Daniel Craig's James Bond movies ranked, from “Spectre” to “Skyfall”
- - Daniel Craig's James Bond movies ranked, from “Spectre” to “Skyfall”
Declan GallagherJanuary 27, 2026 at 8:00 AM
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Ranking Daniel Craig's James Bond movies
Jay Maidment; Jonathan Olley; Nicola Dove
Tears spilled when Daniel Craig bid farewell as James Bond in 2021's No Time to Die, but it's worth remembering that the stoic English actor was initially pilloried by purists for both his appearance — a blonde Bond? — and ruggedness.
It didn't help, either, that 2002's Die Another Die, Pierce Brosnan's final turn as the suave spy, arrived just a few months after The Bourne Identity, which delivered the kind of gritty, tactile thrills that made the Bond franchise look passé in comparison.
That makes Casino Royale (2006), Craig's first outing as 007, all the more impressive. Not only did Martin Campbell direct a film that met the moment, but Craig boldly established himself as a new type of Bond by virtue of, as Entertainment Weekly's critic put it at the time, turning him into a human being again.
"A Bond who doesn’t give a damn, who’s made affectless, even haunted, by what his job brings out in him, is a Bond we can all give more of a damn about," reads our Casino Royale review. "He speaks to an age of desperation, when the cosmetic barely holds sway over the cutthroat."
Audiences agreed, and Casino Royale went on score over $600 million worldwide, turning Craig into a global superstar and setting the stage for four sequels. Below, we rank the Daniel Craig Bond films from worst to best.
01 of 05
Quantum of Solace (2008)
Daniel Craig and Olga Kurylenko in 'Quantum of Solace' Karen Ballard/MGM
In the wake of his great love Vesper Lynd's (Eva Green) death at the end of Casino Royale, James Bond takes to tracking down the men who blackmailed Vesper into turning on him. The search leads Bond to Dominic Green (Mathieu Amalric), an evil businessman who is attempting to stage a coup in Bolivia in order to harness control of the country's water supply. Spaghetti Bond, anyone?
Forster's notoriously troubled production hovers somewhere between an Italian Bond rip-off and a Transporter sequel that is conspicuously missing Jason Statham. In either case, what's the point?
Coming after Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace was a stinging disappointment for fans and critics alike. It should be made clear, however, that even at the end of the '80s, or during the Brosnan run, Quantum of Solace would still have been utter pants. Perhaps better-looking pants, but pants it would remain.
It's a film that seems almost entirely cobbled together by the second unit, many of whom worked on The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) before doing this film. Whereas the Bourne movies, handheld as they may be, have a grace and physical logic to the mayhem, there is very little in Quantum of Solace for audiences to hold onto. Each of the action sequences is rapidly intercut with other scenes, a tactic that, unless it's being utilized by Christopher Nolan, usually means that none of the footage was usable on its own.
Where to watch Quantum of Solace: Netflix
02 of 05
Spectre (2015)
Daniel Craig as James Bond in 'Spectre' Columbia/Eon/Danjaq/Mgm/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
Bond must track down Madeleine Swan (Léa Seydoux), daughter of the venomous Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), who has haunted Bond throughout the series. With Madeleine's help, Bond inches closer to unearthing answers about the Spectre organization, but an unexpected personal connection with the evil mastermind, Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), threatens to upend 007's entire reality.
Spectre feels a bit like director Sam Mendes saying, "All right, I've done my classic 007 movie. Now it's time to do my fun 007 movie." In many ways the most quintessentially Bond-ian of the Craig series, Spectre provides loads of spectacle and even a bit of emotional resonance. The fact that it cannot measure up to Skyfall shouldn't be blamed on the film itself. After all, Orson Welles never made another Citizen Kane. Mendes' follow-up is a lot of fun, but whether it's anything more than that is up for debate.
EW's critic wrote of the end product, "Spectre is a blast of bespoke escapism, full of globetrotting action and thousand-thread-count opulence. But compared with 2012's stellar Skyfall, it feels both overstuffed and undercooked."
