Only in a Bond film

Rating: 3/10 (27 November 2012)

These have been patriotic times for the UK. The Diamond Jubilee. The Olympic Games. I went along with it, you'd have to be a curmudgeon not to. Or Morrissey.
But Heaven Knows, the new film Skyfall has me getting how our miserable pop star feels. I just can't buy into it. The applause given to this series' longevity seems a bit, well, Trigger's Broom. If you recall the gormless road sweeper from Only Fools and Horses, 'Thirty years I've used this broom! I've changed its head three times, and its handle four times...' Which means, of course, that it's hardly the same broom, is it? To me, these films don't stir the same feelings they did when I was a kid. Why should they, just because they feature a character with the same name in it? The first two Jason Bournes, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill Volume 1 - these get me going the way the old Bond films used to.
The phrase 'Only in a Bond film' once referred to the quirky, the classy, the bizarre, traits that lifted the series above other films.
But now the phrase means something very different.
Only in a Bond film would the 'hero' leave a fellow agent to his death to obey orders from his superior, and it's like we're meant to admire him! Craig's Bond disobeys his boss whenever it takes his fancy, but not in this case. We have a name for a bloke like this in England - jobsworth. Maybe that could be the name of the next Bond film, sung by Adele:
Jobsworth! / Get the T-shirt / From the foyer / That'll be another 15 pounds please...
Okay, we soon forget this as we're in a chase and there's some good banter going on, but only in a Bond film do I find it just a bit hard to hear the dialogue, as it's been since Die Another Day, it's just a bit muffled. Is to put the audience on the edge of its seat? Only in a Bond film does the hero slam into another car so it goes crashing into a bunch of 'natives', oh it's okay, he's British and they're not, who cares? Contrast later when you see just how polite and solicitous he is with Brit commuters on the Tube.
Only in a Bond film will the hero smash the bike he's riding into bridge hoping to somehow get thrown onto the train, rather than just pulling up to the bridge like you or I would.
Only in a Bond film will the lead actor move like a crab and no one really cares - it's cool! If you ever watched Octopussy and thought what the film needed was General Orlov in a fight on the speeding train in West Berlin, you're in luck, cos that's just how Craig looks in this scene.
Only in a Bond film would we get all this tripe about what a wonderful song Adele has come up with. It's not a good tune really, you wouldn't look at it twice if it weren't a Bond song. It's lushly produced, just as the film looks good, and some are fooled by window dressing.
Just as Sam Mendes' The Road to Perdition looked great, had ambition but just didn't move along, so it is here. These directors shouldn't be let near a Bond film. As with Marc Forster, who did the last one, I sense a slumming it vibe, as if to say, well, if this doesn't make sense who cares - it's only a Bond film.
This is the Craig and Dench show. Both their characters are talked down - with total justification! They both seem to be idiots. Craig is said to be old and past it - only two films back they were trying to make out he was the young kid on the block! He's only been on two missions, or only two we've seen. This is one way the film tries to tap in to Bond's iconography at the expense of him as a real person.
I think the nadir is when he cockily says he can save the trapped girl in Shanghai. Righty-ho! Sneaks on her ship, easily done. Walks naked into her shower before saying hello. He thinks he can just show up on his own to meet the villain. It starts to feel like The Man with the Golden Gun at this point, in terms of general believability.
CGI buildings on the island, like The Expendables 2.
When the helicopters show up to rescue Bond there's this daft jubilant bit of brass! Like, hey ho, he's safe! No matter the girl he went out to save is, er, dead! Only in a Bond film would the actress get so much publicity for screen time that amounts to what, about 10 minutes? The problem here is a subtext. The writer seems to be saying, hey, M is Bond's Mummy substitute! By taking her back to his own family home, her death allows him to grieve for the first time his parents' death. Seen in that way it's sort of clever, it's only as a straight narrative it's drivel.
Of course, the fans have plenty of reasons to explain away these plot holes (and there are too many to list); though you feel like you're arguing with the Tea Party. Or they say just go with it, there have been plot holes in plenty of Bond films. Well, up to a point, but those movies were fun comedy thrillers. Craig's Bond pitches itself as grim, realistic. I don't want to fess up to being a Bond fan when it means applauding the kind of rubbish we've been fed for the last decade or more. They say patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, it's also the last refuge of the rubbish filmmaker.