Skyfall——for the 12 people on Earth that don’t know——is the latest James Bond movie, although, since people don’t seem to remember the titles of these movies, maybe it should just be called “James Bond, 2012 episode.” Skyfall is a really curious case of a movie that works yet doesn’t astound. It has so many great elements (the sexy Naomi Harris, Javier Bardem’s villain, Adele’s theme song, more on Bond’s backstory) and yet it never really congeals into a great movie. It’s the textbook example of a movie that’s less than the sum of its many parts, but it’s still no worse than a B+ and if you’re one of the 99 percent of the globe that will see it, you could certainly do much, much worse.
What Works: As I said above, there really are some strong parts. First and foremost is Javier Bardem’s creepy villain Silva. Sure, he doesn’t really feel like a typical Bond villain so much as an ethnic Hannibal Lecter, but Bardem is clearly having a blast with this deeply bitter, vindictive psychotic. Dame Judi Dench’s M (who’s been with the series since Pierce Brosnan was Bond) is very nearly a three dimensional character, and it’s clear that Bond’s real love affair is with her. And you could certainly do worse for a Bond girl than Naomi Harris, although she isn’t really given a lot to do, and her quasi-romantic tension with Bond is handled awkwardly and never properly developed.
What Doesn’t Work: It feels like a step backwards from the ultra-realistic villain of Quantum of Solace (a shady company trying to get control of water rights) and the excellence of Casino Royale. The threat is more vaguely defined, and the evil organization of Craig’s first two Bond movies is never actually mentioned in this one. [Why abandon a plot thread that held the first two movies together?]
The first half of this movie is kind of on auto-pilot, it’s a very typical James Bond adventure (stakes we don’t quite understand or really care about, some exotic locations with classy clothes, etc.) that feels a little too routine. Then Berenice Marlohe is introduced, a pretty exciting sequence in a Macau casino (complete with Naomi Harris in a very seductive dress), and, finally, Javier Bardem’s twisted villain shows up and acts like he’s straight from a different movie. The pace quickens dramatically, and the climax (set in James Bond’s boyhood mansion) is as close to personal as this series ever gets and all that feels very new and unique.
BUT I felt like the second Bardem’s Silva shows up, he sort of wants to be to James Bond what Heath Ledger’s Joker was to Batman, and it never quite works. Neither character feels personal enough, and James is never shown to feel much of anything (the loss of his parents, the pull of the dark side with Silva, the call of duty for country, etc.), so the efforts to deepen his character never come through. I hate to say it, but Craig makes the decision to play him as a sort of one-note asshole with occasional grace notes of humanity, and I feel he could have worked a little harder to show us the Bond of Casino Royale, a deeply conflicted but still violent and hard-edged man.
What I Would Have Done Differently: When Craig steps down as Bond, there is but one man to replace him: Michael Fassbender, and it’ll be interesting to see if he pulls Bond back a little from the charmless bruiser of Craig’s reign and into a more classic-meets-modern style where he can still be very smooth, very sophisticated, and slit your throat in the next second.