The Daniel Craig Bond movies, ranked by A.V. Club review

Fifteen years after he first donned the iconic menswear and turned to fire a bullet straight into the camera, is retiring from the spy game. His final turn as , , arrives in theaters this Friday, bringing to an end a whole era of slightly grittier, more serialized adventures for cinema’s most famous secret agent. Unless one counts ’s one-off return to the role in the early 1980s, Craig has played 007 for longer than any actor before him. He’s made the character his own.But how were the movies themselves? The A.V. Club reviewed each when they first hit theaters, charting the course of this franchise within the franchise in real time, from to . Let’s take a closer look at how our critics felt, on a film-by-film basis, about the Craig installments of this endless series—beginning with the one we liked the least and working our way, in order of site preference, to our favorite. Just remember: The ranking that follows may not reflect your own hierarchical assessment of the last five Bonds—nor, for that matter, each individual writer’s.

The early critical consensus on Craig’s final Bond movie, which hits theaters this week, is that it’s one of the better ones: This extended farewell for the post-millennial iteration of the spy is currently and comfortably . Which puts The A.V. Club in the minority, as our own critic found it to be the least satisfying of the Craig run, in part because it’s more interested in laboriously putting the lid on this story than delivering any of the actual pleasures of a Bond movie, new or old. An excerpt from our review:Like almost every actor that’s played the role, Craig has reached the point where he’s a little too long in the tooth for it. But it’s less his age than his effort (or lack of it) that shows: Where once he brought an invigorating balance of thuggish aggression and cucumber-cool wit, the star seems borderline bored in No Time To Die, as itchy as his character is to put the spy games behind him. His fatigue creeps into every corner: It’s there in the half-assed banter, in the been-there-exploded-that gadgets, in the fleeting checklist appearance by Craig’s costar Ana De Armas as a second-tier Bond girl so obligatorily incorporated that she could be airlifted out of the movie with the most minimal of rewrites. The set pieces—the usual car chases and gunfights and climactic races through exotic lairs—are nothing special either.

The Bond movies starring Daniel Craig proved to be much more invested in continuity than the ones that came before them; rather than functioning like stand-alone sequels (the usual protocol of this very old franchise), they unfolded sequentially, each new entry picking up where the last left off. Though that modern strategy culminated with No Time To Die’s conclusive chapter, it reached peak serialization with the previous, penultimate installment, which bent over backwards to try and tie three films (and three villains) before it into a grand mythology, with lots of big revelations about Bond’s past. The real problem with Spectre, though, is that it plays like an overlong greatest-hits run through ideas and sequences better tackled in other, earlier entries. The result was a disappointing follow-up to director Sam Mendes’ prior take on this decades-old material. An excerpt from our review:What Spectre lacks is the sinister magnetic pull of Skyfall, a Bond movie with real stakes and attitude and distinctive flavor, not to mention more mesmeric images than one can usually expect from this workmanlike blockbuster franchise. (Roger Deakins is a tough act to follow, even for a cinematographer as accomplished as shooter Hoyte Van Hoytema.) The movie bends over backwards to connect itself to the unofficial trilogy it follows, teasing a sequel-uniting retcon in the passable opening credits sequence. But those films, even the clunky Quantum, had a more palpable sense of danger. For all the talk of its scary global reach, Spectre itself comes across as just another collective of disposable goons. And despite having been born to play a Bond villain, Waltz never comes within striking distance of the volcanic menace of Javier Bardem’s Skyfall heavy; perhaps the former has done the false-civility thing too many times for it to land anymore. Like most of Spectre, he’s not quite old, not quite new, and not quite distinct enough to shake (or stir) this sequel out of second-tier Bond lethargy.

Just as Spectre couldn’t help but suffer in comparison to the majestic film it followed, Quantum Of Solace felt like a disappointment after the reinvigorating origin-story rebooting of Casino Royale. But time has been at least a little kind to Craig’s second turn in the tux, which doesn’t match the brooding cool of the film it picks up from but does preserve its visceral approach to action and general lack of Roger Moore-era goofy excess. As for the blatant Bourne-biting: There are worse espionage properties for this to plagiarize. An excerpt from our review:Director Marc Forster, better known for dramas like Monster’s Ball and Stranger Than Fiction than for action movies, keeps things focused and moving forward. The film feels, to use a phrase one character applies to Bond, “horribly efficient”: It’s dark and exciting, but with little breathing room. Where Casino went the Batman Begins route, figuring out what makes an iconic 20th-century character work and retrofitting him for 21st-century relevance, Forster fails to make Bond’s Dark Knight by deepening the themes and expanding the scale. Instead, Quantum is content merely to be the second episode in what’s shaping up to be a viable series, good enough but disappointing for those expecting greatness.

Looking for a hard reset after the Pierce Brosnan years, which included some of Bond’s silliest outings, the producers of , commissioning a grounded origin story for the character and returning the series to its more minimalist spy-movie roots. Casino Royale was received by some as an exhilarating reinvention, and maybe one of the best movies of the whole series—though our own Noel Murray was more mixed on Craig’s inaugural appearance as a brutish, less instantly charming James Bond. An excerpt from his review:Craig is fine as Bond, though he’s better at playing stony and tough than he is at making wisecracks and wooing women. He’s also a little adrift in this overthought reconceptualization, which positions Casino Royale as the secret agent’s first adventure, and tries to shoehorn in pieces of well-known Bond mythology (the car, the cocktails) as though they were popping up naturally, for the first time. And while veteran Bond director Martin Campbell brings character-building purpose to the stripped-down, stunt-driven action sequences, he can’t do anything about the typically superfluous plot and routine climax. In its overt attempts to balance high-spirited spy adventure with more realistic acting and action—conveying the realities of government-sponsored murder—Casino Royale is a step in the right direction for the Bond franchise. But it’s a small, tentative step.. And then, for an alternate take on the film (one that may align a little more with the feelings of the editor constructing this ranking), .