Best opening sequence but quickly run out of steam and story

Rating: 6/10 (18 March 2013)

The 10 minute intro is intense and jaw-dropping and leads to a perfect artistic visual title sequence along the Oscar-winning song from Adele. After leaving Istanbul and Turkey, where the tantalizing ten minutes take place. The first hour is still interesting and have some character development and some great cinematography from Deakins. We meet the new Q in the National Gallery in front of a Turner and the script is still full of humour, we travel to Shanghai and Macau and it is still sexy and suspenseful. We meet the annoying villain played by Javier Bardem and it almost works... yet, when the action comes back to London and later Scotland, it starts to fall apart. The screenplay becomes uninspired and easy and the Skyfall, Scotland buildup and resolution are utterly awful. Barricade, bombs, gunshot and fire in the field yields nothing interesting (save a few nice shots from Deakins) and the Bond backstory is not explored to any usefulness. Javier Bardem cannot do anything with the revengeful plotter who becomes one-dimensional and the sagging story with no plot.
I enjoyed every Sam Mendes movie, but here you see the difference in writing quality and consistency. This is no Alan Ball! What could have been the best Bond movie ever (like Bird did with Mission Impossible 4 and Matthew Vaughn did with X-Men:First Class) started with promise, but ended up not quite fulfilling its goal. Hope Mendes will choose better written projects in the future.