. It's not the final film Brosnan's Bond deserved. All that said, the beard Bond sports when he's released from North Korean captivity is a tantalising pointer toward how much better Cast Away could have been if Brosnan had got to hang out with Wilson instead of Tom Hanks.
35. Robinson Crusoe (1997)
Scrap that – he already did Cast Away, and it was underwhelming. Don't get excited about it being directed by George Miller of Mad Max fame. It's directed by George T Miller, of The NeverEnding Story 2 fame.
34. Mister Johnson (1990)
This one, about a Nigerian man who affects the style and manner of an English gent to get on in society, tends to sharply divide viewers. Some say it's a subtle critique of the British Empire's condescension toward its subjects. Others say it handles racial politics with all the tact you'd expect of the man who directed Driving Miss Daisy, while Empire compared it to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Didn't make the poster, that one.
33. Entangled (1993)
32. Love Affair (1994)
Despite a high-class cast (Warren Beatty, Annette Bening and Katherine Hepburn in her final screen role) and Ennio Morricone on the ones and twos, this third-hand remake is a dud.
31. The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996)
Brosnan doesn't do much in this rom-com beyond waft around being dishy, but Barbra Streisand gets her big diva thing on as a romantically frustrated English professor, and Lauren Bacall is appealingly acidic as her mum.
30. The Nephew (1998)
A thoughtful Irish-set family drama about a complex knot of jilted lovers and racial tensions on a small island. Quite good.
29. Seraphim Falls (2006)
A Western in the mould of Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales, but with Brosnan as the outlaw and old pal Liam Neeson as the growling actual law. Beautifully shot, if a bit dry. It's fine!
28. The Greatest (2009)
An easily digestible drama in which Rose (Carey Mulligan) finds she's pregnant after her boyfriend is killed in a car crash, and goes to his parents (Brosnan and Susan Sarandon) for help.
27. The Love Punch (2014)
Daffy midlife rom-com with Emma Thompson. It's very hard to dislike, just as it's hard to actually really like.
26. The November Man (2014)
He's a spy again. The enemy this time: generic cliché. Sadly, it's a losing battle. Still, he's a spy again.
25. The Spinning Man (2018)
Sadly, not a sequel to Running Man in which Brosnan joins a stationary cycling class.
24. Survivor (2015)
Another one in Brosnan's catalogue of rote post-Bond action thrillers, this time playing an internationally feared assassin who likes to explode stuff too. It's directed by V For Vendetta's James McTeigue, but sadly lacking much of that film's zip.
23. Butterfly on a Wheel (2007)
A change of pace here: Brosnan is a sociopathic kidnapper preying on Gerard Butler's family. Impressively unnerving.
22. Married Life (2007)
Based on an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, this mixture of a comedy of manners and a murder plot is buoyed up by good performances but drags when it needs to go in for the kill.
21. The Foreigner (2017)
This Netflix action flick is a lot better than it has any right to be, thanks to GoldenEye director Martin Campbell being the camera and both Brosnan and his co-star Jackie Chan going for it in fresh-feeling roles. Brosnan is Liam Hennessy, Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and one-time IRA member, who Chan's Ngoc Minh Quan wants revenge on after his daughter is killed in a blast engineered by Hennessy.
20. Love Is All You Need (2013)
The best of Brosnan's rom-coms, in which he plays a widower who's brought out of his moping by the love of a good woman and etc etc. It looks a lot like Mamma Mia!, but nobody sings and everyone's Danish.
19. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)
The post-Harry Potter boom in coming-of-age fantasy threw up the Percy Jackson series, about a kid who's the son of Poseidon. Here, Brosnan is a wise and wheezy professor who uses a wheelchair, but who's secretly an incredibly ripped centaur. It's pretty fun, if you're in the mood. While we're on the topic, Brosnan should have played Sirius Black in the Potter films. Absolutely robbed.
18. The Long Good Friday (1980)
A great film, but going by the established Brosnan Assessment Matrix its ranking is limited by the fact that Brosnan's character is named 'First Irishman'.
17. Evelyn (2002)
Left to his own devices, Brosnan can tend toward the sentimental. There's a pretty large blob of saccharine in the mix here, as Brosnan plays an alcoholic dad fighting through the courts to get his kids out of an orphanage, but do you know what? It works.
16. Mars Attacks! (1996)
Very, very good, but again it drops a few places for not having quite enough Brosnan in it.
