I recently undertook a massive project to discover who my favourite James Bond is. Or rather, to confirm to myself what I keep telling people about who my favourite James Bond is, so that I could back up my argument with empirical evidence.
What this involved – and this is the kind of selfless act I carry out for the viewers of The Incredible Suit – was watching every Bond film and rating them out of 10, then adding all the scores together for each actor, then dividing the totals by the number of Bond films each actor made in order to give a mean average score. Yes, I really did all those things. It just took me two and a half years.
For the sake of keeping the results pure and untainted, I didn’t include Never Say Never Again because a) it’s not an official Bond film, and b) it would put Sean Connery into minus figures.
So here are the results, and you can treat these as official figures from the National Office of Officially Accurate Statistical Figures And Stuff:
1. Timothy Dalton 9
2. Daniel Craig 8.5
3. Pierce Brosnan 7.5
4. Sean Connery 7.2
5. George Lazenby 7
6. Roger Moore 6.7
Many people get their nethers in a tangle when I tell them Timothy Dalton is the Best Bond, Like, Ever, because they think Sean Connery should be the best because he was the first. Tommywaddle. He was great in the first three, maybe four, but after that, come on. Fat, slow and bored of himself. Go and watch Diamonds Are Forever, you’ll see what I’m on about.
Having said that, I thought I preferred Connery to Brosnan, but looking at the official figures, apparently not. You can’t argue with the stats.
Here are some of the reasons why I love Timothy Dalton as Bond:
He can act (remember, he was preceded by 12 years of Roger Moore’s eyebrow).
He looks like Bond should look.
His Bond hates his job but takes it seriously.
His Bond smokes. Cigarettes, not ludicrously massive cigars.
His Bond has no time for incompetent assistants.
His Bond looks really, really pissed off when his friends get hurt.
His Bond bleeds and his suit gets ruined when he’s been in a fight.
His Bond swears. If you can count “horse’s arse”, “piss off” and “bastard” as swear words these days.
Speaking of effing and jeffing, have you noticed what a potty-mouth M has become lately? It’s all “bugger” this and “bastard” that, I don’t know what the world’s coming to. I bet Judi Dench drops an f-bomb in the next film.
Thanks to Cameron Arrigoni for the video!
Hey mate its adambatman82 from empireonline. I take part in a coalition of bloggers called The Cineastes. Basically once a month we each write a piece on the same film, and link them up and whatnot. It generates a huge amount of traffic. Anyway, were looking for a new member and I thought you might be interested. Let me know your thoughts. Heres a link to our previous few months work-
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Cheers, Adam
Amusingly, you were correct with the Judi Dench prediction
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