Sean Connery

When You Only Live Twice opens, we find Sean Connery riddled with bullets, in an attempt to induce some sort of sympathy from the audience.

Even Moore showed pathos when he put flowers on a grave during For Your Eyes Only, leaving Connery as the one Bond who stayed within the realm of one dimension, only breaking it once to wink at the camera as the credits for Never Say Never Again rolled. His first performance, Dr. No, had prowess, his second, From Russia, With Love, was better again, but by the time Goldfinger came around, Connery gave up, smoking in the corner where he should have spent his time acting. By Diamonds Are Forever, the actor could barely bother himself to hide his brogue, imbuing unwanted “sh’s” in every “shentence”, much to the horrors of the censors, who were forced to listen to every misplaced word, cut after torturous cut. “Well, once you had done the first two, you just moved forward because the rules were established,” he admitted in 2002. Whatever misgivings his successor Roger Moore held for the role of Bond, or the producers who put him in so many perilous positions, he never let it affect his performance as Ian Fleming’s sleuth, but rather celebrated the pantomime and pastiche of the work in question. If only he was because when he rises from the bottom of a slumber brought on by supposed machine gun fire, we find the Edinburgh born actor decidedly uninterested in giving anything to the audience, other than marching through the motions to finish the film in some sort of condition to walk off with a cheque of some kind.