That's right, Britain's most famous secret agent was dogged by funding problems, but now that's all been sorted out and we have Skyfall, the film we've been waiting years for, where Bond throws off the shackles of his gritty reinvention and gets really fucking confused about exactly what's meant to be happening where, and why, and in fact what has already happened in his own goddamn internal timeline.
Scuse me?
See, Casino Royale was good, I mean it was good. Granted, it was based on a Fleming novel. I liked Quantum Of Solace too, I've no idea how much of the original short story it contained as I haven't read that, but while it has its detractors I am not one of them. So I thought the team behind Bond might have actually hit their stride on this one. Unfortunately, I am not convinced that they have. The plots of the other two Daniel Craig vehicles made sense... perhaps not in a real-life, real-world way all the time (because we know that MI6 doesn't work like the Bond movies depict it working), but you knew where you were. LeChiffre was gambling to make a return on the investments of warlords and the money was funding the organisation we came to know as Quantum. Dominic Greene was controlling the utilities in Bolivia to extort money from the government and make more money for Quantum. The plot of Skyfall is very different, and indeed rather disappointing in comparison.
"First two films were good, third one disappoints? Yeah, I can relate."
The film starts in Turkey where someone has nicked a hard drive from a laptop. We learn that this hard drive contains a list of all NATO agents undercover in terrorist organisations, to which I ask: WHY was this list ON A LAPTOP IN TURKEY? This is a list that is surely made up of information which could be collated on a computer in London. It's never explained why they need to be in Turkey. Even if you need a piece of information from Turkey, why you'd need to take the ENTIRE FUCKING LIST with you is completely beyond me.
OK, let's move on. Someone kills the agents, nicks the list. Bond and Moneypenny (as she is eventually revealed to be) give chase. The bloke they're chasing fires using a handgun with some sort of massive double magazine on the bottom. Remember this, it links to a point I will be making later. Bond chases him onto a train, gets shot in the upper right of the chest but not slowed down much (really?), then they end up fighting on the roof. Moneypenny has a shot, not a clear one, M tells her to take it. She shoots and hits Bond.
Two questions: Firstly, having hit Bond, why not then use another shot to kill the other guy? If the list is that important, don't rely on one 50/50 shot, hose the roof down and kill both of them, have done with. Secondly, since Bond heard M give the order, why the fuck didn't he break off and run away to let Moneypenny have a clear shot? "You should have trusted me to finish the job" he says to her later, but come on. That'd be like confronting a bigger, stronger, faster villain with just your fists when the existence of a city is at stake and one gunshot could get rid of him easily.
"Look, I can totally explain that."
Aaaaaanyway. Bond pretends to be dead for a while but comes back when someone blows up MI6. He fails his tests to go back onto active duty but M passes him anyway for... no apparent reason, really. He then digs out the shrapnel from the gunshot inflicted by Train Chase Guy and tells someone to analyse it. It's a depleted uranium round, very rare, only used by three people.
Um.
You remember that part about the MASSIVE magazine on the bottom of the handgun? Were they ALL depleted uranium rounds? They don't sound that rare to me, in that case. Now, if it was a single round from a sniper rifle then OK, I could buy it, although I'm not sure why you'd need depleted uranium anyway. But this guy was shooting the things off like they were going out of fashion, where did he get all that uranium from?
"Did someone say uranium?"
Yeah, could be.
Bond's gets sent to Hong Kong, finds the shooter again, kills him without getting the information he needs about who hired him (I seem to remember this being a problem in the last movie too) and then bumps into a girl marked for death who works for the someone who's behind all this. You can tell she's marked for death because she has long fingernails, and Fleming hated long fingernails on a woman. Seriously, you read the original novels, all the long fingernail girls die, Bond gets with the short fingernail girls. It seems this tradition has been carried on.
"I won't apply for a role, then?"
There's a fight in a casino and some awesome Komodo dragon action, but there's your hint that we're slipping back into the old ways; grisly henchman deaths via vicious creatures, anyone? There's a reason Mike Myers parodied that in the Austin Powers movies. Bond heads off out to the island lair of the bad guy, which looks oddly familiar to me.
I don't see why Bond didn't just let Sly and his team deal with
this fellow, since they were in the area anyway.
