Disappointing

Rating: 2/10 (16 March 2013)

This film was extremely dull and watching it was a draining experience for me.
The beginning chase scene, though heavily borrowed from other movies (I'll forgive that), was the most exciting part of the whole thing. After that was an hour and forty-five minutes of drawn-out, painfully boring garbage.
James Bond is no longer recognizable as a franchise. The new direction that it's taken is trying so hard to take itself seriously that it does so at the expense of entertainment value. Skyfall tries to carry itself like it's such a smart sophisticated movie, but it's not. (Don't even get me started on M's poetry recital...) It's still James Bond in its simple/porous plot and its fairly lousy dialogue, but it no longer makes up for it with guns blazing action, gadget-wielding explosive sabotage, nearly humorous levels of womanizing, and general liveliness. What do I mean by liveliness? James Bond was always a smooth operator, rarely breaking a sweat, but now he, and pretty much every other cast member for that matter, emotes so little and has such a FLAT, depressing personality that I can't connect with the character, let alone be entertained by it. SPOILER ALERT: when M died at the end, I felt absolutely nothing. I wasn't invested in the story or its characters at all. That is a problem.
The villain wasn't scary, but he was confusing. An ultra-brilliant computer genius with secret agent level skills and years of meticulous planning gets thwarted by a fire extinguisher-induced smokescreen and some Kevin McCallisteresque booby traps? I don't buy it. The way they built him up, I expected a LOT more.
All that said, I will grant the movie this: the locations and backdrops were excellent (kudos to the locations scouts) and the whole thing was filmed beautifully!