The movie Pierce Brosnan wouldn’t make again: “One was enough”
It goes without saying that Pierce Brosnan isn’t a stranger to franchises. Most people have seen 1995’s GoldenEye, which is generally considered the best James Bond flick of the ’90s. He kept playing Bond until 2002’s Die Another Day, that and the films between were… James Bond movies. That’s the nicest thing one can say about them, given that they are a tenure of blemish on the entire brand.
No one likes them, although some of the actors will defend their characters in movies that were considered mediocre by fans and critics alike. They kind of blend together in your head with only the embarrassing moments sticking out—James Bond paraskiing in the Arctic, for example—lodged in your brain. But he stuck with it for a while after GoldenEye. Not for as long as Richard Moore did, as the quality of his films descended quicker than George Lazenby’s skiing, but you can’t fault his commitment.
Brosnan was familiar with the serial before being tapped as Bond. He rose to prominence as an actor in the 1980s’ Remington Steele, a quippy TV show in which Brosnan plays a con man covering for Stephanie Zimbalist’s detective agency because no one will hire a woman to solve crimes. But Brosnan had other roles, too.
Ahead of GoldenEye, Brosnan starred in 1992’s The Lawnmower Man, which was a bit of an oddball. It was supposed to be an adaptation of a Stephen King short story from 1975 about decadent perverts worshipping the ancient Greek Satyr Pan to run a lawncare service of all things, but the film turned into its own thing.
The Lawnmower Man, directed by Brett Leonard, follows Brosnan as a mad scientist intoxicated with the power and potential of his own discoveries (you know the type) who decides to experiment on a guy who cuts grass and trims hedges for a living, played by Jeff Fahey. Superpowers, including but not limited to mind-reading and telekinesis, are bestowed upon our simple-minded gardener, and he decides he wants to be a computer or something along those lines.
Speaking with Movieline, Brosnan was asked if he had “reflected at all on why it took The Lawnmower Man, a sci-fi thriller, for you to have your first movie hit?”. He responded: “The Lawnmower Man came at a time when people were just beginning to hear about virtual reality. It came out at the right time. They’ve made a sequel, but I was involved with the Bond film.” And he’s right; every generation has its own version of technological anxieties as society advances and accelerates.
On the subject of the viability of further instalments, Brosnan tersely answered: “One was enough.” Although the film did well commercially, it was not received well by critics. The sequel did even worse in both categories, and Stephen King filed a lawsuit against the production company over copyright marginalia, so Pierce Brosnan probably served himself and the public well to go on to make bad James Bond movies instead. It’s more dignified.
