Disappointing and patchy

Rating: 5/10 (6 November 2012)

It's not as bad as QoS, which I thought was inept and dull. It's nowhere near as good as Casino Royale.
I find it odd that many reviewers, with usually high standards, have apparently become blind to some quite obvious clangers in this film.
The stereotype would be that a Bond film doesn't need to be smart, it can be cheesy. I'd disagree, the best Bond films - Goldfinger, Live and Let Die, Casino Royale, OHMSS - yes, they do have all the usual staple Bond scenes (Casino, Q gadgets, car chase, bond girl) - but they can still put it into a package which is not cheesy.
Some bits which jumped out:

Bond goes to the casino and is told he won't leave alive. He beats the stuffing out of the 3 baddies and Moneypenny hands him the suitcase of money ... and then just casually strolls out. This is a casino on an Island. There's no other security at the casino to bother him? He just has to dispatch 3 people and then that's it?

It's revealed to us that Ralph Fiennes' stuffy office-bound M used to server in Ireland up against the IRA. Cue groans when he duly grabs a pistol and starts kicking butt when the MP's committee is assaulted. This reminded me a bit of the Independence Day Vietnam-Vet-President stepping into a fighter plane

The Disk of agents that is being leaked ... What happened to that?

Major clunky dialog exposition. Q: I'm not ready to do .. M: "Well seeing as you've just overseen a failure whereby our agents details have been leaked and lots of Nato people are now at risk (insert plot exposition here)... "

Bond goes back to the estate .. and his old mentor turns up to offer wise words and home-truths, like some kind of Karate Kid mentor. Groan ...

Did Q really have to point out explicitly that Bond failed the tests. Surely we'd figured that out already? It's another example of clunky exposition that cheapened the experience

Bond going to Scotland in the old Aston Martin. Huh? He is allowed to keep his old gadgets or something? That's ridiculous. So then this was just crow-barred in as a reference to the old Bonds regardless that it makes no sense in the universe of the film... I know that this is not reality but you need to have some sense of consistency otherwise it's just a theme-park film

Mentor person could pretty much have been written out of the movie and it'd have made no difference

Fore-mentioned mentor happily wandering into the brush - forgetting to switch his light off and thereby alerting the baddies of his presence. Come on ...

The whole Rocky type teaching Bond to shoot again stuff. Groan

The irrational Villain behavior. He can hack any computer in the World... he's a diabolical genius .. but he attacks Bond at the end with a handful of henchmen

The London tube has been attacked with bombs, a bad guy has escaped from MI6 leaving a trail of dead bodies in his wake .. nobody thinks to let the security know at the MPs committee where head of MI6 is. Q's sidekick is being told to get Q to safety immediately, but hang on, better not interrupt the MP's questions ...

I could go on... Shame because there were some really promising bits.

Javier Bardem's villain had lots of potential. His introduction is great, but it's downhill from there and he goes from being quite original and chilling to seeming like a sulky child, albeit one with a lot of firepower at his disposal.

Very well shot

You get the idea.