The burnt-out hit man Pierce Brosnan plays in “The Matador” cowers in a stairwell after another botched job, reduced to tears, blubbering: “I’m a wreck. I’m a parody.”

The 52-year-old actor appreciates how those words might have haunted his real-life career if he hadn’t been cashiered from Bond.

“I certainly connected with the line. It’s rife with sweet irony,” Brosnan says. “I certainly didn’t want to become a parody.”

But, as he puts it, “That problem got solved without me having to do anything” – except take a phone call informing him that after four James Bond movies, his services were no longer needed.

“You know going into that gig that someday the door is going to close on it. You’re not sure when. And you’ve seen guys who kind of stayed too long on the stage and then you saw ones that just kind of came and went in the blink of an eye,” he notes. (Roger Moore and George Lazenby, anyone?)

While he admittedly was miffed at first, Brosnan is now glad he got 86’d from 007.

“With the chapter of Bond past now, there is a wonderful sense of liberation and freedom from having to carry that part,” he says. “You have more ownership of your life and the direction your life is going to go and choices of parts. And ‘The Matador’ is kind of a really wonderful transitional time.”

Brosnan’s Julian Noble does act like a vulgarian – the antithesis of so many of his debonair, sophisticated characters – although “The Matador” begins as any Bond film might: He wakes up next to a beautiful woman he clearly hasn’t known for more than a few hours.

Then he takes her nail polish and paints his toenails.

He later struts through a hotel lobby wearing nothing but boots and black briefs, cigarette in one hand, beer in the other, before plunging into a pool. He comes face to face with a shark, which makes no attempt to devour him. Professional courtesy, perhaps?

While Brosnan has played a dissolute, amoral character before (in 2001’s “The Tailor of Panama”) he’s getting the biggest raves of his career. He received a Golden Globe nomination, and topped The Associated Press’ list of top 10 overlooked performances of 2005.

Richard Shepard, writer-director of “The Matador,” was intrigued by the possibility of having Brosnan play the inappropriately named Noble precisely because “in the past almost every character he has played, Bond, Remington Steele, Thomas Crown, have always been characters in absolute control, and Julian, while appearing in control, is a complete mess.”

Casting him paid off, he says. “Ultimately he found a heart in Julian that was only hinted at in the script. He found his soul. And because of that, he took a completely unlikeable character and somehow gets the audience to root for him. It’s an amazing achievement.”