15. The World Is Not Enough (1999)
The signs that Brosnan's Bond was gradually becoming untethered from reality were all there by the time of his third film. Think of that moment where he straightens his tie underwater during the opening boat chase up the Thames, of the introduction of John Cleese's bungling R, and of Renard, the villain who can't feel pain (exciting!) because there's a bullet slowly worming through his brain (erm) which will make him die when it hits the centre of his brain (right hang on) and wants to nuke Istanbul so that his girlfriend's oil pipeline is more valuable (????).
That’s not to say that The World Is Not Enough isn't often a lot of fun, especially when the circular saw-wielding helicopters turn up, and Brosnan is his customarily twinkling self. He’s rarely much more, though. There is a tantalising glimpse at what Brosnan could have done with the part in the sequence where Bond kills duplicitous oil heiress Elektra King. The film doesn’t dwell on it, and it goes to extreme lengths to tell you Bond was right to shoot her in the face, but there’s a real coldness to Brosnan’s performance that prefigures where Daniel Craig’s Bond would go.
Finally, would you please be upstanding for the single worst line in the Bond canon: "I thought Christmas only came once a year." If anyone – anyone – other than Brosnan had had to grapple with that, someone would have had to go in front of a parliamentary select committee. He takes that absolute hospital pass and just about gets away with it.
14. Final Score (2018)
The lesser-spotted Evil Brosnan gets a start here. He's Dimitri Belav, a revolutionary leader in a Russian province, who's set bomb to go off at West Ham United's old ground Upton Park. The only man who can stop thousands of deaths and many tens of pounds' worth of damage is Dave Bautista. Unexpectedly, it's extremely decent, though when you're ripping off Die Hard, there's only so far you can go wrong. The hostages all support West Ham in this instance though, which might limit your sympathy.
13. The Lawnmower Man (1993)
This special effects-driven techno-thriller asks some big questions. Would the nascent internet be a force for good? Could humanity lose its sense of reality? What would happen if a gardener with a non-specific learning disability offered himself to scientists as a guinea pig and managed to escape his human body to live inside the internet?
However pressing it was in 1993, this last question has not been shown by posterity to be among the more important worries that the internet's arrival should have excited. Nonetheless, that's what The Lawnmower Man is about, with Brosnan playing the principled scientist whose research is being taken in terrifying new directions by big business interests.
It's got all the ingredients of a great B-movie: soapy, bombastic script, over-explained Frankenstein moralising and sets from the Industrial Zone of The Crystal Maze. In fact, it's a cult classic in more ways than one – FBI tapes showed that The Lawnmower Man was Waco leader David Koresh's favourite film. The effects haven't aged magnificently either. Have a look at the big CG climax, when the gardener's launched himself into the mainframe.
Seven people worked for eight months to make that. It cost $500,000.
12. The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)
This remake of the 1968 Steve McQueen heist thriller doesn't have the light-fingered touch of the original, but it's still Brosnan's standout mainstream Hollywood film away from Bond. He's the bored, charming billionaire of the title who organises art thefts for a laugh, and draws the investigator tasked with bringing him down into an extremely vigorous courtship. There's not much grit to it, but it's tidily done.
11. Dante's Peak (1997)
During the height of the disaster movie revival, Brosnan played Harry Dalton, volcano scientist. After Dalton's wife, a fellow vulcanologist, is sadly bonked on the head by a bit of volcano and dies, he becomes deeply suspicious of all volcanoes – especially Dante’s Peak, which he reckons is about to blow. But will anyone listen? Will they heck. Utterly daft fluff, but now a cult classic for a chewy script, actually fairly decent practical exploding volcano effects, and for the audacity of featuring a young character named Graham.
10. The Fourth Protocol (1987)
Right in the absolute depths of Michael Caine's Eighties slough of despond, he managed to shake himself awake with this underrated British spy film. Caine is MI5 officer John Preston, a renegade descendent of his Harry Palmer who isn't afraid to break rules to get things done. He's on the tail of KGB officer Major Valeri Petrofsky (Brosnan) who's tasked with nuking an American military base on British soil and making it look like it was the Americans' fault. It's got the world-weariness of a Le Carré story even if it doesn't quite have the depth of the characters, but the cast is full of grand old men of British acting – Ian Richardson, Julian Glover and Michael Gough all feature – and Brosnan is icily effective.
