Insulting

Rating: 1/10 (25 November 2012)

I've been a Bond fan for a long time and watched it change over the years. Other than some lovely dark portrayals of Bond by Sean Connery, the character and the character of the films is largely tongue in cheek. In 1965 Sidney J Furie showed the filmmaking world how to make an authentic feeling and innovative spy film with The Ipcress File - he even managed to make Michael Caine act well. This film has never been beaten. Broccoli and co should have learned from this but didn't, going even more camp with Roger Moore and latterly Pirece Brosnan. In 1983, Irvin Kershner tried to show the Broccoli gang that they were heading in the wrong direction by making Never Say Never Again and bringing back Sean Connery – a much darker and more 'realistic' Bond/Spy film – and I think, vastly underrated. I also think that the Dan Craig guys 'borrowed' a lot from the style of this film. What really changed Bond for the better and made the character 21st century, was the film The Bourne Identity. Greengrass created a realistic style – modern and believable, no innuendo and no campness. Thankfully they killed off Clive Owen quite quickly who spoiled it all with his primary school acting, but was more than compensated for by the excellent Albert Finney. Now I mention this because Finney was also in Skyfall. I reckon that all any Director has to do with Finney is wind him up and watch him go. Similarly Javier Bardem (the Coen brothers famously saying to him that they weren't going to direct his performance as they had so much faith in his ability). However WTF did Mendes do to these fine actors? What wrong buttons do you have to press to make these fine actors act so terribly? Did they attend a workshop by Clive Owen? The performances were as bad as the film overall. Judi Dench plays everything the same way as she is flat and not quite all there so there's nothing anyone can do with that. And the supporting actors? Heck, straight out of drama school with not a gram of charisma between them. One of the problems the Producers, Writers and certainly the Director had was sitting on the popularity of the film and expecting the brand to do all the work. It's a display of arrogance and conceit that ruined the film entirely. The script by Purvis, Wade and Logan, was more full of holes than a pair of fishnet stockings – no journey (or 'arc' as they like to say) for any character, no rounded fullness no story even, just a few disparate badly joined up scenarios cobbled together with no real feel for length or interest. The script was insulting and I hope the writers are ashamed. The lighting was absolutely appalling – I've seen better lighting on 70's American TV shows. I bet the DOP took forever to light each scene and took a load of wages for bossing people around and being arrogant. Two areas of the film particularly bad for lighting were the underground MI5 – just fluorescent tubes lit from the top and the worst of all, that crazy bloody house burning and burning forever at the end. Man it burned at the same constant rate for half an hour whether you were right next to it or a mile away like in the church – Roger Deakins, you should be ashamed of yourself and your craft. Sam Mendes, go back to theatre directing, you clearly know nothing about pace and storytelling and most of all, Directing actors? You couldn't direct traffic. Definitely one of the worst Bond films ever.