Bond back from the dead

FILM REVIEW

Skyfall
DIRECTED BY: Sam Mendes
STARRING: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes
CERT: 12A

When Pierce Brosnan’s 007 started tearing around in an invisible Aston Martin ten years ago, it was clear that all concerned would have to sit down and have a good long think about how a great old franchise had come to this.

Bond has had a lot of dodgy moments over the years but few worse than that. Out of ideas and with modern espionage heroes like Jason Bourne breathing down his neck, it was perhaps time for James to seriously consider going into retirement.

Instead, he was reinvented as a tougher, grittier secret agent, with Daniel Craig stepping into the role, complete with permanent scowl and completely void of personality. His first outing, Casino Royale, was about as exciting as a coat of grey paint on a shed. But even that was a riot of fun compared with his last adventure, Quantum of Solace, without doubt the worst Bond movie ever, a film so bad it makes Die Another Day and its mad invisible car seem like the height of sophisticated fun and entertainment.

Maybe it would have been better if he’d taken out the pension after all. Or if someone had taken him up a dark alley and put him out of our misery. But wait, what’s this? Is it a stay of execution coming over the hill, just in time for James Bond’s 50th anniversary? It just might be.

Certainly Skyfall starts with a bang, a wild gallop through Istanbul that ends with James Bond (Craig) falling to his death from the roof of a moving train, a bullet in his chest.
Cue the credits sequence, where the dancing girls of old are replaced by somewhat more grim images, with skulls and tombstones filling the screen, just in case you didn’t get the idea. That’s a new direction, but Adele’s classy theme song is an old-fashioned touch, a very nice reminder of the Shirley Bassey days.

Now, I don’t think I’m giving the game away when I say that 007 doesn’t stay dead. That wouldn’t do at all, unless you were hoping for a five-minute movie and after Quantum of Solace, I wouldn’t blame you. Besides, it wouldn’t be the first time Bond has risen from the dead. If he could survive a close encounter with a fold-away bed and a thousand bullets in You Only Live Twice, he’d be some kind of softie if he died on us now.

He’s not his old self, mind you, a bit worse for wear, a bit of the old sharpness gone out of him. Besides a touch of death, there’s a few good reasons for that.
MI6 is not the same, either. His boss M (Dench) is on the rack over the loss of a top-secret list of agents embedded in terrorist organisations. Rival head honcho Gareth Mallory (Fiennes) is looking for her head.

While M is fighting to save her professional skin, Bond is off gallivanting, hunting down cyber-terrorist Raoul Silva (Bardem), who’s threatening dangerous things with this newly-acquired list of his, though his motives are far less grand than world domination or the conquest of space. It’s a tad closer to home than that.

In the course of wining and gambling his way to the showdown, Bond makes the age-old move of cavorting with the villain’s woman Severine (Bérénice Marlohe). He’d be letting the side down if he didn’t, though this kind of thing never ends well for the girl. For a while it looks like it might not end too nicely for Mr Bond either.
There’s a lot of good stuff here, starting with Bond himself. Daniel Craig looks like he’s starting to relax into the role and it helps that he’s got a script that allows him to have more fun than he’s used to.

As Silva, Javier Bardem is a formidable foe, the finest Bond villain in a long while, though never quite as menacing as he was in No Country For Old Men. To be fair, few screen villains are.

It goes without saying there’s plenty of action and it’s very good stuff, even nowadays when it seems like there isn’t a wild action scene that hasn’t been done already. What’s more enjoyable is the occasional Bond in-joke, references to older films – all part of the 50th birthday bash I presume. There’s also a particularly fine nod to one of the more memorable Bond gadgets.

Speaking of gizmos, there aren’t too many new ones on show, but Q (Ben Whishaw) is certainly fresh, several generations younger than most of his predecessors. It’s an interesting touch, though the kid really doesn’t bring much to the party.

For the most part, director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road) has done a decent job, ably assisted by production designer Dennis Gassner and cinematographer Roger Deakins, who make the whole thing look fantastic.

Where Mendes and his writers (Neal Purvis and Robert Wade) fall down is in virtually handing the central role to Judi Dench, taking an ill-advised page out of Christopher Nolan’s book and giving Bond an emotional history, saddling the poor man with all kinds of mammy issues. This of course involves a lot of silly talk, sincere old guff, and at one point a bizarre poetry recital. It’s not just crushingly boring, it’s worse than that. It’s the wussification of one of cinema’s last real men.

A bit of Shakespeare and Tennyson is all very well and we all know big boys cry. But this is James Bond. He saves the world and gets the girl and has tons of cool toys. If he has to go to therapy in between missions, I really don’t want to know what the world’s coming to.