Quantum leap into the dumpster.

Rating: 1/10 (16 November 2008)

If I wasn't so bored, I might have felt violated by this awful suckfest.
Seriously...who greenlights a script this bad? I'll give you a quick excerpt of the "plot": Bond gets to the hotel and kills the geologist, gets the briefcase and walks out just in time for the car to pull up. He gets in and the girl pulls a gun on him. He gets out just in time to hop on the motorcycle. Follows the car to the dock just in time to overhear the conversation and see the boat take off just in time. Follows on motorcycle and drives off the ramp of a boat that was lined up just in time for him to land in a powerboat. Fights off baddies and in the process, the girl gets KO'ed just in time for Bond to reach land and drop her off so he can get to the airport just in time to see the villains take off, etc.
Notice the excessive usage of the phrase "just in time".
There's even a spot where Bond has left a party and is driving in the middle of the desert where he just so happens to come across a man who just so happens to sell Bond his plane. Bond flies the plane for less than 5 minutes and just so happens to get shot out of the air. Bond and the girl (did they even say her name more than once?) open the parachute just in time - oops, sorry. About a minute too late. Sorry, but if you open a parachute 12 feet from the ground, you're dead. I don't care if you're James Bond. You're dead. So anyway, they just so happen to land directly above a sinkhole which just so happens to have the most easily accessible exit in the history of any place where any character was ever trapped in film history, and then just so happen to end up in a spot where they can easily recognize the villain's plan (which was over AN HOUR into the film - didn't know the purpose of any of the action up to that point, which made it tedious and boring), etc, etc.
Notice the excessive usage of the phrase "just so happens".
There is absolutely no plot to this film whatsoever. There are no characters. There is no dialogue. There are no relationships. There is no originality at all. None. Everything about this film is one - yes, ONE dimensional. Not two, and definitely not three. Just one.
This is action porn...but even the action sucks.
It opens with a car chase where one dark vehicle is shooting at another dark vehicle, so you can't tell what the hell is going on, who is in which car, who is shooting at Bond and why they are shooting at him. It makes no sense to a viewer. Neither does any of the action that follows. Bond leaves bodies in his wake, never even encountering a real challenge. Coincidences move him from place to place and stuff blows up and people shoot guns in the process. That is this movie.
Bond doesn't struggle at all. The villain's henchman is supposed to be the brawn to the villain's brain. Look at Odd Job and Goldfinger. Here, we have this guy with a flo-be bowl cut who gets tripped by a girl in a cocktail dress. And the main baddie himself looks like a young Roman Polanski...and the members of his super-secret organization that nobody knows anything about just so happen to conveniently sport little Q lapels, making them so easy to identify. Smart.
Even action porn needs to be exciting. There have to be reversals. Watch the truck chase at the end of The Road Warrior and you'll see more reversals in that one 10 minute scene than this entire movie. That is why that scene is great and this movie sucks. Both have cars driving fast and people shooting one another and things blowing up. Hint: THAT IS NOT WHY PEOPLE WATCH MOVIES! People watch movies for an experience. We want to see reversals in action, character relationships develop and change, a plot that actually makes sense. We want to see characters develop beyond a thuggish menace before they go and wreak havoc. We want to see this person that we now care about actually struggle and fight for victory. We want to be able to follow what is going on, in terms of story and visuals. You can't do that if the camera is swaying violently and cutting every 3/8ths of a second and the main plot isn't revealed until a majority of the movie is over.
This is perhaps the worst movie I have seen in a decade. An absolutely epic failure on every front, including the future of film-making, which appears to be heading toward a depression of it's own if a film like this, completely void of quality, gets made.
The cinematic apocalypse has begun.
PS: Who the f--k edited this movie?! I want to track this person down and murder them with my bare hands in their own home in front of his or her children. My 5 year-old dog could have done a better job. Is there a bet going on with you and Paul Greengrass as to who will be the first to make a film that will literally cause people's heads to explode from an overload of underprocessed information...or do you just suck that bad? Quit your job immediately and find something that you're actually good at.