Poor story, great action, superb Bond!

Rating: 7/10 (19 November 2006)

Let's be honest, Sean Connery had it easy. He was making a cold war spy thriller during the cold war itself. Nothing had dated, nothing needed modernising: he was making a period film set in the period he was living in. Is it any wonder he was always considered the best Bond?
It's been much harder for the later actors to make the role their own, but Daniel Craig has succeeded. Combining Sean Connery's rough-around-the-edges charm with Timothy Dalton's steely-eyed ruthlessness and adding a good measure of something new: military hard-man dangerousness! While Roger Moore, as always, played Bond as a charming dandy and Pierce Brosnan played him as a slimy Americanized business executive, Daniel Craig is the very picture of a field-tested military officer. Someone you might genuinely feel safe trusting to safeguard your country. Aside from making Bond "hard" again, Craig also delivers Bond's charm with great confidence. Rather than hamming up his lines for laughs in the Moore/Brosnan fashion or playing down his charming side like Dalton, Craig delivers a genuinely believable sly wit which gets the audience on side immediately.
Eva Green is also superb as "Bond girl" Vesper Lynd. Not a helpless dumb blonde waiting to be bedded by Bond or a PC-pleasing hard-woman, Green is attractive, composed, charming and human. She is possibly the first genuinely *attractive* rather than just beautiful Bond girl.
Sadly, despite great turns from the two leads, the film doesn't provide a quality backdrop for their top-notch performances. The action scenes are very well-handled and exciting but the story often seems nothing more than a series of things that happen in sequence rather than a plot per se. The card-playing scenes are badly handled with very little tension built up. They should possibly have edited the dull and unnecessary action scene at the airport and spent more time building tension in the card games. Some of the use of technology in the film is unnecessary and clearly added gratuitously to please gadget-fans.
On the whole, this is a very enjoyable action film, but not a well-made spy thriller (which is what the Bond franchise really needs!). People who enjoy Bond for the camp-factor, with cheesy camp humour and self-aware parody will probably enjoy this much less than some of the other movies, but the lack of camp made me enjoy it a whole lot more.
And Daniel Craig is a superb Bond.