Uneven action-insoluble dilemmas

Rating: 7/10 (9 November 2008)

This James Bond film begins with a sequence of breathtaking action of a chase throughout the roads of Italy. Faster cars and faster bullets are the content of this opening sequence, which is followed by another action scene of man hunt, having as background the yearly competition of Palio in Sienna, that is a form of horse race albeit one with period costumes.
After all this chaotic action, the hero, James Bond, played by the tough but suave Daniel Craig has a talk with his superior and mother figure, in the British Intelligence, M, played as always by JudI Dench and all this chaotic incidents begin to resume the skeleton of a plot.
Another sequence in Haiti puts Bond in the same car with an admittedly sexy young woman,Camille, portrayed by the Ukranian model-actress Olga Kurylenko and after she is offered as an expendable sex-present by a former boyfriend to a corrupt Latin American general, from the clutches of whom she is saved, reluctantly, by Bond. The outline of the story becomes clear even to someone of mine average film viewer intelligence.
A corrupt organization under the coverage of ecological sensitivity seeks access to oil and latter as appears to water, using as paws corrupt Latin American militarists, only to eager to collaborate. Even CIA has an conniving attitude towards the villains which gives M and Bond some cues against their transatlantic cousins.
Shadows of the past creep in as Bond has a personal score to set for the assassination of a former love, while he meets another former? agent, latter betrayed by Latin Americans, while Bond himself becomes temporarily rejected by his kind because of his rather brutal crime-fighting techniques. Also the girl has a vendetta with the corrupt Latino general who has a penchant of raping women.
In the end this Heraclitian universe of constant change of alliances and misalliances produces a form of justice rendered through the death of the major villains and regrettably of some innocents, while topics as the environment, the British-American special relationship, the nature of loyalty, the limits that must be respected in the application of lawfull authority, the inter-American international relations and others are treated and one starts to suspect that with the similar example of last Batman in mind, action movies will resemble eventually moral diatribes and biblical parables in the depth of the moral dilemmas they attempt to pose.
Non - withstanding the ponderous ethics of the movie plus the bombastic action sequences there is another element that is surprisingly absent in display although present as innuendo and that is sex. Talked about, even in its seedy and negative forms as rape and much implied, the actual sexual content of the movie is surprisingly minimal although one has to admit that most female roles are played by women who look much more appealing than the average working or for that matter middle-class girl.
There are some verbal exchanges between the leading villains that reveal the depth of their corruption, depravity, political amorality, time-serving and phenomenal cynicism that appear farcical but some environments even in "real life" tend to operate in a similar manner.
The actors serve their roles, Daniel Craig been a sort of gentrified Judge-Dread in the rough way he administers justice and Olga Kurylenko being another beautiful but restrained Bond girl. Judi Dench is just fine in her role, which she has become identified with as Christopher Lee with Dracula or John Wayne with a good cowboy (I mean the identification not the content of the roles.).The two villains, the sham ecologist- international schemer, is played by obnoxious detail by the Mathieu Amalric, while a good performance is delivered concerning the character of the power-money-sex hungry Latin American general by Joaquin Cosio, although I suspect this will raise issues of political correctness.
All in all I think, it is a movie worth watching.