9. The Tailor of Panama (2001)
This was the smart, all-star Le Carré thriller Brosnan had been searching for. He's another MI6 spy, but his Andy Osnard is a manipulative hack. He works over Geoffrey Rush's debt-ridden wideboy tailor Harold Pendel for contacts and information, and when Osnard starts pressing for better tips for the money he's paying, Pendel starts to embroider his stories. Everything starts to spiral out of control in a more darkly farcical way than Le Carré's most typical stories, but it's just as tightly plotted as you'd expect. Jamie Lee Curtis, Brendan Gleeson and Harold Pinter pop up too. Plus! Daniel Radcliffe makes his big-screen debut.
8. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)
This sequel doesn’t quite spark into life as vibrantly or thoroughly as Mamma Mia!, but it feels most Mamma Mia!-ish when it pushes Brosnan, who returns as dad and recent widower Sam Carmichael, to the fore. In fact, he gets the film’s most Mamma Mia! scene: staring lovingly at a picture of his dead wife Meryl Streep, he croaks out a mournful version of ‘SOS’. There should be a word for knowing that something’s hilarious, but feeling moved by it anyway.
7. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
The idea that one megalomaniac with a stealth boat and a newspaper empire could start World War Three on his own doesn’t quite have the sting it once did now that the only people who buy actual newspapers are café owners and retired colonels. However, there’s a lot to like about Brosnan’s second Bond film, which pitted him against Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce), a mix of Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch.
Having sorted out Bond’s place in the post-communist world order in GoldenEye and decided that, actually, he was right all along, there’s a lot less self-examination here. There’s a sense that it’s back to business as usual here, and not just for Bond films. Tomorrow Never Dies is the glossy techno-thriller Brosnan had been trying to make for years, and despite clonking along a bit in places (and, in Teri Hatcher’s Paris Carver, one of the most perfunctory roles written for a woman in Bond) the set pieces match anything Brosnan’s Bond ever did. Driving a car with your phone? God-tier Bond sequence.
6. The Matador (2005)
Flamboyant and disillusioned contract killer Julian Noble (Brosnan) stumbles into a bristly not-quite-friendship with a businessman in Mexico City, giving Brosnan the chance to dig into the darkness inherent in the life of someone who kills people for a living away from Bond. Genuinely very good, even if In Bruges probably did it better.
5. The Ghost Writer (2010)
Based on Robert Harris's novel The Ghost, this skilful political thriller is relentlessly gripping. This doesn't change the fact that director Roman Polanski is an awful, awful man, obviously. British PM Adam Lang (Brosnan, as a fairly obvious Tony Blair stand-in) is putting together his memoirs with a ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) but accusations of war crimes during a war in the Middle East (you don't say!) and suspicious deaths of his aides and acquaintances start to rouse suspicions. The race is on to expose the truth.
4. Mrs Doubtfire (1995)
Yes, this is a Robin Williams film first and a Pierce Brosnan film a very, very distant second. But as Stu, Brosnan is the handsome and urbane flash bastard who somehow embodies everything hateful despite having only had the temerity to give a divorcée and her children the steady love and affection that they crave. In another universe this is a Brosnan-led techno-thriller, in which he heroically and sexily thwarts an obsessive ex-husband who can't accept that his kids need some stability at home.
3. The World's End (2013)
Edgar Wright's concluding chapter to the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy is the most emotionally complex of the three, digging into alcoholism, nostalgia, midlife ennui and the complicated dynamics of childhood friendships once they mature. Brosnan is the suspiciously youthful Guy Shepherd, an old English teacher of theirs who turns out to be a salesman for the alien invasion that Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and pals stumble upon during a pub crawl. Brosnan whacks the charm up to 11 and gets stuck into the best script he’d yet had to work with, turning his easy slickness into something genuinely malevolent. His presence is a smart bit of casting too: in a film that's all about gazing back at the mid-Nineties with a wistfulness they don't deserve, Brosnan adds a direct link back to GoldenEye while taking all that hero-worship you probably did at the time and flipping it back in your face. The mid-Nineties weren't a never-ending episode of The Big Breakfast, and James Bond is a robot now.
2. Mamma Mia! (2008)
Strangely, for a musical built around the music of ABBA, Mamma Mia! has absolutely none of the careful craft and painstaking detail of the music of ABBA. Benny and Bjorn said that they sat in their log cabin on the Stockholm archipelago and wrote 12 songs a year, then they whittled away at them, sharpening and shaping and sanding, until they were all perfect. Mamma Mia! often looks like a IKEA bookcase with several screws missing and a couple of shelves on upside-down.
