Not the best Bond film...

Rating: 7/10 (24 November 2012)

Quite frankly it was rather dull. I even felt like getting up and walking out of the theater, but thought to my self - I paid money to watch this in our brand new Cineplex theater and I'm gonna last through it. It didn't help much as I felt wanting to hit the fast forward button on an imaginary remote controller for the cinema ... wouldn't that be great - having a cinema theater all for your self with a remote and everything? :))
Now back to the movie. It's short comings weren't the fact that it didn't have any gadgets in a digital era or that it was going for a retro style, I was quite psyched up about that actually.
It was the story. Something about it felt ... uninteresting. Maybe the fact that we've seen it all before in other movies, lots of clichés; I know, Bond movies are all about clichés, but these clichés were just out of character for a bond movie ... at least to me. Like having a bisexual villain resembling the Jackal, Havier's character even looks like him with his dyed blond hair. Although Havier's performance is one of the best in the movie.
Then there are the unexplained parts of the story which bothered me, like how did Bond survive after being shot in the beginning.
Secondly, (spoiler ahead) Bond has a clean shot of Silas in the underground tunnels just before the train drops down, but no he actually has to chat with him and let him detonate a bomb. There was no reason to delay shooting him, they had already contained the situation with the compromised data!? Not to mention that Silas has a point blank shot at M at the hearing and misses just because he delays his shot, come on, you'd think a trained ex agent should be able to make such a shot blind folded while taking a whiz.
And lastly the movie took almost an hour before it got started, Bond movies are supposed to take your breath away, leave you breathless, not leave you yawing in the middle of it.
A trade mark of this movie have to be washed up secret agents which are quite (I mean considerably) down on their game.
On the up note, the music was quite nice. I really liked the brass rendering of one the Bond motives, actually the music is what kept what little was left of my attention and at moments I caught my self just listening to some of the music rather than watching the movie.