As far as I’m able to tell, there are three James Bonds that should have never been James Bond. George Lazenby shouldn’t have been James Bond because he wasn’t a good enough actor, and Timothy Dalton shouldn’t have been James Bond because he was too good an actor. And then there’s Pierce Brosnan.
Pierce Brosnan shouldn’t have been James Bond because, to put it simply, he isn’t James Bond. James Bond is smooth and unflappable. His trademark is the cooly wry quip, often delivered at the point of actual murder. James Bond is bulletproof, but Pierce Brosnan is not bulletproof. Take Bond out of the equation, and his best characters tend to be those whose superficial sheen of confidence can barely mask the surging torrent of spitting batshittery that lies beneath.
Think of The Matador, where his ice-cold assassin suddenly started walking around in his underwear for no real reason. Think of Taffin, which would have been Get Carter were it not for Brosnan’s berserk propensity for yelling at the top of his voice. Think Mamma Mia, where Brosnan plays a wealthy, swaggering architect who also happens to have a singing voice that sounds like a buffalo being rabbit-punched in the gonads. In essence, Pierce Brosnan is Nicolas Cage in a tuxedo.
For proof, Brosnan has two big new projects to shore up his credentials as the most Pierce Brosnanny guy in town. His most recent film, IT, is pure Brosnan candy delivered straight to the veins. In it, Brosnan plays a man in a suit who quickly unravels when a hacker uses the internet to, I don’t know, spy on his daughter in the shower or whatever. The film contains a scene where Brosnan tries to fight back against the entire internet by smashing up an iPad with a baseball bat. That’s what sort of a film it is. It is glorious.
But for longer-term Brosnan fetishists, he now also has a TV series. AMC’s The Son has all the surface trappings of prestige drama: it’s based on a novel, it’s set in the past and it has facial hair that’s both rampant and indiscriminate – but its centrepiece is a fundamentally Pierce Brosnanny Pierce Brosnan role. Brosnan plays Eli McCullough, a classic white male antihero in a television climate that’s just got sick of white-male antiheroes. McCullough owns a cattle ranch. He’s a bit racist. He is the picture of untrammeled privilege in a world determined to upend itself. On paper, The Son must have looked like Pierce Brosnan’s chance to play Daniel Plainview. But that isn’t the case, because Pierce Brosnan is Pierce Brosnan, and at some point he has to open his mouth.
Just look at the trailer for The Son. It’s one minute and five seconds long, and yet I managed to count four different accents coming out of Brosnan’s face. There’s the classic rumbling, murmuring Texan antihero that you’d expect, but there’s also a full-blooded southern preacher in there too. After about 36 seconds, he becomes Bill Clinton. But then, inexplicably, he’s Tom Hardy’s Bane as well. In terms of accents, not only is Brosnan failing to hit a barn door with a banjo, but he’s also running in the opposite direction of the barn door, and the banjo is on fire, plus he’s choking on a stranger’s shoelace at the same time.
This is the curse of Pierce Brosnan. By rights, he should be an indie darling. He should be Christopher Walken, tricking people time and time again with his unconventional choices, keeping us all on our toes, making us wonder what he’ll do next. But he’s got James Bond’s face. He was born with a conventionally, ridiculously handsome face and hair so thick and luxurious that you could use it as cavity wall insulation. Pierce Brosnan is a world-beating character actor who is unlucky enough to live inside the body of a leading man. And that, forever, will be his undoing. We can only pray he transitions soon.
The Son starts 9pm ETC Sunday on AMC