The bad guy's an ex-agent called Thiago Rodrigues. M gave him up the the Chinese because he'd been a naughty boy and gotten too enthusiastic about spying on them. They tortured him and his cyanide capsule disfigured him but didn't kill him. In fact it burned a lot of his mouth away (left his tongue intact, strangely enough) and he has to wear a false teeth/upper jaw thing. When he takes it out, his face is ruined. Hmm, former government figure who has been disfigured and now has a grievance against the people he used to work alongside?
Anyway, Bond manages to capture him (not saving marked-for-death girl in the process - he said he'd help her but kind of failed at that) and takes him back to London. Only it turns out he WANTS to be captured and has in fact set up a system in his laptop which New Q (who previously asked Bond "what were you expecting, an exploding pen? We don't really do that sort of thing anymore", see, that's self-referential comedy there folks) decodes only to find that it opens all the doors in MI6's new headquarters.
I can't help but feel that he should be presenting Never Mind The Buzzcocks.
So... the bad guy has been captured, but actually he wants to be captured and this was part of his whole grand plan all along?
"I believe you'll find that's my schtick."
From here the film descends from the unlikely into the farcical as Bond rescues M from an assassination attempt by Rodrigues whilst dressed as a policeman-
"Seriously, I'm going to sue in a minute."
-with no explanation of why or how he's managed to buy off half the Metropolitan Police Force so he can get given a change of clothes or drive around in one of their cars.
"I mean, at least when I did that I could sort of explain it by having
taken advantage of the mentally unstable and easily suggestible."
Bond takes M and they change from her car into an Aston Martin DB7, and when she complains about the suspension he flicks the gearstick up to reveal a red button and threatens to eject her. Funny? Yes. Distracting? YES! So are we saying that this is the same Bond that went after Goldfinger in the 60s, because he has that car and knows its tricks? Even though that Bond was reporting to an M who had a Miss Moneypenny, and now Bond's meeting Moneypenny for the first time? If you're going to be self-referential then you need consistency. Even if you're running the logic that actually 'James Bond' is a codename then it beggars belief there could be two Miss Moneypennys. Besides which, Bond isn't a codename because they go back to his parents' home of Skyfall, and there at one point we see the gravestone of his parents, both of whom have the surname 'Bond'.
"Do you expect me to talk, Goldfinger?"
"No Mr. Bond, I expect you to have some respect for your own damn timeline."
In the meantime, New Q is laying a 'trail of breadcrumbs' with the approval of Ralph Fiennes as George Mallory so that Rodrigues can follow them to Skyfall. Now, I get the logic of going to Scotland... sort of. Rodrigues has demonstrated that he can turn the systems against them, so you go somewhere there's no systems, merely a house and a moor. I get that. Why the hell you wouldn't organise some sort of military response to shoot the bastard when he catches up though, I don't know. Also, WHAT IS THE TRAIL OF BREADCRUMBS? We get absolutely no information on what this is. Pictures? Traffic camera images? False radio messages? Nothing. But somehow they lay a trail that 'only Rodrigues could follow' to lead him to Bond's ancestral home.
Long story short, Bond fails at keeping M alive. Oh, it's dragged out somewhat with lots of explosions and the like, but essentially she dies anyway, although he kills Rodrigues too. Seems kind of a wasted journey really, just so gay Two-Face/Joker with fake mummy issues can sort of succeed at what he sets out to do. That's nought out of two for Bond trying to keep women alive in this movie, although the fact that he gets shot by one might sort of even the score, I'm not entirely sure.
Anyway, at the end of it all Bond is still active, Moneypenny's taken a desk job and George Mallory has taken the role as M. So we have Ralph Fiennes in charge of MI6.
I'm fairly sure this can't be a good thing.
No wait, he's wearing a suit and has a nose and everything.
I'm not entirely certain that's an improvement.
Overall, Skyfall is certainly watchable, but it's a long way from the masterpiece of cinema that everyone's been hailing it as. It's a little too self-referential for Bond's 50th anniversary, and has tried to have a complex plot without addressing the plot holes in it. Granted, plot holes are not exactly unknown in Bond films but this is the gritty, realistic New Bond which has led us to raise our expectations of a movie's feasibility. It feels worryingly like we're slipping back towards steel-jawed villains and space lasers, and while that was fun... we've done that already.
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