007 falls flat with Skyfall

I’m not sure if I like James Bond anymore.  In fact, I’m not sure if I’ve ever liked him after the age of 12.  Of the last several movies, the only two I’ve found to be worthwhile were Casino Royale and Goldeneye.  I’m pretty sure my love for Goldeneye was propped up by hours and hours of the N64 game in college.  Casino Royale was great, but it wasn’t really a Bond movie.  It was just Daniel Craig being gritty and awesome.

I went to see Skyfall this past week, and I’ve got to say, it was not a good movie.  It was enjoyable, but I also saw the Red Dawn remake, and that somehow managed to be BETTER than the Bond movie.  At the very least, it had a cohesive plot.

The cold open of the movie is a big motorcycle chase that turns into a fist fight on top of a moving train.  Another agent, a woman who seems pretty awesome, is forced to take a shot at the bad guy Bond is fighting and hits Bond accidentally, blowing him off of the train.  This sets up the main “plot” of the movie, which is basically that spies who are sacrificed for the good of their nation end up being angsty and blonde.  This is also one of the best parts of the entire movie.

From there the movie becomes about what people will sacrifice in pursuit of a higher goal, and how it effects them.  At least, I think that’s what it’s about.  It’s unclear from the absolute shittastic writing and transitions in the movie.  For example, it’s stressed several times that Javier Bardem’s character is some kind of genius.  He orchestrates explosions, opens doors, and crashes subway cars all with button pushes and extreme planning skills.  He does all of this so he can execute his master plan to take out M, the head of MI:6.  The final step in his cleverly orchestrated plan?  Busting into Parliament and fucking shooting at her wildly with a pistol.  Guy Fawkes had a better thought out and executed plan than this guy.  Even though we’re led to believe that his plan is completely on track and he has manipulated the entirety of the world’s best intelligence organization, he suddenly goes from Lex Luthor to John Hinkley Jr.

Even his manipulation fell flat.  The movie introduces another “genius” character – the new Q.  Q is an extremely young computer whiz who is the new quartermaster for MI:6.  His introductory scene, as well as his youth, are intended to give the audience a sense that his character’s skill with computers is nothing short of savantism.  Yet, his only role in the movie is to take a foreign computer from a rival intelligence operative and plug it into his organizations main network.  They even let us know this is important by zooming in real close when he plugs in the ethernet cable.  “Foreshadowing”.  For God’s sakes, man, at least run Norton’s on it!  When a movie relies on it’s characters being stupid in order to make the plot work, that’s a telltale sign that you are going to be stuck eating a shit sandwich without the bread.

The movie finally ends up in Scotland, where it turns out that Bond is a Scottish noble, apparently one of the last ones not killed by Mel Gibson.  His parents died when he was a boy, and he was raised by some old coot with a shotgun.  From these humble beginnings he goes on to be a sociopathic killer.  Well, at least the writers got something right.  I’m not a fan of the way they delved into Bond’s actual past.  For one thing, they directly say that his real name is James Bond, which shoots down the popular fan theory that Bond is just the codename attached to the 007 designation.  This plays into the idea that the 3 Daniel Craig movies are “prequels” to the rest of the films – they are how Bond became the Bond we know.  However, when Q is introduced, he looks at James and says “We don’t do gadgets anymore.”  That implies that all of the gadgets we saw in the originals were in the past, not the future.  Then the movie suddenly blurs and we see Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon Levitt fighting while morphing between Daniel Craig and Sean Connery.  Actually that would have been a way better movie.  These inconsistencies help completely confuse the shit out of the viewer and remove any sense you might have had that the movie was anything other than 6 or 7 well-put choreographed action sequences loosely tied together with some guys talking.

Finally, and this is the worst, we have to talk about this film’s “leading lady”.  She’s in it for all of about 8 minutes before she’s unceremoniously killed.  That’s fine, but all of her scenes are just hollow reflections of past Bond girls.  I can’t even remember her name.  She just apes being mysterious and sexy, and then gets shot.  The only reason I even remember she was in the film is because of the “love scene” between her and Bond.  I use the term in its loosest sense possible.  Bond sees this woman once, then talks to her for a minute in a casino, where she indicates that she’ll take him to her boss if he’s able to kill the three goons watching her.  In the next scene, she’s in the shower on her boat.  We see Bond approach and get into the shower, also naked, and surprise her.  Then they get to the bonin’.

There is no world I can imagine in which that scenario EVER plays out.  They spoke for maybe a minute, had only the lightest of flirting, but Bond decides that his best move is to whip it out and rush her in the shower.  Who would have thought that James Bond would be one of the Con guests that fires off a Twitter storm about appropriate behavior?  I guess the 007 designation also comes with a license to rape.