In the role that marked Daniel Craig out as the next Bond, he played a nameless drug dealer who was pretty smug about life. He lived in a fancy London flat and organised a lucrative cocaine operation. Hes soon to retire and gives the smoothest monologues you were ever likely to see. But was he a badass? Certainly not. The first act breaks any illusion of this by showing us that hes not a big fish in a small pond, hes a tadpole in an ocean, ready to be swallowed up by a perma-furious Kenneth Cranham, an always-threatening Michael Gambon and a gang of murderous Serbians. No matter what Craig does, he always seems to put himself into further trouble. Honestly, hes pretty inept he ends up riling a ferocious hitman after a botched drugs deal and gets beaten to a pulp after killing his treacherous boss. Its always one step forward and two steps back for this man, and worst of all he almost makes it with Sienna Miller before being kidnapped and almost bundled off a skyscraper. The mans hapless, is what Im saying, and hes at his lowest ebb when a potential drug super-deal is stolen by a monologue-ing Gambon from right under his chiselled nose. Yet suddenly, Craig reveals to the audience that hes actually awesome. After flying by the seat of his pants the entire film, his footsoldiers re-ambush Gambons ambush (ambush-ception?) to take back the drugs and he takes the position of the man he killed in the power hierarchy. For a man who has been almost perennially on the brink of being killed throughout, to resurrect your fortunes so dramatically is a massive turnaround worthy of our respect and you get a fresh perspective on the character, a man who conquered massive swathes of the underworld in around a week simply because he was pushed if thats not badass, I dont know what is. After all, only a badass could possibly get away with wearing a white suit in rural England. Yes, its not the overt badass moment on this list and its certainly one of the briefest (he gets shot in the very next scene), but damn, it was good while it lasted.