If you're looking for Bond, you've walked into the wrong cinema screen

Rating: 4/10 (29 October 2008)

Looking down the checklist of what you get when you see the name "James Bond" on the poster of a movie, it seems that the electric reboot in 2006's Casino Royale missed out a substantial amount. Gone were the gadgets, the humour and the trophy girls  the post-Bourne Bond was all about the psyche of a thug. "Find Bond" barks M on more than one occasion in this outing and, in all honesty, I think most of the audience are still looking.
Following on just an hour after Casino Royale (marking the first direct sequel in Bond history), the difference is easy to see. Accompanied by a rock soundtrack, we find ourselves jerked all over the place in a flashy albeit very hard to follow car chase that sets the speed for the film and thankfully, it rarely lets up. Why "thankfully"? Well, not because of the lack of good action in movies nowadays. The problem with this film is that we need to have overblown set pieces and lots of things blowing up to keep our minds off the ridiculous and paper-thin plot.
It's a good thing Bond has a passport, because from the opening in Italy, he moves around the world faster than malaria. Moving from A to B with one line of dialogue stringing him along, he quickly destroys anything in his path  and manages to kill any lead MI6 have on the organisation that Mr White is a part of. However, the story really isn't as simple as that; director Forster tries to get inside the mind of Bond after the death of Vesper Lynd in Royale. However, this is where the failure begins, as we rarely see a side of Bond other than the brute, and this makes it very hard for the audience to even like him. There are only a few occasions where this matters, as the incredible set pieces quickly take our minds off the audacious yet faltering storyline and keep them on the adrenaline rush coursing through our bodies. An aerial dogfight is one such piece; there is an unexplainable need to ride a plane a matter of miles to a secret lair in a desert when 007 has a perfectly usable Humvee to drive. But this absurdity is instantly forgotten when he's attacked on all sides and a thrilling chase begins.
But what about the humour? The girls? The gadgets? All humour is lost, save for some  maybe three  one liners ("'We have people everywhere'? That's a bit cliché I mean, florists say that" says M after interrogating the mysterious Mr White). The girls take a back seat for Bond (not in that way) because of the seeming importance of Lynd, and therefore seem awkwardly shallow  particularly Camille (played by Ukranian model Olga Kurylenko), who enters the scene as a backstabber and continues to manipulate Bond throughout the film. The second girl Bond comes across, Agent Fields, is a nod back to older, classier Bond girls but it is only a nod, as she barely lasts five minutes in the film before she is found in another throwback to older films (a huge easter egg for Goldfinger fans). The final female lead is the hugely understated M, who has a much meatier role here, and Dench plays it with such a perfect mix of benevolence and impatience that it's hard to imagine back to the days when M was a man.
All the elegance and style of Royale is lost, all the thoughtfulness of Bond's mind is replenished with anger and a need for over-the-top violence. The girls are hollow, the humour misplaced, and the gadgets gone. So what on earth is there in this movie to watch? Let me put it this way. If the title character wasn't James Bond, agent 007 for MI6, in the 21st sequel to an adapted story, then this would be a hugely enjoyable action adventure film. As it is, the Bond we love is gone, and he's been replaced with a clone of Jason Bourne's younger sister.