Question of Sport

Rating: 8/10 (29 October 2012)

We can all pretend that Quantum of Solace never happened. But how does Skyfall compare with Casino Royale? Daniel Craig's Bond debut was an exquisitely made, neat and nasty exercise in sexual and violent tension which brought Bond bang up to date. But reboots are always at an advantage - the filmmakers have a pre-stocked toy box of tropes and expectations to play with. Skyfall, on the other hand, comes four years after a dud, with a director more suited to symbolism than stunts. Barbara Broccoli and MGM need Skyfall to be a success, lest the series is dragged back into the obscurity of the Dalton era or the preposterousness of latter Brosnan.
After the stylised pyrotechnics of Road to Perdition, the war-inside war film Jarhead, and the masterful but talky Revolutionary Road, one might expect that director Sam Mendes would put the brakes on Bond. But the 143 minutes fly by. If anything, I found myself longing for more. More time constructing the icy relationships between Bond, M (Judi Dench) and Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), and more time sparring with Bond and Silva (Javier Bardem).
Bardem's magnificent monster (part Hannibal Lecter, part Anton Chigurh, part Joker, making an entrance like Frank-N-Furter) appears at first to be an offensive, old-fashioned equation: campness = homosexuality = evil. But then great writing makes sense of the love triangle. Silva adores M (for Mother), but feels betrayed by her. Silva is expressing the repressed abandonment issues felt by Bond. And the relationship between M and Bond is precisely the mother-son bond (!) coveted by Silva.
Even more interestingly, Silva seems to embody Bond's deepest fears. With a threatening caress, Silva directly challenges our hero's ferocious heterosexuality; and he's secretly deformed, while Bond possesses a paranoid obsession with physical perfection. Silva is the expression of the scared little boy hiding behind the "cool" facade; the child who could never grow up, still playing with the toys that Mummy allows him, and still sulking when he's told off.
The dynamic between Bond and Silva takes the film in the thematic direction of The Dark Knight. And why not? This new Bond is as conflicted and repressive as Batman; damaged goods doing good in a modern world that promises safety and intimacy but provides neither. But while the final act of Nolan's flawed opus went wildly awry, Bond 23 ends entirely appropriately for a 50-year celebration, by returning to its beginnings. The raw, stripped-down finale recalls Straw Dogs' final storm. With its dwindling characters cast black against its fiery backdrop, it's as primal and mythic as Bond himself.
The only missteps are when it feels like the filmmakers seem to feel the need to actively remind us that we are watching James Bond and not The Dark Knight, such the casino fight scene that ends with a cheesy reptilian death. Typically Bond, maybe, yet it comes straight after an atypical, empathic exchange between Bond and Sévérine (Bérénice Marlohe) about her induction into child prostitution and the imprisoning nature of fear.
Overall, it would be a hard task to name a more satisfying or sophisticated Bond film. Budding screenwriters should take a leaf out of the screenwriters' (Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan) book: the last line spoken by M in this movie is an absolute killer, bursting with meaning without spelling it out; a reminder that, in a world of pragmatists and assassins, love is expressed in actions, and the significance is in the subtext.