The strength of your enemies

Rating: 5/10 (11 September 2014)

How do you make a bad James Bond film, bad enough to be mentioned in the same conversation as Octopussy? Let's see.

Worst opening song in a Bond movie, rivaling only Die Another Day in terms of aural torture? Check.

Blandest antagonist in the series? Check. Not every Bond villain must be some freak who owns a volcano lair, but he does need to be more colorful than this guy. With his Hawaiian shirt and weaselly grin, Greene reminds me of some low-on-the-totem pole SPECTRE associate Blofeld would feed to sharks for failing to kill Bond. Medrano is your by-the-number sleazy dictator; I half-expected a scene with peasants paying him with the equivalent of his weight in manure, like in Woody Allen's Bananas.

Weak action? Check. Set-pieces are a tedious mishmash of quick cuts, with zero sense of spatial relationships. Marc Foster is no Martin Campbell. Get Brad Bird or Doug Liman for the future - Skyfall's Sam Mendes was much better, but still no great action director.

Weak script? Check. Reportedly, its development was crippled by the writers' strike, and it shows. This feels like an early draft.

Weak Bond girl? Check. Olga Kurylenko, a fine-looking woman, gives a vapid, mediocre performance. Gemma Arterton is barely in the movie before a demise which tries (and miserably fails) to rival an iconic scene in Goldfinger. It also makes no sense character-wise - Goldfinger was a sadistic sociopath; here, bad guys are as pragmatic and straightforward as it gets. Why would they bother with this over-the-top execution?

Not the series' nadir (both Moonraker and Die Another Day are worse), but close.
4,5/10