Lots of thrills and one big shock

Rating: 8/10 (1 November 2012)

Sam Mendes really has breathed new life into the 007 franchise. Not only is SKYFALL better than the woeful near-plot less QUANTUM OF SOLACE of Solace, you could argue it's even better than CASINO ROYALE and GOLDENEYE, the last two movies that attempted to give our superhero a much needed kick in the pants!
What really works this time round is a decent script. Once the producers had exhausted Fleming's original novels, the screenwriters came to rely on cobbling together a few original fragments with some conspicuous recycling of previous highlights (ski and underwater sequences being the most blatant examples of this). There is a bit of under-the-counter re-vamping in SKYFALL: the stolen disc with agents' names reworks the nuclear-code device from FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (or even FROM Russia WITH LOVE's cypher machine). Javier Bardem's peroxided villain Silva is a camped-up version of Christopher Walken's Zorin in FROM A VIEW TO A KILL, but the sharpness of the new script and the tightness of Mendes's direction makes the film seem very far from formulaic.
If you're a fan of the Fleming books (as I am!) Daniel Craig is so wrong to play Bond (physically, Tim Dalton came closest to the Bond of the novels, with Piers Brosnan a close second), but Craig has now stamped his seal on the part. SKYFALL, however, really belongs to Judi Dench. M's role here has been beefed up to its best since THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH. Dame Judi really seizes the bit, alternately ruthless and vulnerable. She ends up in the Highland scenes looking more like Bond's partner than his boss. Ralph Fiennes gives a nice turn as a creepy Whitehall mandarin who thinks M is past her sell-by date. Ben Wishaw is low-key as the new Q, from whom we can surely expect bigger things in the future. Naomie Harris is very appealing as the fledgling agent; her little 'surprise' at the end of the movie makes a pleasing 'coda' after SKYFALL's big shock (which must be one of Movieland's most successfully kept secrets of recent times). There are some pleasingly sly references to the Bond 'heritage' (Martinis, the Aston Martin, the original Bond theme and, of course, the obligatory 'Bond, James Bond').
Adele's slightly plodding theme-song is not going to knock Shirley Bassey off the top of the Bond charts. The blowing-up of MI6's Thames House is not CGI's finest hour. Other 'set pieces' are a bit daft, especially the runaway tube-train which we saw in the trailer and even the Istanbul rooftop chase at the beginning. But the Shanghai highrise generates vintage thrills and the London scenes have terrific tension. The Scottish moors prove to be an atmospheric location and bring a well- paced movie to a seriously thrilling climax.