A superb film on its own, and a decent Bond film at that

Rating: 7/10 (12 November 2012)

The 23rd Bond movie packs quite a punch. The explosive beginning shows James Bond and fellow agent Eve running down an assassin who has stolen a hard drive containing details of undercover agents - a list similar to the NOC list from Mission Impossible. I'll just go ahead and call this the NOC list. By opening credits, Bond is accidentally shot and falls off a bridge to his presumed death.
With the NOC list missing, there is a high pressure political upheaval around M and her division. The Government questions the relevance of MI6 as an organization, as they disputes its relevance in the modern non-war era (This ironically reminded me of how Judi Dench's M was introduced on screen in GoldenEye, where she accused James Bond of being a relic of the cold war)
M is under political pressure to relinquish her post, after a terrorist attack takes out the MI6 building. This bit seemed nonsensical to me. "Your division to infiltrate enemies and fight in secrecy is clearly obsolete, as evidenced by this terrorist who infiltrated our top secret Govt body in secret, in the shadows" is a rather thin argument.
But of course, Bond returns, resurrected, and a bit worn out by his ordeal. He tracks down a thin trail that leads him to Raoul Silva, the villain of the piece, a cyber-terrorist who has a meticulously calculated plan.
It is a very entertaining action movie, and a decent Bond movie. It's not as good as Casino Royale - but that's a pretty high bar to reach; It's better than Quantum of Solace - but that's a pretty low bar to clear.
The Bond fan in me was furious that they did not have the gun barrel scene at the start of the movie. However, it was shown in the end, and the movie kind-of seemed like a tasteful segue from the darker tones of CR and QoS into the classic Bond series - with even the interiors reminiscent of the 60s Bond - so I am not complaining on that.
My biggest gripe is that this movie showed far too much of Bond's past. I liked to think of Bond as a man with a mysterious past, orphaned at childhood and groomed by MI6 to be the lethal kissing/ killing machine he grew up to be. I like character development in a movie, but Bond was better off without his history as a baggage.
We are re-introduced to the Q branch, which is headed by a nerdy young computer hacker. This makes sense in the modern era, and I can understand their need to move away from wacky gadgets. But their contribution to the James Bond gadget world were - a radio transmitter (low key, but fine... it's useful), and a gun modified so that it can only be fired by Bond; useful when you're facing the budget conscious terrorist who plan on stealing your gun and using it against you, but in a world where your enemies are able to buy their own guns, it is actually worse than a regular gun. Yes, through a curiously improbable situation, this stupid feature pays off once in the movie, but really, Q? Bond would have been better off with some Kevlar.
I liked the villain's performance, but his plan seems to be eerily complicated. I don't usually give out spoilers, but what I'm about to say would be on the edge of spoiler territory, so skip the rest of this entry if you want to stay away from that. (Thanks for reading. Bye bye). The villain, Silva, is a former MI6 agent who holds M personally responsible for his imprisonment and torture by the Chinese, and his entire plan is to take revenge on M.
Taking revenge on M is actually a fairly easy task. Bond sneaks up to her home without any problems when he 'returns from the dead'. To actually sneak up to a Government's secret military intelligence division is actually too roundabout a way to get to M. Even if we extend the storyline explanation and say that Silva wants to take revenge on MI6 as a whole, he could have done that by releasing all the names from the NOC list (He doesn't... He releases 5 names and then the list doesn't appear at all anywhere). And add to all of this, with the elaborate Joker-like plan of getting captured in order to escape (he needn't have done that. He only needed to let his laptop be 'captured' to set his plan in motion), he's just behaving irrationally. His plan also assumes that having a dozen or so armed mercenaries disguised as cops would be enough to subdue a top level judicial procedure involving the Prime Minister and other dignitaries. If you take a moment to think that this is what happens, then it really is an insult to reality. The British Government does look insanely fragile - It's a wonder they got by while Bond was 'dead'.
And Bond's solution to this cybercriminal mastermind's tactics is even more bizarre. He drags M with him discreetly to his abandoned childhood home, Skyfall. He deliberately plants an electronic trail engineered so everyone except Silva will be sidetracked. This is the cunning plan to get Silva to attack him. But once again, if you manage to get three seconds to think about it, it just makes no real sense. People who can and want to help M would not be able to find them, but Silva would - so would all his mercenaries and other enemies who he can bring with him. By the time Silva locates them, he could have just shot a missile at the house and called it a day.
Just because I'm nitpicking on all the available holes for this movie, it doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it. It was a very entertaining movie. It could have been better, though.