Where to watch Spectre: Netflix
03 of 05
No Time to Die (2021)
Daniel Craig in 'No Time to Die' Nicola Dove/MGM
After the events of Spectre, Bond has retired to Jamaica and is living an easy life at the resort's bar. His old pal at the CIA, Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), materializes and requests the super-agent's help in tracking down a kidnapped scientist (David Dencik). This leads Bond to Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), a terrorist with a particularly nasty plan who happens to have a personal connection with Bond's estranged lover Madeleine (Léa Seydoux).
No Time to Die is a bit of a mixed bag. It contains some of the boldest ideas in any of Craig's Bond pictures, yet it's not particularly fun, nor is it tremendously re-watchable. The 164-minute running time contributes somewhat to the malaise; the other bit can be attributed to what EW's critic identified in her review as "a [vague] kind of ennui." Many of the action sequences rely on a particularly wonky and weightless form of CGI, directly oppositional to the practical-is-better ethos that the Craig series began under. At times, this creates the feeling of a generic American action epic rather than a James Bond film.
On the plus side, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's much-hyped contributions to the script lend the proceedings a vigor unrivaled elsewhere in the canon. Meanwhile, Lashana Lynch hits an absolute grace note as 007's replacement within MI6. If the producers are smart, Lynch should have her own Jinx-style spin-off post haste. Ana de Armas, Craig's Knives Out costar, also turns up and has a ball during the film's liveliest sequence, set in Cuba, which draws electrifying parallels to both Hong Kong actioners and Nicolas Roeg's The Witches (1990).
Where to watch No Time to Die: Netflix
04 of 05
Casino Royale (2006)
Daniel Craig in 'Casino Royale.' Jay Maidment/Sony Pictures
Fresh off earning that coveted License to Kill, Bond is tasked by MI6 with beating terrorist financier Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) at a game of high-stakes poker, the winnings from which Le Chiffre's mysterious organization will use to bankroll their deadliest attack yet.
Casino Royale is top-tier Bond, and a perfect action movie unto itself. The first hour, before the plot properly kicks into gear, is largely devoted to increasingly intricate action sequences without much dialogue, as if Brian De Palma had been given the reins to one of the biggest franchises of all time.
Director Martin Campbell does a tremendous job behind the camera, working with a taut script by longtime series scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. (Paul Haggis is also credited, though his contributions largely focused on shaping the final action sequence and fine-tuning Vesper's betrayal of Bond.)
EW's Owen Gleiberman raved that Casino Royale was "the most exciting Bond film since On Her Majesty's Secret Service [and] has everything you want in a pop entertainment: physical audacity, intrigue, romance, but also a charge of personality that stayed with me for days."
At the end of 2006, Gleiberman named Casino Royale the best film of that year, and in 2009 would christen it the 10th best film of the decade.
Where to watch Casino Royale: Netflix
05 of 05
Skyfall (2012)
Daniel Craig as James Bond in 'Skyfall' Everett Collection
After MI6 is bombed and the identities of undercover agents begin to leak around the world, M (Judi Dench) has only Bond to turn toward. Their search, aided by fresh-faced recruits Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Whishaw), leads them to Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a cyberterrorist who has a decades-old grudge to settle with M.
Skyfall is an astounding achievement. Certainly one of the absolute best additions to the Bond canon, it's also a spectacular film without any qualifiers. One of Skyfall's great treats is that it stands alone as a rousing action movie (and a surprisingly nuanced character drama) while also playing off stories from both Craig's tenure and the greater series.
Bardem makes for one of the most formidable Bond villains of all time, a madman who feels entirely Bond's equal. And even if Skyfall wasn't one of the greatest movies of its kind, it would be worth a watch simply for the Straw Dogs-riffing sequence in which a gun-toting Dench dispatches a room full of henchmen using only light bulbs and nails.
Skyfall would go on to gross over $1 billion — the first and last time a Bond film achieved that box office milestone. EW's critic found that "of all the marvelous feats that make Skyfall such a thrilling addition to the James Bond movie canon, the greatest may be that the 23rd entry conveys the melancholy of loss, mortality, and future-shock anxiety, while at the same time leaving us plenty of space to enjoy one of the most complexly unhinged villains in Bond history."
Where to watch Skyfall: Netflix
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