Pierce Brosnan was great at portraying James Bond in films. He's not quite as skilled at playing Bond in GoldenEye 007, though.
Brosnan was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last night. Fallon decided to challenge him to a duel in the game based on 1995 Bond movie GoldenEye. They didn't play the recent HD remake. Instead, Fallon managed to scrounge up an old N64 and a rather pristine-looking copy of the game.
The match, a power weapons duel between James Bond and Alec Trevelyan, didn't go so hot. It's pretty clear that Brosnan didn't get a chance to practice the game beforehand so he just sort off fumbled around for a minute. I'm sure the knowledge that millions of people were watching him made the learning process even more fun.
The poor guy didn't even find a weapon before Fallon gunned him down. C'mon, Jimmy, shooting an unarmed man is against the GoldenEye code of honor. In terms of distastefulness, it's up there with picking Oddjob as your character. I guess that's the silver lining for Brosnan: he lost the match but at least he didn't break any of the unofficial rules of conduct for the game - not that he knows any of them.
Brosnan was on the show to promote The November Man. In the film, he plays an ex-CIA agent who comes back for one last mission. This job forces him to go head-to-head with his old protege. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess there's no video game duel in the movie. The film will be out on August 27th.
Fallon's tradition of showcasing video games stretches back to his time as host of Late Night. He seems to do it even more now that he's on the Tonight Show. For example, here's him demoing the Wii U last summer.
"We're going to treat a video game premiere as if it was a movie premiere," Fallon said years back about his attitude toward games. "My generation grew up with the computer. We grew up with the Internet. We live in a video game type of world - video games are second nature to us."
His tradition of making celebrities awkwardly play said games is just as long. For example, he dueled Channing Tatum with the PS4's virtual reality headset this summer. Tatum fared a bit better than Brosnan did, though.
