And the same character played him in Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace.
I don't really understand Jeff Albertson's condemning of Pierce Brosnan. When Goldeneye came out everybody was saying how good he was as Bond after the embarrassment that Roger Moore had become and the non-Bond like adventure that the second Timothy Dalton film was - chasing a drug dealer for revenge rather than stopping a megalomaniac from trying to rule/destroy the world.
Pierce Brosnan did nothing wrong - what let down his final three movies ultimately was the crap baddies. Elliot Carver was a nothing baddie who just sat in his tower pressing buttons on an ipod and making up newspaper articles, Hamish Macbeth and that French girl were totally forgettable, and the Korean guy who became the posh English guy was rubbish. And the reason that Pierce Brosnan had rubbish baddies to combat is because the movies were not based on original novels - the scripts for the films were written just for the movies, with no original novel to be even remotely based upon.
But Pierce Brosnan had both the suave and sophistication that "the gentleman spy" should have had, whilst also being tough enough to fight/shoot his enemies without wincing (a la Roger Moore). Daniel Craig is very tough, no doubt about it, but comes across as a bit of a thug - not a very James Bond like character at all. He looks out of place whenever he puts his tux on.
Casino Royale impressed everybody (or at least most people) because it was based on a James Bond novel, even if the script of the movie was massively adjusted to bring it up to date, the characters and the plot were defined in a book written fifty years ago.
Quantum of Solace is not based on a book - it is a title lifted from Ian Fleming, but the script was written solely for the production of this movie. And that is why it felt a bit flat - it was just a lot of (very impressive) stunts with no real meaning, and perhaps the least impressive baddie ever. Nick Nack was more frightening than Dominic Greene.
I enjoyed it - but it wasn't really a Bond film. Just a big action revenge movie, and you don't need to be James Bond to go seeking revenge. Maybe the demise or disappearance of everybody who had anything to do with the earlier Bond movies (i.e. no more Cubby Brocolli, no more John Stears, no more Peter Lamont, no more Ken Adam, no more Vic Armstrong, no more John Glen, no more Q, no more Moneypenny) has finally broken any links to the original movies - and that break has meant both good things and bad things have been lost.
