plenty of action but too many plot holes

Rating: 4/10 (18 December 2006)

From the write ups on this movie I was thinking it was going to be closer to the novels. It looks like it started out that way but they wound up putting in so many holes into the plot in order to have a particular action scene they lost me. Some big and some small. Here are some examples: 1. Bond kills the suspected bomber in the African embassy then blows it up. Next action but at the start of the scene they made a point of saying they wanted the guy alive. Why couldn't Bond just get out then try to pick him up again later? This one is a small point and could be written off as poor judgment or maybe he didn't want him alive so badly after all. It would seem that he was a lot closer to escaping earlier in the sequence and Bond never thought about shooing him then.
2. The top bomber was being hired to drive a gasoline truck into a parked airplane? And a giant airplane to boot? Why did that need a top agent? I think the people in Iraq have shown it doesn't take a lot of skill to deliver a car bomb. If they wanted a top guy couldn't he have used a rocket or a remotely controlled vehicle? It seems to have been done this way just for the Indiana Jones type fight in the truck cab.
3. A big one - the CIA was going to pick up Mr One Eye. Felix Leiter tells Bond it's set. The next thing we know Mr One Eye is not only free from the CIA but has his crew of thugs able to kidnap people and take them away without any CIA tail. I guess you could write this off to incompetence on the part of the CIA but that is pretty bad. I had a real problem with this.
4. One-eye wants both the bank code and the password so needs the woman and Bond alive. However they leave the woman in the road where Bond could run over her and or kill himself in a crash getting out of the way. It made for a nice scene but a few minutes later when we found out the bad guys needed them alive it made no sense at all. The whole point was to get the account number and password, if one or both of them were dead how would they be able to get the money??
5. Bond is being tortured and at the last second the old man with the gun comes in and blows One-eye away. So the old man can track down the bad guys but Felix Leiter is still back asleep in the hotel? Okay so the CIA is incompetent but why did the old man kill one-eye so quickly? The airplane bomb-plot just failed a few days ago and rather than wait to see if one-eye can come up with the money he is just killed outright? What is the point of that? It's obvious that the old man doesn't have any trouble tracking down one-eye so why not at least try to get the money back? If the old man wanted the girl to give him the money that is okay but why let one-eye off the hook? If the money is that important why not break one of his legs or something. I don't think many loan sharks would stay in business if they killed someone the 1st time they said they asked for a few days extension.
6. So right after Bond goes through hell the girl decides to screw him over because someone (the old man?) has kid napped her old boy friend? At this point she didn't trust Bond enough to let him try to help? MI-5 sent her on this mission with $15 million and she was being blackmailed? So they are incompetent too? And their man on the scene turned as well? Or did Bond screw that up? Between the CIA and the MI-5 screw ups you have to wonder what is the point?
It seemed like I was back in the Roger Moore days by the end of the movie. Daniel Craig was good but I really don't think James Bond should be the sort of man that goes to the gym to work on his pecs. I thought he would look with disdain on puffer body builders.