Same old, same old ridiculous, childish Bond. Twist: It's also boring.

Rating: 3/10 (3 December 2006)

What a terrible film!
It started off nicely, the pre title stuff was pretty hard core and cool (at least for a Bond movie), the action stuff with the Parkour guy was cool as well, but overly long. As soon as the real story started it degenerated into a snooze fest though. There was no suspense at all! The stuff on the Bahamas was just silly. "Here, park my car boy!" That joke is what, 30 years old? When Eddy Murphy did it it was funny, but Bond?! And don't even get me started on the minute long Ford commercial that was there for no reason: "Ah, he's driving a Ford family car. I bet he will have a great day at the beach with his wife and two little kids. Wait, isn't that supposed to be James Bond in there?! What the hell?"
They managed to make the poker game mind numbingly boring, every little detail was explained ad absurd-um ("See, he scratches his head! That's his tell!" well thanks for that information!). There was NO chemistry between Bond and the girl whatsoever, they were just some idiots taking themselves to seriously staring blankly at each other. Wasn't this stuff supposed to be, i don't know, sexy? He falls in love with her right? Nothing of this was on screen, they just tell you: ooh, he loves her. And the shower scene where he sticks her fingers in his mouth for no reason at all? Completely ridiculous. Talking of ridiculous: First he gets poisoned like a total "noob" (okay, it was his first mission, but come on: even without a supposedly top notch secret agent training nobody would be that stupid!) The scene where he has to shock himself back to life and forgets to plug the defibrillator in was just painfully dumb. Then she shocks him back to life and a second later he's a suave player again cracking a stupid one-liner, AFTER HE WAS DEAD! Retarded! Then they abduct the girl, high speed pursuit, yet they find the time to place her in the middle of the road and hide out of sight. Yeah, right, that made sense! And what was the plan anyway? "We'll put her in the road so he runs her over and feels sad?" I can only repeat myself: What. The. Hell. Why didn't they just abduct him? Would have been easier wouldn't it? But then there wouldn't have been a chance to show his car rolling over in slow motion eight times.
The torture scene: If you describe what's happening in that room to any man, he twitches with phantom-pain. Yet the inept director managed to make that scene completely unpainful. I didn't even flinch once. In the end it was just 10 boring minutes of staring at a naked guy! Who watches this stuff and thinks: wow, cool movie?! I don't get it. All the romance stuff in Italy afterwards was just out of another movie. He suddenly turns all emo and soft and quits the secret service (with an email he sends from his SONY VAYO LAPTOP - BUY NOW! An email?! It basically said: "Dear M! I quit! Yours, James Bond" That's how you quit being a top spy? Sending an email to your mom?) Blabla, huge stupid action scene (right, buildings in Venice float on huge air balloons and when they pop, the buildings just sink) the woman he supposedly loved is dead, so he's back to cold hearted killer again. He murders some white haired business man, says his name and the Bond theme kicks in. We are supposed to feel good about this, yeah, he's James Bond Bitch! In reality this is a guy who has nothing left to live for except being a hired killer for the British government. Everything human in him is dead. That's not kick-ass, that's terribly sad! Watch the Bourne Supremacy to see a somewhat similar situation handled infinitely better.
Even though all the critics say "wow, this is a totally new Bond, real acting, real drama, character arks blah" it's still the same bullshit they have been doing for more than 40 (!) years. They took some situations and put an ironic twist on them, but they're still the same scenes as in every other Bond film. There's now 21 of these things, and with one or two exceptions they ALL sucked. How much more of these films does the world need?
Oh and don't even get me started about the title sequence: A 13 year old with down-syndrome, after effects and some default plug ins can make that thing just as good (if not even better). There's card playing in the movie - WE GET IT. At least show some naked girls, but they didn't even manage that!