Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

Rating: 4/10 (1 November 2008)

This film's predecessor was such a good re-invention of the franchise that I went to the cinema to see a Bond film for the first time since my childhood. It's a shame then that the re-engineering of 007 has now been taken many steps too far, so that I left the cinema wishing I'd waited for the DVD. Thanks to madly frenetic editing, it's difficult to know where the story is in this film. Bond jets around from place to place, staying for as long as is required to kill another handful of people in ever-more implausible ways. There is little ability to be thrilled at the amazing stunts, because everything happens so quickly that you haven't got time to process the mise en scene before it is taken away. Several key action sequences are also spliced between peripheral backgrounds, so you see a horse race / opera for a second, then it cuts back to an action scene, and back again... I could forgive the lack of humour, gadgets etc as they had been taken too far in previous incarnations of 007. However Bond himself should be present in the film; this time, Bond was absent and replaced with a dour killing machine. Sadly, given the success of "Casino Royale", I'd have to mark this as a failure to build on what went before.