If you like Brosnan as Bond, you probably won't like this one!

Rating: 2/10 (17 March 2007)

After all the hype and critical racket leading up to and following the opening of this movie, I was really expecting to enjoy myself.
I didn't, and a lot of it admittedly has to do with my own Bond biases, but a at least some has to do with conceptual inconsistencies and poor acting or casting (I'm never sure which causes performance problems).
First, the Bond presented in this movie could not and would not have later become any of the versions of Bond that we've seen up to now.
This Bond has no class, no humor, no panache ... in short, none of the things which I've enjoyed in other Bonds, with the exception of Timothy Dalton, a Bond incarnation I thought was pretty all around nasty, which I COULD believe Craig's Bond might become.
There was also much made in the reviews I read about what a pleasure it was to see a grittier, less technology-dependent Bond ... but then we started out with a fleeing terrorist who was imbued (I assume with wire work ... yawn) with literally superhuman escape powers. Yeah, it's definitely sweatier, but more realistic? I think not!
And, last but not least on my list of disappointments, there seemed to be an attempt to infuse some genuine feeling into Bond's relationship with his lady love (as there was in Fleming's novel) ... but personally I found the emotion portrayed by Brosnan in the death of Bond's old flame in Tomorrow Never Dies to be far more credible than Craig's declarations of love. To paraphrase Craig when he was asked if he wanted his martini shaken or stirred, "Do I look like I care?" Nope.
Ironically, Pierce Brosnan's comments about the Bond movies quoted on his IMDb page make me think that this is the Bond that he would would have preferred to play. Go figger.