I really wanted to love this...

Rating: 3/10 (18 November 2008)

I was one of the many people who didn't really believe in Craig before Casino Royal but I was also one of the many people who loved Craig and CR. So of course when I was hugely excited about this Bond film. I found the title quite interesting and I found it certainly fit the mood of the end of CR and I was hoping that the Bond/Vesper story would be the main plot here.
It started out really well. I don't really have a problem with the Bourne editing and although some people have said it is not a typical Bond movie any more, well neither was CR and I loved that so it was OK. So the car chase was great and the chase over the rooftops were also good even though I was distracted by the fact that some shots (Bond jumping over the street onto a balcony) were directly from Bourne Ultimatum, which wouldn't have been a bad thing if the didn't already seem very much like Bourne.
More by chance than anything else does Bond get dragged into the whole "bad guy wants to take over the world/country" story and this was for me the main letdown. The villain just wasn't evil or scary or anything. He was basically a businessman who at end was still somehow able to match Bond in hand to hand combat. This was a bit confusing as Bond had been shown that he was almost inhumanly strong (ripping of the door handle). I loved Le Chiffre in CR because although he was also a bit of a weakling he was still evil. And BOnd sudden realization what is going on as they are leaving the cave is just laughable. Having Bond chasing White and revenging Vesper for a whole film would have been a bit thin but it would have been better than this.
Now the action: There are some great scenes (car chase), there are some scenes that are OK (climax in the desert) and there are awful scenes (plane chase). CR was spectacular but pretty down to the ground. This just tried to hard to be amazing. I remember sitting in the cinema and seeing the trailer and I thought "Ok, this all looks great but hopefully they didn't overdo it". Bad luck.
But the action didn't make CR great, it was the reinvention of the characters so maybe that will save this film? Well kind of. The best scenes in this film were not the huge action scenes but the little shots that showed Bond as a human. The sot in the cave, where Bond and Camille are talking about their losses is the best scene in the film because here Forster knew exactly what he was doing. Unfortunately there were only three such scenes in the movie. The others being the final one and Mathis's death. This was really the turning point for me because it showed Bond's very dark and merciless side and that now he was only concentrating on the job at hand.So Craig did a great job again but he was not given enough time. He spent most of the film either jumping, running or shooting so he didn't really get a chance to play the human Bond that much. M had a much larger in this film and Dench probably had more screen time than in all her other Bonds to date put together and she did it really well. The other Bond girl Fields was the one that annoyed me. It was basically the same problem that HMSS had. Bond was still in love with someone yet the seduces another woman and apart from that Fields has no real scene in the film. The Goldfinger reference was neat and Bond's and M's reaction to it again showed more human Bond but I think the whole character could have been cut out.
Right, so to sum it up: The action is bigger but not better than CR, the characters are not as good as CR and the plot is not as good as CR.
7/10