SKYFALL

The best Bond movie in the last ten years was probably X-Men: First Class or maybe Michel Hazanavicius's deft parodies OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies and OSS 117: Lost in Rio.  The last three Bond films have been surgical procedures, designed to remove any last trace of fun, color, or personality from a franchise built on them.  In this film, right from the beginning I knew I was in trouble.  Bond opens a door and finds a room full of bloody murdered agents.  Ah, the childish fun of a Bond movie!

The story is hogwash but not the wonderful escapist hogwash that fueled decades of worldwide adventures.  Bond and M’s surrogate parent-child relationship takes center stage at about the time you remember Bond used to bed ladies named Pussy Galore, Plenty O’Toole, Holly Goodhead and Xenia Onatopp.  M’s previous surrogate son, a goofy Javier Bardem, shows up to whine about Mommy not loving him enough and Bond has to prove he’s the better son and that he loves Mommy more.  

I never thought what made James Bond so great was his loving relationship with his superiors.  The amount of Judi Dench love in this movie is staggering.  She won her Oscar for a movie where she barely appeared, and this film feels the total of all her other appearances.  If she’s not in a scene, they’re cutting back to her so we know what’s she doing, usually in freakish extreme close-up in case you were wondering what the wrinkles between her nose and mouth were doing.  Update: they are still staring back directly into my soul.

It always bugs me to see foreigners as intelligence agency employees in American and English spy films, especially since they quite frequently seem to be traitors.  You know who might have questionable allegiance to England?  The guy who’s not English.  The villain here, Raoul Silva, manages to disguise himself as Metropolitan Policeman in London despite being an enormous, bleach blond, mincing Spaniard.

I know a James Bond film is not the place to go for strict continuity but timeline issues were distracting me in this one.  During this film, they say Judi Dench’s M was running Hong Kong in the 90’s just before the handover.  But...  no she wasn’t.  She was already M in the 90’s in four different films.  So this M, played by Judi Dench, is not the same as the other M played by Judi Dench?  Then why the hell didn’t they recast M when they started the Craig series?

The villain this time is an offensive stereotype (Bond hasn’t fought one of those in years!) with poorly defined powers and plans.  Javier Bardem blows up M’s office so she’ll get called before a hearing so he can shoot her.  Bond ruins this Swiss watch of a plan by shooting fire extinguishers that fill the room with magic movie gas so Bardem can’t make his shot.  The only thing I liked about this villain was his music taste: he plays Charles Trenet’s Boum and then later John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom Boom.

Midway through the film, there is a dramatic close up of Q’s face: ‘We’ve been hacked.’  Yeah no shit, it happened earlier in the movie when M’s office got blowed up real good and you called it ‘cyber-terrorism’ because...  I’m not sure.  They keep calling Bardem a ‘cyber-terrorist’ but he seems to do things pretty much the old-fashioned way with guns, bombs, helicopters, false teeth, etc.  Hell, he even steals the NOC list by hiring another guy to shoot up a room full of people and rip a hard drive out of a laptop.

The Redemption of Bond story angle lost me.  First, Bond gets a tiny scar.  Suddenly, he is a terrible agent according to all the fancy agent tests MI6 make him take, despite the fact he still looks and acts like an unstoppable kill-droid.  At the end of the story, he kidnaps M, takes her to his house to keep her safe from assassins, she winds up dead at the hands of assassins, so of course he returns home to... a hero’s welcome?  They said he was terrible even though he still did everything great, but then when he finally does rightly cock up a situation, everybody loves him again.  I think maybe he drowned and the end of the film is just a dream.

For my money, the joyless Bond who rarely quips, and even more rarely quips anything that makes any bloody sense, is the worst Bond.  Smile, you fuck!  You’re a globetrotting hard-drinking hard-partying every-lady-bedding adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasy.  This isn’t Tinker Tailor, you poncy twats!

At least he enjoyed the movie

  
~ A frozen pond near the end of the movie might as well have a sign ‘The old contrivance pond’.  Is it winter?  I didn’t see any snow.  They were in London the day before and... whatever, seasons are fair game in Bond i guess,

~ Bond fought an ambiguously gay hitman duo named Mr Wint and Mr Kidd in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever but that was over 40 years ago.  It feels out of place here.  I kept waiting for Bond to drop a racial slur or pine for the disenfranchisement of women.

~ Speaking of quips I do not understand: Bond lets a henchman get eaten by an enormous komodo dragon, then hands a briefcase full of money to a woman and says “Put it all on red. (pause) Circle of life.”  Is that a roulette joke?  A Lion King joke?  What's going on?  Why is my nose bleeding?

~ Speaking of the komodo dragon, its appearance comes courtesy of terrible CGI, which made me fondly recall the days when Bond interacted with all manner of real animals, from Alligator to Elephant to Octopussy.

~ Javier Bardem won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and now he’s a bleach blond Bond villain... just like Christopher Walken in A View To A Kill.

~ I liked the song.

~ Skyfall AKA Freud meets Bond. Tagline: Whoever wins, we lose. 

~ The most entertaining part of the film for me was pronouncing the title so it rhymed with Eiffel.

~ As for ranking the Bonds, which everybody has to do, I guess I can put my two cents in.  I put Lazenby and Dalton in a special category of also-rans because they only had one and two films respectively to make their mark which just isn’t enough.  Craig is current so he gets a pass from ranking, and the more I learn about the 60’s version of Casino Royale, the less I understand, so all those Bonds get a pass too.  TV Bonds, Book Bonds, Cartoon Bonds, Videogame Bonds, any other Bonds are also excluded.  So with all that out of the way, I guess it goes Connery, Brosnan, Moore.

~ The film features clumsy reintroductions of excised elements from the Bond Mythos... so maybe the next one will be different?

~ I don’t know how many bad Bond movies in a row it would take to get me to abandon the series.  Ten?

~ Of all the exotic locales that could feature in a Bond film, sorry Scotland, you weren’t on my list. 

~ What was I saying about sucking the color out of these films?  Here's an quote from director Sam Mendes where he says of Javier Bardem: "I worked very hard to persuade him to be colourless."  He admitted it!  I'm not imagining things!  The Bond-puppet-masters officially hate fun.