Weak plot, idiotic direction and progressively more disappointing.

Rating: 4/10 (8 November 2008)

I'll start positive - the very watchable Daniel Craig has nailed Bond as well as Connery did for his time, and QoS manages in many scenes to supersede the glamorous traveloguery of the earlier franchise. There are a (very) few jokes, the totty isn't just totty, and they've also slightly toned down the CGI and product placement from CR, which can only be a good thing. (Though Bond's phone never loses coverage, never needs charging, and zooms in on single faces in a crowd of thousands. At night. Is it nuclear powered?) But QoS isn't much bang for your buck. It's just an extended chase, which would be okay if Marc Forster hadn't made such a truly, unforgivably dreadful job of the action sequences. In Bond, you're expecting stunt work much like a great circus act - you want to be blown away by the skill and ingenuity of the performers. But Marc Forster's direction completely gets in the way. He literally loses sight of the action every time a sequence comes up; the only one that half works in spite of his pretentiousness is the plane chase. This means that you leave the film unsatisfied by the weak plot because you couldn't follow the action that would have made up for it. Meanwhile any Bond character development you've heard about is minimal, Judi Dench still doesn't understand the character she's playing, and the final climax is a clichéd and dismal melodrama. (Imagine 'Backdraft' on a budget). A final point: it would have been far more accurate, funny, and true to the 'Bond reboot' to see the British Secret Service struggling with ancient clunky technology, rather than that unbelievable super-slick Minority Report-style system, which is plainly a pathetic nod to the action film competition - and maybe the sponsor.