Skyfall

2012 • 143 minutes

About this movie

Bond's loyalty to M is tested as her past comes back to haunt her. As MI6 comes under attack, 007 must track down and destroy the threat, no matter how personal the cost.

Ratings and reviews

"Bond girls" average around 48 years of age when one counts Dame Judi Dench. She is a serious actress, but this is not Oedipus Rex. The other two female leads, Marlohe in particular, make neither memorable characters nor, oddly enough, eye candy. The final smash-em-up is a low-stakes local affair, however noisy. Plot holes usually would not matter in a Bond film, but this one seems to pass itself as a part-time psychodrama, so incoherence rankles. Some decently choreographed fighting early on. Locations are ho-hum. Craig is a charmless Bond. Bardem is a good villain, but that is not enough.

Let's face it, Craig never really understood Fleming's 007 character. James Bond is part action, part suave, part spy, part ladies' man! Craig is all about action and spy like Dalton. His scenes with the ladies are so wooden and mechanical that one can be forgiven for thinking he's doesn't know the meaning of "suave"! Craig should have taken hints from Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan for scenes with the ladies!

Skyfall is truly an awful film, and a tremendously disappointing deviation from what the new James Bond movies were shaping up to be. I'm not suggesting that the first two films in this new generation demonstrate artistic genius, of course, but they are certainly several orders of magnitude better in every conceivable way than this latest atrocity. The theme of old (the "old way" as well as the physically old characters) beleaguered by new feels contrived and awkwardly permeates the entire film.