This might beat recent Bond movies, but don't forget how low the bar was set

Rating: 6/10 (2 January 2007)

Firstly I must say that from the opening moments I was convinced that Daniel Craig was Bond -- he had all the ruthlessness, cunning and panache that marks Bond out from the pack. OK, later in the film we discovered that he sucks at playing someone in love, but he shouldn't have had to; Bond has pretty near always treated women as disposable, and that's the way Fleming wrote him in Casino Royale.
Long before that, though, I'm suffering from a feeling of being lost in time. This is the start of Bond's career? Then it must be set before Dr. No, but it looks remarkably like the early 21st century, not the 1950s or early 60s.
Any film based on a book has to deviate from that book; they're different media, different things work. That much I accept. But this film is bizarre in the things that it chooses to keep and in what it chooses to lose. It's lost the sense of time and place, it throws away a lot of Vesper's complexity and motivation, and ignores a lot of Bond's self doubt. But it keeps the mishandled pace. The movie keeps stalling, struggling to restart and stalling again, in relentless misguided fidelity to the book which does the same. I kept thinking "Oh, good; it's finishing. I can go home now" only to have the plot splutter back into life.
OK, so it's a popcorn movie, so I shouldn't judge it too harshly (had it had pretensions to art-house I'd have given it just 1 or 2 out of 10), but there's no shortage of action adventures far better conceived and executed than this.