A Failure on Every Level

Rating: 2/10 (23 November 2006)

It is mystifying to me that this film has received so many good reviews, as I thought it failed on almost every level. The plot is nominally centered around how James Bond "becomes" James Bond (clearly hoping to achieve the same kind of success that "Batman Begins" won), but it misses the mark by taking an established character firmly rooted in the 1960s Cold War mentality and implying that he starts out in the world of the mid-2000s with middle eastern terrorists, cell phones, and digital technology.
Not helping the enterprise is the casting of Daniel Craig, certainly the most humorless actor to ever play Bond and who the script implies has the moldability and insecurities of a young man starting out in his career. But Craig is close to 40 years old with the complexion of a saddle bag, and it is impossible to buy that a man of that age is going to smooth his rough edges into the character in a white dinner jacket matching wits with super villains like Ernst Blofeld and Auric Goldfinger. Instead, Craig's Bond is a surly thug who would be shown the door by security at the first five-star resort that he tried to check in at.
Craig isn't given any assistance by a lackluster script, which does its best to rob Bond of the glamour associated with the character. The plot centers around a silly plan for terrorists to raise money for their operations by taking part in an interminable game of Texas Hold 'Em, a game that one usually associates with playing with old college buddies while drinking beer on a Saturday night and not in the exotic universe of James Bond (in the novel, the characters play Baccarat), that Bond ducks out of occasionally to take part in unspeakable acts of violence (fortunately, Giancarlo Giannini is around as a character who sits table-side to spout ridiculous lines of dialogue that exist only to provide explanation of what's going on with the plot to audience members who have nodded off during the poker game). You'd think that characters playing for a hundred and fifty million dollar pot would be more insistent on Bond's attendance at the table.
The script keeps the current post-AIDS trend of limiting Bond's sexual conquests to the single-digits, but his primary love interest is the listless Eva Green, a pretty girl with no apparent personality who we are supposed to buy as a government accountant, an occupation that has the same credibility as a Swedish Playboy playmate playing a nuclear physicist in an old I Spy episode. Green's character has no chemistry with the dour Craig (at one point she tells him that he would be more of a man than anyone she ever met if he were whittled down to just a smile and his little finger – a peculiar inventory since Craig never seems to smile during the course of the entire movie) and it is difficult to accept many of the plot turns that result from the romance. The film also provides one of the least charismatic villains in Bond history in the person of Mads Mikkelsen, a quiet man whose only quirks seem to be bleeding from his eyes and a propensity for graphic displays of cock-and-ball torture (where is Goldfinger's laser beam when we need it?).