5. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
The Man: Pierce Brosnan
The Mission: Media baron Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) plans to provoke war between Britain and China, using a stolen GPS encoder to sink a Royal Navy ship and shoot down a Chinese jet. With only 48 hours before a possible retaliation, Bond teams up with Chinese spy Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) to investigate...
The Problem: The Bond series has always been at its best when it has had to freshly justify its existence Goldeneye, Casino Royale, Skyfall and so on. But it's often the case that the film which re-establishes the franchise is followed by one that's much more complacent. And that's just the problem here: Tomorrow Never Dies undoes a lot of the good work that Goldeneye did in bringing Bond back for the 1990s. While it did have its fair share of problems, Goldeneye did make a very good fist of justifying Bond in the post-Cold War period, and had a very compelling villain in the shape of Sean Bean's 006. Tomorrow Never Dies, by contrast, is very by-the-numbers in its plot, even by Bond standards. Its attempts to appear up-to-date are pretty weak, with Pryce's pantomime dame villain being a lazy stitch-up of Rupert Murdoch. The whole film smacks of people taking the foot off the pedals, and no amount of Bond making out with Lois Lane is going to change that.
The Alternative: Goldeneye (1995), because Sean Bean is awesome, and so is the game.