A very disappointing follow-up to "Casino Royale"

Rating: Null/10 (20 July 2014)

Unfortunately, Daniel Craig's second film as Bond does not come anywhere close to matching the quality of his first. He is as impressive as he was in "Casino Royale" but this film's script is very uninspired and just plain boring. While "The Man with the Golden Gun", "A View to a Kill" and "Die Another Day" were all worse, I thought that this was the most boring Bond film since "Thunderball". The title may come from an Ian Fleming story but it's still a very dull one.
Mathieu Almaric is a good actor who is saddled with an uninteresting character in the form of Dominic Greene. In comparison to other main Bond villains, he has no distinguishing characteristics in terms of his personality or characterisation. He may be ruthless and amoral but that's nothing we haven't seen before. His evil scheme is rather uninteresting and straightforward, offering few real surprises. The Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko may have an odd choice to play the Bolivian agent Camille Montes but she is quite impressive in the role. However, her character is far too derivative of Melina Havelock in "For Your Eyes Only" on the one hand and Wai Lin in "Tomorrow Never Dies" on the other. She likewise offers nothing new and the female agent character type – which it is rather overused at this stage – has done better in previous films. Admittedly, it's been done worse too! As in "Die Another Day", the film was going very well and was classic Bond until the female lead showed up but the turn for the worse wasn't their fault. Judi Dench is as effortlessly excellent as ever but the material that she was given wasn't up to standard. However, the fact that the maternal undertones from the last film have become overtones was interesting and I liked that she gradually develops greater trust in Bond.
Again, the standout supporting actor is Giancarlo Giannini as René Mathis and he once again plays the role with great charm. I think that it was a serious, serious mistake to kill the character off as he could have contributed so much more to future Bond films but his death scene is by far the best in the film and the most poignant death of any male ally in the series' history. Gemma Artertron gets my vote as the most boring Bond girl ever as Strawberry Fields, though I quite liked the "Goldfinger" reference with her death. As in the previous film, Jesper Christensen and Jeffrey Wright were very good as Mr White and Felix Leiter respectively but were given far too little to do. I hope that they both return in Bond 24 with more to do. Rory Kinnear is good as Bill Tanner but he's no Michael Kitchen. Of all the actors in smaller roles, the always entertaining Tim Piggott-Smith as the Foreign Secretary was the only one who made an impression on me. Sometimes older actors with presence can help lift parts of a lacklustre film and Dench, Giannini, Christensen and Piggott-Smith were able to do so on this occasion. Overall though, this film was one of the weakest casts of any Bond film.
I quite liked the music but it didn't set the world on fire. Outside of Bond chasing Mitchell in the early part of the film, the action scenes were as uninspired as many of the characters.