Not since Goldeneye have I walked out a Bond movie with such an awful taste in my mouth.
Synopsis
Bond is still pissed about Vesper from Casino Royale, he travels the world to bring down a super-secret nasty organization called Quantum and, despite all the cards stacked against him, he succeeds.
Analysis
Where do I begin? It’s not so much that the film is bad, it’s just a moderate Bond film ruined by awful executive decisions, which I assume are wholly director Marc Forster’s fault. I don’t know who he is, and I’ve not seen any of his films, but after this train wreck, I wouldn’t want to. Has the man never seen a Bond film?! (or if he has, did he just watch them so he could try to find homages to the originals to stick in this film so we’d be fooled into thinking it’s a Bond film?)
I’ll break this into groups, starting with
The Good
Best part of the film, without doubt, was seconds after Bond dropped Vesper’s necklace into the snow. The screen goes black, and the classic Bond Gunbarrel logo slides across the screen, Bond walks left, turns, shots the would-be assassin and a full measure of the Bond theme is played. Pity this was the beginning of the end credits!
Daniel Craig turns in another tough-as-nails performance. You will believe Bond can take and inflict serious damage. (On the other hand, maybe you won’t, but it isn’t Craig’s fault.)
The Mediocre
The soundtrack. Sub-par for any Bond composer, a real shock from David Arnold who has, till now, mostly delivered the goods, standing as he is in the shadow of John Barry. I bought the soundtrack a week ago and it’ so nondescript that, when I play it, I tend to forget it’s on – much like muzak in an elevator. I’ll save my comments on the theme song till the next section.
The script. The script is OK, but really nothing special. It’s complete, it gets you from point A to point B and, apart from the inclusion of the Hotel Hindenberg at the end, holds together with a reasonable amount of logic. (Movie logic, that is.)
The Awful
The theme song is terrible, I would have been happier with a Quantum of Silence instead of what we got. Bond films have retained an anachronistic tendency over the years. Whereas most movies and even TV shows have been eschewing formal opening titles for a number of logistical reasons, preferring instead to run credits over the opening of the film, Bond has bucked that trend, probably because of the strong associations that previous 007 films have had with big hits. In this film, if they wanted to muck around with the formula, they should have run the Bond gun barrel tag at the beginning and skipped the opening credits altogether. They could have played this theme song at the end to help clear out the theatre more quickly.
The fonts. This is just a nit-picky, but it exemplifies what’s wrong with this film: Everytime Bond goes somewhere, they have to put the place name on the screen. If they had a good script, they wouldn’t need that, but it’s a common shorthand and I can live with it. The problem is, each place is not just show on the screen, it’s artistically rendered in the center of the screen using a different font for each place. How f%$king pretentious!
The editing. Again, the director must have been shooting for this style of editing, and presumably the director has final say over the finished product, so I’m laying this steaming pile at his feet, too. The editing is a confusing, muddled mess, meaningless fast shots are intertwined, many of them handheld with uneven quick pans. Often you’d just see someone’s body parts, like their legs. The editing completely ruined the car chase at the beginning, making Bonds driving and reactions seem not only superhuman (as was the bad guys’) but uninteresting. They looked like they were driving 400 mph and squeezing their cars smoothly through 1 foot wide cracks. Preposterous! They started to lose my interest before the opening credits rolled. A Bond action sequence should never make you say, “that’s just stupid.” (Case in point: Die Another Day with Bond being parasailed along by the obviously CGI avalance. Awful!)
Other awful examples were when Bond chases a bad guy through some tunnels, interspersed with, ultimately pointless, scenes of a horserace. In another example, he has a running gunbattle in a bar, in slow motion, interspersed with scenes from an opera. What a pretentious twat!
The film also shows a certain self-consciousness by interjecting a number of obvious previous Bond film references – despite them all having been erased from the current cannon. I suppose it might have been meant as throwing a bone to long-time Bond fans, but I can’t help feeling the director should a spent more time perfecting his craft and less time doing irrelevant things with the scenery.
Perhaps it was the ultimate Bond film reference, but the end of the movie featured a fight in an isolated, high-tech hotel. This isn’t any hotel though, this hotel, like so many final Bond battlegrounds, starts to explode as soon as the bullets start flying. Some people say Moonraker was far-fetched. No, far-fetched is a hydrogen fuel cell-powered hotel exploding and collapsing around the final battle.
Bah! My hopes for this film were just crushed.