Skyfall/2012
Directed by: Sam Mendes
Starring: Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, and Albert Finney
The Plot: It's Bond: the Revenge for the 23rd installment of the James Bond franchise. James Bond (Daniel Craig) is dead. Which couldn't have happened at a more problematic time for MI6. A brilliant ex-MI6 agent (Javier Bardem) seeks bloody - albeit flamboyant - revenge against the agency that sold him out to the Chinese. His main target is M, (Judi Dench) but he's just as happy to blow up MI6 headquarters - bringing James Bond out of his self-imposed graveyard sabbatical to seek his own revenge. But which revenge will be satisfied when the two ill-tempered agents collide?
The Film: I had to sit through two different screenings of Skyfall before I could nail down my feelings on the latest James Bond movie.
I struggle with the Craig-Bond franchise because, even though I really like Daniel Craig in this role, and the directors cutting these movies are filmmakers of reputation, (I've got a huge crush on Sam Mendes movies) the films are still James Bond films. They're locked into a fifty year old format - almost rigidly. With the latest entries in the Mission Impossible and Bourne franchises (and yes, I really got into the latest Damon-free entry in Bourne) Bond has started to show his varicose veins more so than he ever did. He's the product of a bygone - but genuinely provocative - era.
Skyfall seems to be the first Bond movie in a long time to openly embrace his varicose heritage.
Case in point: The opening minutes of Skyfall are everything a great Bond movie opening should be. Mendes literally throws James Bond into every action flick paradigm MGM can afford to pay insurance premiums for. Car chases, motorcycle chases across Istanbul's rooftops, train jumping, fist fights.... even a Caterpillar 345 excavator gets involved.
Skyfall opens like a Superbowl commercial directed by a coked-up, pre-Madonna, Guy Ritchie.
Not that I'm complaining, but there is a point of critical mass where the contemporary film attendee starts to feel buried in action, and the film plot starts to become an action set-piece delivery system.
Which, make no mistake about it, Skyfall's plot most assuredly is.
There's next to nothing underneath these well-executed punches and gun shots. There's a minor potboiler about a stolen disc containing the secret identities of MI6 agents in the field, (thanks for the lift Mission Impossible...) and an ex-MI6 agent out for revenge against the agency that sold him out, (thanks for the lift Goldeneye....) but in its Union-Jack-painted heart Skyfall is a revenge film - with every conceivable classic Bond touchstone tread upon thoroughly.
Adele's Skyfall credit sequence (my favorite part of the film if we're being serious) practically begs you to scroll through the backlog of your James Bond memory banks, while comfortably dumping an endorphin drip into your system.
Daniel Craig's Bond is a bit more of a ladies man this time around. Sure, he's still not the polished skank that Roger Moore was, but Craig's Bond is finally scoring on screen. Add a fight scene that takes place in a Komodo dragon den and a Goldfinger-era Aston Martin, and this isn't just your father's James Bond - this is his father's James Bond too.
Sam Mendes is consciously retro-fitting the series this time around. The ghost of Sean Connery haunts every frame of film stock in Skyfall. Which might be pandering a bit more to you fans of that era than it does at creating a modern, stand alone masterwork. It also begs the question - after three movies have we given up trying to make Daniel Craig's James Bond his own beast already?
There is literally a moment in Skyfall where our new James Bond uses one of Sean Connery's James Bond's gadgets - a gadget that will no doubt garner the loudest cat-calls and cheers at your screening of the movie - to defeat his very well armed, present day adversaries.
The equivalent is like Christian Bale's Batman breaking out Adam West's Bat-Spectrograph Criminal Analyzer during The Dark Knight Rises and using it on Bane's henchmen. It's so Twilight Zone it's almost impregnable by logical thought. But it's also kind of cool too - you can't help but cheer on the gap in temporal accord.
Which might define Skyfall perfectly.
Completely untrustworthy as far as plot and logic are concerned - but looking bloody cool while doing it all.
Now that I've managed to drag Chris Nolan's Dark Knight movies kicking and screaming into this Skyfall review... expect those films to be an overpowering influence in Sam Mendes new James Bond movie. James Bond is pretty much Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises. He's rusty and grumpy - past his prime and off his game. Skyfall even closes at Wayne Manor, with a shotgun-toting Alfred Pennyworth (Albert Finney) included. Bond's a vengeful orphan in this movie, a persona we've seen done well by Christian Bale these last seven years. His villainous adversary, Silva, is almost a clone of Heath Ledger's Joker, with a tiny bit of Fantasy Island-era Ricardo Montalban peppered in for spice. He's an evil oddball, capable of anything and everything, including sexually harassing James Bond - and in turn the devoted male audience who's been in love with the guy's intimidating heterosexual conquests since his inception. But other than that.... Silva's kind of a flunky. His schemes and ploys only work well when he's running them off screen. When he's front and center he's a neutered mess. A funny neutered mess, but almost completely incapable of being lucrative in the art of villainy.
The Verdict: Skyfall gets caught somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle of trying to be a modern action/espionage flick, and replaying the notes from Bond's beloved classics. Fans of the original Sean Connery films are going to get a huge rush out of Skyfall. The rest of us are going to get a semi-honest action film, with plenty of big locations and set-pieces. The smaller things in Skyfall are what I appreciated the most - Adele's credit sequence and an extremely well-choreographed fist fight between Bond and an assassin done in a single stationary shot, in silhouette- ala' the Hughes Brothers The Book of Eli. But look elsewhere if you desire anything close to an engaging plot.
Skyfall should leave you stirred, but probably not shaken.
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Not in the mood for action this weekend? Check out my review for Steve Spielberg's very quiet, very thought-provoking Lincoln.
