License to steal: 10 times the James Bond series chased action movie trends

The arrival of marks the 25th entry in the film franchise, an onscreen run measuring nearly 60 years. To what can 007 attribute that longevity? The ability to pull a new actor into the role every few years helps. So does the moviegoing audience’s bottomless appetite for jet-setting, high-flying stunts, and outlandish villains. Bond also endures because, like any good secret agent, his skillset includes mimicry and flexibility. The series that launched a wave of bed-hopping, gadget-equipped spies in the 1960s has shown no qualms about swimming in the wake of the action blockbusters that came after it, like , ’s Dark Knight trilogy, or . It can be shameless in the pursuit of a cinematic trend, like the Blaxploitation trappings adopted by Live And Let Die. Elsewhere, evolving tastes point toward the right fit at just the right moment—like the jumpy energy of the The Bourne Identity channeled into the early Daniel Craig Bonds.As Carly Simon sings at the beginning of The Spy Who Loved Me, . It’s just that sometimes James Bond learned to do the things he does from other movies.

The second film in the James Bond series introduced and/or solidified many of the tropes that would come to define it: beautiful women, exotic locales, elaborate action, droll one-liners, gadgets that come in handy in a third-act pinch, an in media res opening set piece, and a main theme. Yet even as the franchise was coming into its own, it was already borrowing from other sources, too. Looking beyond the 007-specific iconography, From Russia With Love boasts the unmistakable influence of Alfred Hitchcock and his ’50s milestone hits. The plainest example is a late sequence, not included in Ian Fleming’s novel, in which Bond evades a dive-bombing helicopter; the scene was explicitly inspired by (some might say pilfered from) . Elsewhere, director Terence Young nods to the master through tense pursuits (with Bond stealthily maneuvering around pillars and hedges), a Grace Kelly-ish blond in a headscarf, and an extended, treacherous passage on a train. No future entries would nod quite as directly to Hitch, though the best ones would continue to work within his guiding principles of suspense. Meanwhile, Sean Connery would trade a Hitchcockian thriller for the real deal just one year later with a starring role in . [A.A. Dowd]

The year that Sean Connery made his final canonical appearance as James Bond, another smooth-operating hero with a killer theme song was pulling 007’s future studio home, MGM, back from the brink: Shaft, John Shaft. Two years later, the boom in Black-led action films spurred by and wasn’t just inspiring the likes of Coffy and Cleopatra Jones—it impacted Roger Moore’s very first Bond movie, too. Live And Let Die sets the new face of the franchise on the trail of a heroin ring responsible for the deaths of three MI6 agents, picking up the fashions, underworld milieu, and lingo of Blaxploitation along the way. (Where else are you going to hear Bond get called a “honky”?) It cherrypicked from the genre’s casts as well: Yaphet Kotto was offered the dual role of Dr. Kananga/Mr. Big on the set of Across 110th Street; Gloria Hendry and Julius Harris bookended Live And Let Die with and its sequel, Hell Up In Harlem. [Erik Adams]

The Man With The Golden Gun culminates in one of the all-time great James Bond set pieces, a shootout between Roger Moore and Christopher Lee in a psychedelic hall of mirrors. It’s a tremendous setting for a climax—as evidenced a year earlier by Bruce Lee and Shih Kien’s . The shadows of , Bruce Lee, and the kung fu craze of the ’70s loom largest over The Man With The Golden Gun’s trip to Thailand, where Bond is pitted against the entire student body of a martial-arts academy. It’s a reflection of the genre Lee helped popularize that followed Enter The Dragon’s mirroring of the Bond series’ island lairs, British intelligence operations, and with . [Erik Adams]