And yet.
Mamma Mia! is brilliant. It barrels along propelled by its high camp, its total lack of cynicism and its irrepressible joy. It would only work if everyone involved committed it fully, and for his part, Brosnan operates at 1000 per cent Pierce Brosnan™ at all times. He's Sam, one of three potential dads lured to the Greek island of Kalokairi by bride-to-be Sophie ahead of her wedding along with Harry (Colin Firth) and Bill (Stellen Skarsgard).
The most effective of the post-Bond rom-com roles which lean on his suave rep, it's the complete conviction with which he attacks every moment of it that makes it work. Watch him honk through 'SOS' like a jilted goose. Feel his pain as he emotes next to Meryl Streep and Meryl Streep's Big Scarf wailing 'The Winner Takes It All' on a cliffside. Gawp at him pulling John Travolta moves in a spandex jumpsuit at the climax. You cannot fault the man.
Mamma Mia! is really about the friendship between Meryl, Baranski and Julie Walters, of course – and the 'Money Money Money' fantasy sequence where they cavort on a yacht – but the extremely believable appeal of late period romance Brosnan is the pivot around which everything else turns. He cannot sing. It does not matter.
It is never a bad time to watch Mamma Mia!. You think it's going to be a confection and a bit of a larf with some big tunes, but before you know it Christine Baranski's stalking across a beach, belting 'Does Your Mother Know?' while doing the Watusi and why am I standing to applaud is that me shrieking with joy where did this daiquiri come from??? Watch it now.
1. GoldenEye (1995)
In 1992, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama surmised that the fall of the Berlin Wall meant the "end of history". After the fall of communism, he reckoned, liberal democracy had its final victory.
History had other ideas, and really got its act together after the turn of the millennium, but up until then Fukuyama’s position looked quite solid. And no Cold War meant no James Bond – until Brosnan and GoldenEye made him make sense again.
Despite being one of the most enduring icons of Britishness, Bond only rarely reflects how the nation feels about itself. The bruised pride of Skyfall chimed with 2012's cautious post-crash, mid-Olympics optimism, for instance, and GoldenEye pulled off the same trick two decades earlier.
After 16 years of increasingly ragged Conservative government – one which spent the early Nineties mired in every single kind of political scandal possible – Britain was increasingly in the mood for renewal. Even the Sun was sick of John Major, branding his leadership election against the legendarily humourless John Redwood as “Redwood versus Deadwood”.
Culture was one answer. GoldenEye premiered in late November 1995, right at the height of Everything British Is Brilliant And Really Clever Actually Fever, and its knowing treatment of the old, increasingly awkward Bond conventions sits right alongside the Page 3 models in Blur’s Damien Hurst-directed ‘Country House’ video from that August. Judi Dench’s M may have called him “a sexist, misogynist dinosaur,” and Alec Trevelyan might have archly mocked his problematic vodka intake, but that wasn’t meant to stop you liking him, and it certainly wasn’t going to make him leave either alone.
That makes it sound like a near-disaster, but from the first time you watch GoldenEye it feels like both a classic Bond film and a strident new beginning. And it might all have fallen completely flat without Brosnan. Convincingly tough like Timothy Dalton, tigerish like Sean Connery, and able to land a quip with just enough waggling of Moore's eyebrow to sell it, Brosnan's Bond was exactly the man that the mid-Nineties wanted working at MI6. He didn’t just successfully modernise Bond; he post-modernised him.
The story fitted with the cake-and-eat-it attitude of the time too. It wasn't a simple Bond-against-the-Reds romp, but a brotherly struggle against the ghost of Britain’s own treachery in the shape of Sean Bean’s Trevelyan, whose parents were betrayed by the state and sent to Stalin’s death camps. He has a very nice line in withering sarcasm aimed at Bond’s slightly pathetic unquestioning devotion to queen and country: "Her Majesty’s loyal terrier, defender of the so-called faith". But, obviously, Bond was still fighting those bloody commies as well.
Everything else came together too. The set pieces are still among the best in the Bond archive – the tank chase through St Petersburg, the extremely goth face-off in the graveyard of communist-era statues, the staggering bungee jump off the dam that opens the film – and the industrial Nine Inch Nails-influenced score freshened things up too. But more than anything, it was Brosnan that kept Bond from being swept into the dustbin of history.
