Brosnan’s rich history as a spy deserves another look


From the suave swagger of Sean Connery to the steely-eyed pugilism of Daniel Craig, every generation gets the James Bond it deserves. In 1995, audiences were introduced to the latest incarnation of the dashing gentleman spy, played with a martini mix of mirth and magnetism by Pierce Brosnan, and the results were explosive. GoldenEye, directed by Martin Campbell, rescued the venerable franchise from its post-Cold War doldrums, spawning the now-classic Nintendo 64 video game and three sequels, all starring Brosnan and Judi Dench as the imperious, newly feminized M, that would keep 007’s license to kill current until Campbell returned to reboot the series again with Casino Royale in 2006.

Today Brosnan’s tenure as Bond is remembered as serviceable yet safe, an agreeably conventional take on Ian Fleming’s creation that never technically wore out its welcome — no, not even with the goofy excesses of Die Another Day — but nonetheless fell short when it came to unearthing any physical nuance or psychological scar tissue within the character. The Irish actor, a self-confessed Bond fan who was originally offered the part in 1987 but had to decline due to contractual obligations to Remington Steele, has proven his own harshest critic on the subject, revealing in a recent interview with The Telegraph that he thought he was “never good enough” in the role, adding that these feelings continue to prevent him from enjoying the movies, even GoldenEye, which belongs in the top tier of Bond films, if only for the scene where Dench’s M calls 007 a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur.”

“I felt I was caught in a time warp between Roger [Moore] and Sean [Connery],” Brosnan said during the interview. “It was a very hard one to grasp the meaning of, for me. The violence was never real, the brute force of the man was never palpable. It was quite tame, and the characterization didn’t have a follow-through of reality, it was surface. But then that might have had to do with my own insecurities in playing him as well.”

To be fair, much of what doesn’t work about Brosnan’s later Bond movies can be attributed to weak scripts, inexperienced producers and studio heads who were eager to replicate the runaway success of GoldenEye without understanding the ingredients that caused the film’s popularity to begin with. Tomorrow Never Dies, which saw 007 match wits with a Rupert Murdoch-esque media mogul (Jonathan Pryce) who sparks international conflicts to boost his network’s ratings, was the first film in the series to move forward after the death of longtime producer Albert R. Broccoli, who had been involved in shaping the franchise since 1962’s Dr. No. His heirs, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, were less willing to take risks with the character, and their reluctance shows in every frame. The movie, plagued by constant rewrites and an unhappy cast, eventually surfaced as a stiff, middle-of-the-road affair that lacked the edginess and maniacal energy of its predecessor.

The next installment, 1999’s The World Is Not Enough, is unfairly maligned as one of the worst Bond movies because of its convoluted plot and Denise Richards’s unfortunate performance as Dr. Christmas Jones, the world’s least convincing nuclear physicist. Brosnan, however, nearly redeems the story’s numerous shortcomings by turning in his all-time best performance as 007, who finds himself torn between his love for the beautiful, damaged oil baroness Elektra King (Sophie Marceau, one of the most underrated Bond girls), and his duty to thwart the megalomaniacal aspirations of Renard (the memorably menacing Robert Carlyle), a KGB agent-turned-anarchist who has become impervious to pain thanks to an assassin’s bullet lodged in his skull.

Brosnan donned the tuxedo for the last time in 2002’s Die Another Day, which opens with a disavowed Bond being captured and tortured in a North Korean prison camp, a compelling, out-of-the-box development that in many ways presages the grit and humanity of Casino Royale, but the rest of the film quickly devolves into a cartoonish cavalcade involving ice palaces, invisible Aston Martins and, no kidding, the world’s first racial reassignment surgery. The only other standout scene is a well-choreographed fencing match between Bond and deranged billionaire Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens), but even that is tainted with a distracting, self-indulgent cameo from Madonna, who also provided the movie with its infernally catchy theme song.

Brosnan’s Bond movies might be criticized for playing it safe, but the actor himself has never had any qualms about riffing on his super-spy persona. He appeared in John Boorman’s excellent 2001 adaptation of John le Carré’s The Tailor of Panama as a nasty, amoral MI6 agent who appears to have more than a little in common with the world’s greatest secret agent. It’s an utterly fearless performance that exaggerates Bond’s signature character traits — the ironic detachment, the shameless womanizing — and reimagines them as the manipulative tools of a sociopath.

Then there’s Richard Shepard’s The Matador, the pitch-black comedy Brosnan made shortly after it was clear he wouldn’t be returning as Bond, swapping his tailored suits and mannered charm for a black speedo and a sailor’s mouth as a boorish, over-the-hill assassin who invades the lives of a hapless married couple played by Greg Kinnear and Hope Davis. There were even rumors, vague but persistent, that he was teaming up with Quentin Tarantino for an unofficial, hard-R adaptation of Casino Royale in the years leading up to the release of the Campbell-Craig version.

Now, more than 12 years after his last Bond movie, Brosnan is ready to return to the spy game with a straight face. Though critics are pummeling his new movie The November Man, it’s nonetheless gratifying to see the actor returning to his action thriller roots on his own terms (the movie was funded by his Irish DreamTime production company), albeit with a few more gray hairs and a believably world-weary grimace. The plot centers on Peter Devereaux (Brosnan), an ex-CIA spook who comes out of retirement to protect a valuable witness (ex-Bond girl Olga Kurylenko) from his former protégé Mason (Luke Bracey). Hopefully the film, based on a series of political thrillers by novelist Bill Granger and directed by The Bank Job helmer Roger Donaldson, will tap into the same subversive spirit that made Brosnan’s other pseudo-Bond projects so fascinating and weirdly cathartic. After all, who better to take down 007 than the man who brought him back to life?

 

Landon McDonald is a graduate student studying public relations and film. His column, “The Reel Deal,” runs Thursdays.