Satisfying; too many unanswered questions

Rating: 6/10 (11 November 2012)

Skyfall, James Bond's 23rd screen adventure, caveats aside, is fun to watch both on a visceral level and on an intellectual level, but it leaves one with one too many unanswered questions or unexplained incidents to be counted among the best in the series. It's quickly paced, perhaps too quickly so, but the action scenes are memorable, as are the usual locales and women. Daniel Craig continues to solidify his hold on the iconic British spy.
A hard drive containing the secret identities of all of MI6's secret agents has fallen into the wrong hands. You may ask why there would be one drive that contained all of that info, but that's neither here nor there for the purposes of this movie. Bond's mission is to track down the drive and exterminate the thief, but the thief has much bigger plans in mind - and they involve, of all people, M (Judi Dench). M's past has everything to do with this plot, and its central theme is one of trust.
Now, let me get one plot point out of the way, because it's occurred in several preceding Bond films - James dies. Or maybe he doesn't, who knows. The man has come back from the dead about a dozen times, it seems. It's what happens afterward that may make you scratch your head, an entire sequence of scenes that don't seem to make a lot of sense, based on what we've come to learn about Bond over the past 50 years. The way Bond deals with certain events just doesn't seem in character.
Bond has some help. On an initial mission gone bad, he is accompanied by Eve (Naomie Harris), who can drive and shoot and is otherwise a capable agent. Then there's a new, young Q (Ben Whishaw), who is naturally a computer whiz - a necessity in a movie in which the ages of both M and Bond are contrasted with the rapidly changing outside world. They're relics, you see.
The bad guy here is played by a blond-bewigged Javier Bardem. He has control of the list, and he's releasing the identities of all agents, five at a time, for no apparent reason. Okay, there's a reason, it's apparent, but it's mundane. When it's explained to you, you might have trouble buying it as a logical explanation. You see, here's one thing we know about our double-O agents: they sign up for their missions knowing they could die and that their lives are not more important than the mission and certainly not more important than the country itself. So if there's an issue of trust in this movie, it's that I had trouble trusting the movie to be on the up-and-up. It's one of those times when a movie makes a rule for itself and then breaks it just to further a plot.
That's not to say that the movie is not entertaining, because it really is. The action scenes are, as typical, well shot; there's car chases, train chases, fights, and even a chase on the London Tube. There are locales as diverse as Macau, Shanghai, London, and Scotland (the country, not the Yard). There are few bon mots and plenty of gunplay. In some sequences, it's as if we're watching an old Western. The cinematography is definitely up to par.
I believe that while Craig's Bond takes a step forward in development, Dench's M takes a step backward. There's a difference between being stubbornly British and being unrealistically foolish, so I found M to be a little less believable than I had in previous films. Dench does her best in a role that's much more physical here than it had been in the past, too. Bardem makes a terrible villain, and I mean that in the good way. He's diabolical, insane, and yet creepily believable.
Overall, the movie is like many other Bond films - likable, not too dark, not too deep, filled with action and gorgeous women and settings. It is by no means a bad film, or even a mediocre film. It's a good film. I was just baffled by some of the plot developments, and I felt there was too much time spent on extra, dispensable characters. It was also no surprise to me that, when a particular actor showed up, he would be very, very much involved in not only the end of the movie but also movies to come, and that's a shame (the knowledge, not the fact).