I agree with Mel. He would have been a good Bond. Plus if this is post Lethal Weapon Mel he would have played that role with a mullet and that would have been awesome. Cause if there is one truth about Mel Gibson, that Lethal Weapon Mullet was literally beautiful and I don’t feel gay saying that.
It’s such a shame his time got cut so short because of the fallout the Broccoli family had in the early 90s and the licensing nightmare caused by that whole Never Say Never Again two studios issue. IMO, that’s Connery being a bad Bond. He should have never come back for that role. He was terrible.
We actually had a discussion on Reddit on that once and I posted my own idea for basic story outline. Weirdly enough, I selected Elba to play the Villain because frankly the villains are the main characters in Bond movies and Elba is fantastic with villains.
I kind of imagined him as an ex Royal Marine in command of training unit assisting an unspecified nation’s military training special forces. One day they are attacked by a belligerent power (this was before the whole Russia Ukraine thing started but that would be a good backdrop honestly). The enemy power is deploying special forces and tanks and artillery. Elba’s character calls in to UK authorities to get permission to fight back and for an airstrike on the enemy and they deny him. His unit and their friendly allies are decimated by this and Elba himself receives significant scarring around his neck and face (since Bond villains tend to have some kind of physical ailment that plagues them). They’re all pronounced dead.
Then he pops back up a few years later and starts a huge plan to steal a Vanguard class nuclear ballistic missile submarine to hold the British government hostage for basically leaving him and his men out to die. Bond (I imagined my Bond as a Hardy type actor, clearly older and more jaded) and MI6 deploy to try and stop him but they’re one step behind at every turn. Bond would also sympathize with the villain because his cause, while insane, can be justified since his majesty’s government abandoned a hundred Royal Marines to die.
Never got any further than that. I’m not a writer. But it was a cool idea to me as a nerd.
I absolutely loved the Bond movies of the 60s! As you said, Sean Connery set the mold for Bond. Those who followed in his footsteps paled in comparison, although I think Timothy Dalton came closest. Until, that is, Daniel Craig. I thought Craig came far closer to embodying the Ian Flemming’s Bond character far better than any of the others, including Connery. (And I think that anybody who has read the books will agree on that.) Furthermore, the movie productions during his reign were much better too. The Connery films were big and bold and exciting, but the special effects were so bad back then that watching them today makes me laugh at how good I thought those movies were when I first saw them. So for me, Daniel Craig’s Bond is the clear winner.
Connery was the best Bond.
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IMO, I think Dalton takes the crown objectively. Connery put his own spin on the character that was fantastic but Dalton really played the book character better than anyone else. Connery gave him a suave that Bond in the books didn’t really express. Great choice for his movies though.
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