10 Biggest Mistakes The James Bond Series Ever Made

Ah, that old Bond dilemma; the balance between self-conscious pastiche and outright comedy. As we touched on earlier, the Brosnan years played a tricky balancing act in this respect, and hindsight shows us that they frequently got the balance completely wrong.

The casting of John Cleese as the new Q was a particularly notable example of this. When Desmond Llewelyn originated the role in 1963's From Russia With Love (introduced not as Q but as the quartermaster Boothroyd), there was nothing comedic about the character or his function. It was only as the series progressed, and the gadgets got ever sillier, that the Q scenes came to have a comedic value.

Llewelyn remains the longest-serving Bond actor, reprising Q in every entry up until 1999's The World Is Not Enough, by which point his interactions with Brosnan were out-and-out comedy sketches. As such, one can see the logic in having an established comedic actor introduced as his replacement when Llewelyn chose to retire. (Of course, his retirement proved to be a sad and short one, as the actor was tragically killed in a car accident only three weeks after The World Is Not Enough premiered.)

When the Monty Python alumnus took over as the solo Q in Die Another Day, he had little to do other than retrace the steps of his predecessor whilst essentially just playing himself; or at least, his existing screen persona. Now, whoever they cast would have been hard-pressed not to make that invisible Aston Martin seem anything less than stupid, but still, Cleese's dynamic as Q just feels wrong.

Llewelyn was funny because he wasn't trying to be; casting a comedian playing for overt laughs just seems to miss the point.

Not that this was by any means the only issue with that particular Bond movie...