Cartoony Bond masquerading as serious drama.

Rating: 3/10 (13 November 2012)

Skyfall is a great looking film. Daniel Craig delivers his best Bond performance yet.
Unfortunately they are the only good things that I can say about it.
Most of the acting was wooden, the dialogue forced, music unmemorable, action forgettable, the nods to previous films heavy handed and unnecessary. Worst of all the script is a half baked, contradictory, contrived and uninteresting mess.
The film lost me at the conclusion of the pre-title sequence. Here we have Bond, after taking two bullets to the torso, plunging over 300 feet from the top of the Varda Viaduct in Turkey, landing shoulder and neck first into water........and surviving! Since the impact of the fall in the first place would almost guarantee death and there could never be any satisfactory logical explanation as to why the natural laws of the universe are completely suspended in this instance, the scriptwriters decided that the best option was to completely ignore this event and simply have Bond walking around afterwards with no physical ill effects whatsoever.
Here's the problem as I see it.
The biggest factor in creating a quality film is the script.
Bond is not Superman, Thor or The Hulk. He is a human. Showing Bond suffering that amount of physical trauma and then have him walking around perfectly fine turned this film into the equivalent of a Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon and since it was the scriptwriter's obvious intention to show us a more human, realistic and serious side to Bond's character throughout this film they should have seen how ridiculous a contradiction they were creating.
The film doesn't get any better from then on either.
I would expect children to enjoy this type of hack writing, but an adult whose consciousness has been raised by life experience should be thinking more critically and demanding more.
Exotic locations, gadgets, humour, action etc. can still exist in a more logical film. The films don't have to be serious and absolutely realistic, just more plausible. Suspension of disbelief doesn't happen because one chooses it to happen. It is the responsibility of the film maker to create the conditions in which the viewers disbelief is suspended unconsciously. This film failed to entice me into that state of mind.
I wanted nothing more than to enjoy it, but I find it impossible to enjoy the work of scriptwriters who repeatedly treat me as if I'm stupid.
This is a film that attempts to tick all the boxes instead of choosing one stance and sticking with it and it is a poor film because of it.