Home, James...

Rating: 5/10 (8 April 2011)

As cold and soulless as a computer game, this is Bond still struggling to keep up with Jason Bourne. So we get a bazillion stunts and SFX, ditto body count and changes of location, likewise plot twists. It all goes by in a whirr, exciting for the merest second, but gone the next, leaving no real feeling of enjoyment or even exhilaration.
Daniel Craig probably uses less words of dialogue than any previous Bond and demonstrates little finesse. Yes, he's a superbly sculpted killing machine, but somewhere along the way, the writers and director forgot to give him a personality, humour or even wit which effectively turns him into a Terminator-type, grunting like Arnie and therefore impossible to like or admire. That may have been the intention, given that the basic story here is one (or rather, two) of revenge, so much so that green Oligarch Greene's machinations in South America seem like a sub-plot.
Some of the stunts are stunning, but with others you can see the C-Gen joins. With only one genuinely breath-taking moment in it, the "Goldfinger"-update death of Agent Fields, the rest is just relentless, senses-numbing "action". No one has to act much plus I think Judi Dench's M role is getting built up far too much in latter-day Bonds. This brutal, ice-hearted Bond I see here isn't one I readily recognise or particularly enjoy.
Two films into the Bond re-boot and already I suspect a cross-roads ahead...