Martin Campbell understands Bond better than any other director. He pushed Brosnan to be cold and intense. Dalton and Lazenby were both too precious at times. If Lazenby had just not tried to emote at all OHMSS would have been 10 times better. Look at how much mileage Hitchcock could get out of telling his actors not to act.
I actually think OHMSS gets unfairly maligned. It really isn't that bad a film. Naturally, there's the invidious comparison between Connery and Lazenby, but for a totally inexperienced and (as I understand) largely untrained actor, Lazenby is serviceable. OHMSS is also practically scene-for-scene a remake of the book, with only a few differences that I can recall. It even ignores stuff that happened in the Bond film franchise (IE: having met Blofeld once already, so the "Sir Hillary Bray" thing makes ZERO sense). As such, I think audiences were completely caught by surprise at a Bond who is one of the closest to "Book Bond", who was remorseful, who could cry, who could fall in love, etc. To them, Bond was Connery, and Connery's Bond was a badass man's man who threaten to spank Moneypenny (and who knew she'd enjoy it, anyway), a love 'em and leave 'em type who could just as easily beat the snot out of a henchman, and then shoot another and say "You've had your seven."
Then you get Lazenby saying "This never happened to the other fellow." Cue record scratch sound effect.
Brosnan seems like a fun guy but his persona for me was just an update of the Roger Moore "smoothie", as my mum would say. And some of his clothes were just far too silly. Thought he was great in the Taylor of Panama though.
I think that aspect was more about the directors and scriptwriters. As I understand it, it was Brosnan's idea to have Bond get captured at the start of DAD and to show his torture. Brosnan really pushed to make Bond less of "Mr. Smooth" and more of a complex character (granted, not super-complex, just MORE than he'd been in the past). But at the same time, you had the pressures to throw in gadgets, sight gags, quips, and other "Bondisms."
Basically, I think it took DAD and all of its extreme awfulness (in spite of Brosnan's excellent suggestion -- the title sequence up until he meets Q and re-arms is an honestly good sequence in the film) to make the producers realize that the old formula just wasn't working anymore. They'd wrung the life out of it. It took all of that to get us to Casino Royale, which in my mind is one of THE best Bond films to date.
