Not Bond

Rating: 5/10 (2 January 2010)

To Bond fans of a certain age and era - I'm 39 - a Bond movie has a familiar formula:
prelude intro with the infamous silhouettes Bond in M's office (banter with Moneypenny) Down to Q branch for gadgets - more banter M launches Bond like a 'fire and forget' missile at the enemy Cue lots of action, girls, witty quips and a finale.
This movie fails on almost every aspect except the action. Lots and lots of stunts strung together with a thin plot.
No humour. No gadgets. No Moneypenny. Not Bond.
In fact it would appear the directors were well aware they were making a movie that didn't look like Bond. When Fields is discovered naked covered in oil it shouts 'This is similar to what happened to Jill Masterson in Goldfinger - just in case you forgot this is a Bond movie, and we can understand why you would have.' On the subject of Fields I have only just read in the cast list her full name is Strawberry Fields. This is exactly the kind of pun the real Bond would pick up and run with, yet it isn't even mentioned in the movie.
Very disappointing, and yes I am one of those people who feels very strongly that Daniel Craig is badly miscast. He's a great actor [(I'm about to write a review of Defiance - he's brilliant!) but Bond he most definitely is not.
In a nutshell it's just A N Other action movie, which seems accidentally set in the Bond universe, and for that it gets 5.