GoldenEye (1995)
Ask me to picture James Bond, and, sacrilege though it surely is with Connery and Moore both in the room, I don't reach for either of them. I see Pierce Brosnan, tuxedo immaculate, Walther in hand, in GoldenEye. That image is lodged somewhere deep, and after rewatching it recently I can confirm it has no intention of shifting.
This is, near enough, my favourite Bond film, and the one that for my money bottles the essential Bondness better than any other. Martin Campbell's 1995 effort had the lot: a hero who finally looked the part again, a genuine edge of danger, and a swagger the series had been badly missing. It arrived after a six-year absence and had everything to prove. It proved it.
There's a neat symmetry worth noting, because Campbell is the very same director who would reboot the whole thing a second time, eleven years later, with Casino Royale, the one Craig film I'd genuinely call the best of his run. Here he was doing it the first time round: Brosnan's debut, the first Bond of a post-Cold-War world, needing to convince audiences that this character still had a place in the 1990s. He answers that question emphatically. Judi Dench turns up as M for the first time, tartly writing Bond off as a relic of another age. Sean Bean makes a terrific, treacherous foil as 006. Robbie Coltrane wanders in for good measure. A cracking cast, all pitched exactly right.
And the film is relentlessly, gloriously of its decade. Few things capture the mid-90s quite so completely, from the fashions to the technology to the whole texture of the thing. The villains are hilariously dramatic, Famke Janssen's lethal Xenia Onatopp chief among them, and the film leans into that theatricality with full confidence. The score is a blast. The stunts are the good old-fashioned sort, practical and gleefully oversized: that vertiginous bungee drop off the dam in the opening, and a tank ploughing through the streets of St Petersburg with cheerful, catastrophic abandon. Spectacle delivered with a wink. This series, at its best, does nothing better than that.
It's a film that knows exactly what it is, and there's something genuinely refreshing about that. It reminded me a little of what I enjoy about Die Hard 2: neither film is reinventing anything, both are just doing their particular thing with total commitment and a lot of personality, which turns out to be more than enough. The difference is GoldenEye has Brosnan, and Brosnan is just effortlessly right for this.
Is it high art? Of course not, and it has absolutely no interest in being. But it's Bond doing precisely what Bond ought to do, with more style and personality than most of the entries on either side of it. When I think of 007, this is the one I think of first. Revisiting it only confirmed why.
Three and a half stars. Yes, this is Bond.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1995 | Watched: 2026-09-06
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: MGM Plus Roku Premium Channel · MGM Plus
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · Fandango At Home
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · Fandango At Home
Physical: Amazon US
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
