5. Dean Martin as Matt Helm
4. Roger Moore as 007
3. Vin Diesel as Xander Cage
2. Sean Connery as 007
1. James Coburn as Derrick Flint

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favrefan said:"Chris Coghlan isn't gonna pay your rent, Jimmy."

I don't know about naming a single spy, but, besides the Bond films, some of my favorite movies off the top of my head are:

Kingsmen: Secret Service
Ronin
Mission: Impossible (the first one from the mid-90's)
Three Days of the Condor
Patriot Games

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I like thinking big. . . If you're going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.
-Donald J. Trump, BPE

Does Gene Hackman in The Conversation count?

5. Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan (Red October)
4. Robert Redford as Joseph Turner (Condor)
3. Robert Redford as Nathan Muir (Spy Game)
2. Pierce Brosnan as James Bond (GoldenEye - WiNE)
1. Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan (Patriot Games, CaPD)

Honorable Mention: Mike Myers as Austin Powers, Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan, Matt Damon as Jason Bourne

5. Arnold Schwarzenegger as Harry Tasker in True Lies
4. Sean Connery as John Mason in The Rock
3. Colin Firth as Harry Hart in Kingsman: The Secret Service
2. Robert Redford as Joe “Condor” Turner in Three Days of the Condor
1. Sean Connery as James Bond

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5: Patriot Games
4: Syriana
3: Goldfinger
2: True Lies
1: The Hunt for Red October


I was always disappointed that "The Cardinal of the Kremlin" never got made into a film. It was Clancy's best work. Alec Baldwin was also by far the best Jack Ryan or at least the closest actor to how I would imagine him in the books.

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

Harrison Ford as a better Jack Ryan than Baldwin? I'm going to have to ask why.

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

Because he did the "aw, shucks", fumbling Jack Ryan routine better than any other to play the character (walking into the women's restroom in Patriot Games, negotiating for the Huey in CaPD). Clancy wrote Ryan as a regular guy put in extraordinary circumstances, and I think Ford got at that characteristic better than Baldwin. Don't get me wrong, Baldwin was fantastic, and I would have loved to see what he could do with the character outside the confines of a submarine (his "you sonofa BITCH!" was great), I just think Ford had more of those moments, and played it as the regular guy Jack Ryan was supposed to be. IMO they should have signed Ford for 2 more pictures right after CaPD's success and gone right into Debt of Honor and Executive Orders, as Ford was at the perfect age for that era of Jack Ryan.

5. Richard Burton (The Spy who came in from the cold)
4. Redford (condor)
3. Gary Oldman (tinker tailor soldier spy)
2. Connery (007)
1. Michael Caine (Harry Palmer)

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

Ford was fine, but I felt that Baldwin just better captured the character. I had a hard time viewing Ryan as a regular guy who falls into the situations as he clearly isn't a regular guy. He makes millions in a brokerage both before joining the CIA in Patriot Games and during his time away from it after Sum of All Fears. I just felt Baldwin had the right level of youth (Ryan is 31 in Patriot Games so he's 34 in HfRO), assertiveness, confidence, and that small bit of naivete that comes from his inexperience in bureaucracies.

As for the films, Debt of Honor and Executive Orders probably had too much in them to ever be effectively put on a screen, unless you give them a "War and Remembrance" type mini-series. Just too much is happening in those books to be condensed into a single film.

I would say we got robbed of a Without Remorse film as we all deserved the chance to see John Kelly going on a rampage in Baltimore.

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

Always thought without remorse would have made a fantastic movie. The later Jack Ryan books not so much but could have made Cardinal of The Kremlin probably.

I hear this a lot, and it has been awhile since my last re-read of them (I liked Clancy better without an editor; Give me 1600 pages, fine, I love it), but I think people might overestimate just how many pages Clancy spent on inane shit (again, sans-editorial review at that point), like the intricacies of the Japanese real estate market and the Wall Street coup. There's like 200 pages in that book devoted solely to Clancy's economic views that can be scrapped entirely, and covered in 30 seconds of screen time, MAYBE necessitating a scene with a big infodump. Didn't he devote an entire chapter in Executive Orders to the new Treasury Chair's performance in front of Congress vis a vis the tax code? And all the Ed Kealty shit can just be scrapped.

Anyway, I get you not buying Ryan as a strict everyman given his financial success, but Clancy spent so much time on Cathy's father's hatred of him alone that I sort of bought into dismissing his wealth as a function of his casual brilliance (a forerunner to the "smartest guy in the room" trope that is just now starting to phase out in television) rather than...egh...some kind of privilege.

5. Tom Cruz - Mission Impossible I
4. Clint Eastwood - Firefox
3. Sean Connery - Goldfinger, Never Say Never Again
2. Roger Moore (R.I.P.) - For Your Eyes Only, Moonraker
1. Edward Fox - Day of the Jackal

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Am I the only one who thinks Daniel Craig is the second best Bond? I know his presence has resulted in a shift of the character of the movies, but I like the shift.

I also liked Pierce Brosnan. He is what Bond would look like in my mind if you were to design one from scratch.

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

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"The Lightworker", starring Barry Obama. He pulled off the biggest spying job in American history. An future historian will no doubt be appalled. But not yet. Too many ignorant white people still won't touch his Obamanations.

Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years
http://circa.com/politics/barack-obamas ... -americans
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The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.
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The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017.

The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.
(much, much more at the link)

Now we can understand some of the idiotic fervor of the DC leftists who seem frantic to tar The Duck of Death.


"can you help me"--them that was wronged
"no"--US Congress


#LockHimUp

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Obama's Legacy is Trump.
And dead cops.

"One guy lays the pipe, the other guy smokes it"--Clint Eastwood

It's wasn't a great movie, but I loved Val Kilmer in The Saint. I probably like it too much because of the soundtrack.

When Dalton got the part, I had thought that Brosnan should have received it, yet, after he finally did, I was entirely underwhelmed by his performance in the role.

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I like thinking big. . . If you're going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.
-Donald J. Trump, BPE

If Brosnan got the role when Dalton did he would have been great. By the time Brosnan got the role, I think he had lost his wife to cancer and had other life issues. The guy seemed to have no energy and desire as bond. It was like he was mailing it in. I remember back when he was doing Remington Steele they had him warpped up to be the next Bond but NBC woudln't let him out of his contract. He was young and full of energy during those Remington Steele years and he would have been more of a Connery bond if he got the role then. When he got the role I think he was trying to be more like a Dalton bond which didn't really fit his acting style.

Kevin Costner in No Way Out

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I'm on #TeamCraig as well. He is the clear runner up to Connery for me.

I agree with Panther.

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Elections have consequences.

That really was a great movie. Also, if he wasn't too busy making dumb movies after that he would have been a great Jack Ryan.

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Elections have consequences.

Ronin is a great movie.

Can't go wrong when you have John Frankenheimer as Director, a still-in-his-prime Robert De Niro as lead, Jean Reno, Natascha McElhone, Stellan Skarsgård, Sean Bean, Jonathan Pryce, and written by David Mamet (under a pseudonym).

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I like thinking big. . . If you're going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big.
-Donald J. Trump, BPE

Truth

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Yeah, I'm in this boat, too...

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Malkovich as Ozzie Cox in Burn After Reading
Patinkin as Saul Berenson in Homeland
Damon as Jason Bourne

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"It's not exactly a rocket surgery." D.J.