Ian Fleming had no idea how prescient he was when he named a 1955 James Bond novel Moonraker. While the movie that Lewis Gilbert eventually made from the book in 1979 bore little resemblance to its source material, the fact that Eon Productions was sitting on a Bond movie with a vaguely space-related title two years after Star Wars captured the public’s imagination was a real gift. All the filmmakers had to do was replace the book’s eponymous V-2 rocket with a space shuttle called Moonraker, give the bad guy’s henchman some laser guns, and send Roger Moore into space, and they had a Bond movie that was more Star Wars than… well, anything. [Sam Barsanti]

when his friend George Lucas gave him the reins to an ode to adventure serials about a globe-trotting hero cut from the same cloth as 007. After , (out-grossing 1981’s For Your Eyes Only), Bond suddenly had to keep pace with the new guy. The result was , one of the spy’s most far-flung missions, which sent him to an East German circus to a floating fortress of female assassins. Emboldened by Raiders’ rollicking blend of action and comedy, Octopussy leaned into the franchise’s playfulness, producing Roger Moore’s goofiest take on the character—and that’s saying something. [Cameron Scheetz]

Ronald Reagan’s strident drug crackdown meant that ’80s pop culture was rife with tales of shady traffickers and the hardscrabble law enforcement tasked with taking them down. Cribbing from the and feisty, then-young franchise , Timothy Dalton’s second go at 007 was a more street-level affair. His titular license revoked, this was a brutal, desperate Bond who—taking a page from Tubbs and Crockett—goes deep undercover in a ruthless drug lord’s ring, all to exact revenge for a friend’s death. With detractors calling it “too dark” and “too American,” Licence To Kill may have strayed too far off course in an attempt to stay fresh, but it laid the groundwork for Daniel Craig’s later, grittier approach to the role. [Cameron Scheetz]

By 1997, Hong Kong action had made its way abroad, finally infiltrating the American multiplex: Dubbed versions of Jackie Chan vehicles did solid business at the U.S. box office the year prior (leading to Chan’s official stateside breakthrough, Rush Hour), while director John Woo completed his transition into a Hollywood hitmaker with the summer’s . Tomorrow Never Dies, the second (and ) of the Brosnan Bond pictures, capitalized on this burgeoning craze through a plot that eventually sends 007 to the South China Sea, where he ends up teamed with an unusually proactive, ass-kicking Bond girl played by Hong Kong star Michelle Yeoh. The movie’s highpoint may be the most blatantly HK-inspired: a chase sequence that finds Brosnan and Yeoh handcuffed together on a motorcycle. It genuinely plays like something you’d see in a Sammo Hung movie, albeit it with a star who most definitely wasn’t doing all of his own stunts. [A.A. Dowd]

After decades of over-the-top adventures with space lasers, nuclear threats, and , James Bond needed a refresh. Luckily, a year earlier, Christopher Nolan’s —which rebooted the Dark Knight after years of , , and —had established a template for how to do that exact thing. . Both movies involve flashbacks to the days before their heroes became superheroes, both movies winkingly push back against their characters’ traditional catchphrases and gimmicks, and both movies replaced cartoonish action with (relatively) grounded stakes. They each end on cheer-worthy fan-service sequel teases, too, finally dropping all pretension to give fans exactly what they want. [Sam Barsanti]

’s parkour-based opening sequence is a thrilling departure from the more traditionally stoic or silly Bond action, vaguely echoing the tight close-ups and gritty hand-to-hand action of . For , director Marc Foster decided to make that echo even more explicit by literally hiring Bourne stunt veteran Dan Bradley as a second unit director. The plan to be more like Bourne worked out, for better or worse, with Quantum being a movie where a colder and more calculating Bond spends a lot of time on the run, being chased from set piece to set piece just like Matt Damon’s amnesiac CIA operative. A good idea on paper, but people don’t really like James Bond because he’s like Jason Bourne. [Sam Barsanti]

In a somewhat ironic touch, ’s Javier Bardem apparently chose to channel for his turn as flirtatious, digressive cyberterrorist Raoul Silva in . (Down to pulling the old “get caught by the good guys to further your plan” trick straight from the Joker’s playbook.) But Sam Mendes’ first Bond movie has more in common with than just its villain, or the fact that it’s the obvious stand-out of a more generally mixed run of films. Skyfall is also the most bluntly inward facing of any of the modern Bonds, insisting at every turn that there’s a broken man lurking beneath the legend—as Nolan a touch as all those moody Scottish vistas or glass-filled neon high-rises. [William Hughes]