Whats all the fuss about?

Rating: 6/10 (23 November 2006)

Well, I saw this today and I honestly cant imagine why there's been so many people going on about how good this film was. To me, it seemed like the film was all backwards.
There were some really good action sequences at the beginning, and I quite enjoyed the Parkour chase scene, but the film slowly seemed to die down from there. Now personally, I'm a massive fan of bond films, I grew up on watching them and my brother and I spent hours pretending to be Bond as kids. So I was really looking forward to all the classic bond elements, beautiful women, fast cars and most importantly, the gadgets! OK, so they often provide a bit of a comic element to bond films, but who didn't at some point want a car with a rocket launcher built into it? On to the film itself then, well, Daniel Craig did fairly well in the movie, but personally I didn't really feel that he came across as the cold ruthless killer he was supposed to be, Pierce Brosnan did a much 'colder' bond in a few sections of the other bond films. Personally I saw him as being just a tad whiny - poor me, I'm an orphan and I have a chip on my shoulder...
Plus, I felt that the whole poker sequence went on for way too long, and there was no feeling of intensity during it, neither Daniel Craig or Mads Mikkelsen gave the feeling that this was a life or death kind of game.
Two more quick points, the twist at the end of the movie was really obvious to me, and probably will be to any bond fan, and the ending of the movie was a tad dire as well.
All in all it felt that there were too many potential sub-plots left unaccounted for, and the movie had no real urgency to it. Don't get me wrong, for what it did it wasn't too bad, it just felt more like a really great scene setter for a movie. If they'd condensed it all into about an hour then explored all of Le Chiffre's out of pocket and no doubt angry war lords with the requisite action sequences then I feel it would have made a better movie.