“The villian of “Quantum” is an environmentalist fraud who in some scenes is lit to look like Al Gore. A LOT of Libs didn’t like it for that reason”
True. But it also featured evil CIA guys right out of “3 Days of the Condor” to please the Lefties. It was also badly shot and edited. What good is it to stage the stunts action in a way that the viewer can’t discern what is going on? I wish Martin Campbell had returned to direct to give it more of a consistency of style with Casino Royale. As it stands now, the only scenes I liked in QOS where the scenes that directly referenced CR and made me wish I was watching that instead.
For the record, my current top 5 Bond films are(in order of their release):
1) “From Russia With Love”(1963) Classic cold war spy thriller.
2) “Thunderball”(1965) First truly big budget epic style Bond film with Sean Connery at the top of his confidence in the role and the most beautiful gallery of Bond girls to ever appear in a single Bond film, especially Luciana Paluzzi as a lovely but lethal redhead from SPECTRE.
3) “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”(1969) Underrated epic, very faithful to Ian Fleming’s original source novel(possibly Fleming’s best).
4) “The Living Daylights”(1987) A return to a FRWL style cold war espionage Bond film with a great performance by the underrated Timothy Dalton. Very well written spy thriller. Only downside is lack of strong villain and (watching it from a post 9/11 perspective)the fact that some of Bond’s Afghan ally characters probably later joined the Taliban.
5) “Casino Royale” (2006) A true Bond epic in the style of TB and OHMSS and probably the only Bond film post-1970 to truly recapture some of the grand style of the 1960s films along with the harsh feel of the Ian Fleming novels.
I'd go with most of your choices with the exception of Thunderball. Rik Van Nutter is a poor Felix, but what really sinks it is the interminable underwater sequences. Talk about not knowing what's going on -- and eventually not caring!
I join in a tip of the hat to Dalton as Bond.
He was a believable licensed killer.
Also better films than most give credit for.