Someone please flush this.

Rating: 10/10 (9 September 2007)

This movie is the cinematic equivalent of an incorrectly-assembled jigsaw puzzle. Just a total mess no matter where you look. Watching this felt like watching 5 movies at once and only catching one-fifth of each one. There's just an incredible amount of underdeveloped characters and subplots.
Why chase the unbelievably athletic black dude bomb maker guy in the beginning? It didn't seem to be connected in any way to the guy with the crazy eye except perhaps in the most minor, circumstantial way possible...not to mention the sequence went on for about 10 minutes and ended with Bond killing the guy outright after we are informed that he needs to remain alive.
And the whole thing about blowing up the plane...why? Who was that guy? I have absolutely no idea. Didn't even catch his name. They gave us NO INFORMATION about him. The whole tanker-chase was just absolutely ridiculous and seemed more at home in a cartoon, and before you know it, the unknown guy is dead. Not to mention the entire sequence was pointless. Bad guy needs money, which is the reason for trying to blow up the plane. Afterwards, Bad guy still needs money. You can remove that entire segment and nothing has changed. It's redundant.
There's at least a dozen characters that we essentially know nothing about who suddenly die and that's supposed to mean something. Who are they? Who's side are they on? Do they even have names? They could have saved the salary budget and just got a few cardboard boxes with painted faces on them instead. I know it's a Bond movie, but for Christ's sake.
The guy with the weird eye was quite a bland villain. It's mentioned that he's some math genius and that makes him good at card games, but why is that talent never actually shown in the movie? He just turns cards like everyone else. I know it would be a little difficult to show the inner workings of his mind, but it's better than a throwaway line. So if being good at math makes him so great at cards, what makes Bond so good? And if Bond doesn't need a reason, why does the eye guy? And why is Bond even there instead of a professional card player if they need this guy to lose so badly? And speaking of this card game, why did the villain, despite his many connections to the underworld and corrupt dictatorships, decides his only way to recoup his losses is by holding a high stakes poker game with a CIA agent as well as a British Secret Agent? And couldn't they just abduct him and hold him in a secret location until his enemies were hot for his blood, then threaten to release him if he didn't flip? It seems much more logical than the card game method, which would still require abducting the bad guy and threatening to release him if he didn't flip.
Despite the repeated need for the villain to win all the money brought to the game, the villain, the alleged super genius, decides to poison Bond while Bond has 50 million sitting on the table which means that money would not have been won by the villain had he succeeded in killing Bond.
After the villain's defeat he was supposed to be grabbed by CIA but apparently the boys from Langley are more incompetent than the guerrilla soldiers from Uganda because they didn't even get near the bad guy and let him abduct members of the British Secret Service and flee the country.
And what was up with that tracking device they put in his arm. Talk about a setup with no payoff. What a waste of time that was.
From here on in we get a lot of contrived and pointless melodrama as the film refuses to stop and continues to slog through Bond's tragic romance with a woman who is so in love with her boyfriend that she decides to steal ten million dollars from the government (that's all that belonged tot eh British government, which ain't that much) and she also bangs the hell out of Bond for good measure - because she is so in love with her abducted boyfriend.
To top off the insanity, we get a crazy chase through Venice to hunt down some one-eyed villain we have never seen before that has nothing to do with anything, as far as we know. Then just when things couldn't get more ridiculous, the love interest decides to kill herself by locking herself int the elevator of a sinking house. Why did she do that? I guess because it was supposed to be tragic and sad - it was just stupid.
Another thing that bothered me was the fact that Bond got help with nearly everything he did. He got helped out of the whipping chair, he got help with the defibrillator, he got help disarming an enemy, he got help disposing of the bodies, he got help tasering that other dude, etc. Most of the stuff was completely done by other people, and it made for a rather passive "hero".
It seems as though every review ever written for this film (besides this one) compares the movie to other, lesser-quality Bond movies and praises it for sucking less than those. But if you actually look at this movie in and of itself, it's terrible in every way.
And on a side note, Eva Green looks infinitely more attractive without excessive layers of makeup gunked all over her face.