Arguably the greatest Bond film ever

Rating: 10/10 (19 November 2006)

This film is a reboot of sorts. After the clichéd 'Die Another Day' in 2002, with its plethora of explosions and ludicrous gadgets (the invisible Aston Martin really pushed the meter), the producers decided to do away with the bizarre, fantastic and conspicuously repetitive trappings of the traditional Bond film and start again, focusing on the character and the plot, rather than weird and wonderful gizmos and set pieces. Basically, the aim of this film was to bring Bond into real life.
And by God, how it succeeded in doing just that.
The film opens without the traditional gun-barrel sequence and instead starts with a eerie, film-noiresque black and white sequence, showing Bond doing away with a rogue Mi6 agent.. It is apparent from the very start that this Bond is fairly different to the Brosnan version and is willing to kill callously. The title sequence is great as it drops the semi-naked CGI women, in favour of a more sinister montage of cards and a very cool animation of Bond fighting hand-to-hand.
The film is gripping, throughout. It is one of the first films I have been to in a long time where the fight sequences were very tense and organic and I was unsure whether or not the hero would make it out. The plot jumps around a small bit, but not too much to annoy the viewer. I often worried that the low-key plot of the novel might out-date the film, but the filmmakers worked around this, expanding the novel and giving it a modern edge.
In terms of acting, this is easily one of the best 007 films around. Daniel Craig is simply marvelous as Bond and makes him very three-dimensional. In this film, Bond is not the all-knowing, all-powerful secret agent he was in previous films. Bond makes mistakes in this film, and spends much of the film dealing with these mistakes, growing into the agent we all know and love. Craig personifies this perfectly and it is difficult to envisage Brosnan performing some of these very dramatic scenes. Eva Green is a very competent Bond girl and shares real chemistry with Craig's Bond. The fact that she is not cavorting around half nude like many Bond girls would, helps the audience to take her seriously and understand why Bond would actually fall in love with this woman.
If there is any problem with this film is its shameless use of product placement. It is wrong to say Bond is without gadgets in this picture. Sure, he doesn't exactly have the laser-watch or the exploding key chain, but he has just about every real-life gadget Sony makes. Bond or another character is shown using a Sony Ericsson in most scenes and Sony laptops, Mp3 players and any other whatnot the company could throw in are in full view throughout the picture. It takes away from the realism of the film, when every character has the same brand of telephone.
Anyway, this is a bold and brilliant Bond film, with a fairly perfect star. I find it difficult not to call this the greatest Bond film of them all. Go and see it.