Bond-arama: No. 0010 Skyfall (2012)

Skyfall is essentially a re-tread of Goldeneye which leans heavily on other popular films. It is alternately brilliant and mind-numbingly stupid. And while the public loves it right now, that will fade because this one doesn’t feel much like a Bond film. For now, it sits at No. 0010 of 0023.

Plot Quality: To understand Skyfall, we need to break it into three parts. The first part is an amazing Bond film. It begins with one of the best chase scenes ever in a Bond film as Bond chases a suspect who has stolen a hard drive containing the names of every western agent imbedded with terrorist organizations around the world. The chase opens with Bond trying to decide if he should save the life of a fellow agent or finish the mission; the mission wins. He jumps into a car driven by fellow agent Eve, who struggles to stop the bad guy. Bond casually reaches over, grabs the wheel, and yanks the car into the bad guy, causing the bad guy to crash. It’s a brilliant moment. The bad guy gets out and sprays everyone with bullets until he can get onto a motorcycle and escape. Bond grabs another motorcycle and they engage in a rooftop chase through Istanbul until they end up on top of a train, where Bond and the suspect engage in hand-to-hand combat. That’s when Eve shoots Bond by mistake. This is an amazing chase. I can’t talk highly enough about it.

With Bond apparently dead, M gets grilled about losing the list. As she returns to the office, the office explodes in a terrorist attack. Someone hacked into MI-6's computer to cause this. Bond returns and is sent after the man who stole the list. He will be in Shanghai. Before Bond goes, we meet the new Q, who is an arrogant 20-something computer nerd. In Shanghai, Bond follows the killer to a high-rise building where he performs an assassination. Bond watches him perform the assassination and then tries to capture the man to question him, but kills him instead. Bond follows the only lead he has left, which is the woman who helped stage the assassination. She leads Bond to the villain, Raoul Silva, a former British agent in Hong Kong. Silva is a deranged killer who kills the woman and seems to want to enlist Bond to join him, but Bond captures him instead. The cinematography in China is perhaps the best of any film I’ve ever seen, not just a Bond film.

Up to this point, the film has been an excellent Bond film with one small complaint. Throughout this portion of the film, there is a steady theme of “you’re too old.” Seeing as how this is Bond’s first mission after the Casino Royale/Quantum of Solace reboot, this feels really misplaced. Ultimately though, Bond ends up proving himself more necessary than ever and the film proves the doubters wrong, so this isn’t a huge sticking point.

Now we come to the second part of the film. This lasts about twenty minutes and it’s mind-numbingly stupid. Essentially, these twenty minutes are The Dark Knight without the capes. First, they copy Silence of the Lambs by putting Silva into a glass cage. Silva reveals that he was M’s best agent in Hong Kong but M surrendered him to the Chinese after he hacked their computers. They tortured him and he tried to kill himself with a cyanide capsule that didn’t kill him, but instead ate away the bones in his jaw (like Harvey Dent in Dark Knight). He is crazy and wants to get even with M. Silva is essentially Heath Ledger’s Joker without the face paint.

Then Silva escapes... and things get really stupid. He escapes because Q connected Silva’s computer to theirs and Silva’s hacking program opened the doors. Somehow, Silva manages to kill armed guards who would have had plenty of time to shoot him from across the room when the doors started opening. Then his henchmen appear with impossible precision at various rendezvous points to give him things he needs (like a cop uniform). Batman Bond chases him exactly where he needs to be at the precise time so Silva can explode the roof of the sewer above them and cause a subway train to crash down on Bond. Silva and his crew then go try to kill M as she testifies before a committee. Bond stops him, but Silva escapes.

This. Is. Nonsense. There is no way Silva could have known the things he needed to know to pull this off, no way he could have predicted the behavior that took place. How did he know MI-6 would move here after he blew up M’s office? How did he know M would be testifying today? How did he know Bond would follow him to this subway stop and through the precise door and down the tunnel at that precise speed and then shoot at him but only as a warning shot? How did he even know that MI-6 would plug his computer into theirs? The only reason we can accept them doing this is that Q is an arrogant nerd who thinks he can handle anything. But he’s new. Silva would have no way to know that he would be Q right now or that he wouldn’t have followed obvious safety protocols and decrypted Silva’s computer on a standalone station.

Thankfully, the third film begins pretty quickly. The third film is Harry Potter. With Silvamort proving invincible, young Bond decides to take M-bledore to the manor in which he lived before his family was killed up in rural Scotland. Here we will discuss Bond’s childhood, meet a loveable old caretaker, race through a secret maze inside a spooky old mansion, see the graves of Bond’s parents, and dispense knowledge to Bond about the meaning of friendship. Silvamort and his Deatheaters will attack with overwhelming force, but good will prevail and Silvamort will meet his end in a dank marsh after complaining to M-bledore, “You made me.” Arg. This was actually an entertaining bit of filmmaking and would have been an excellent addition to the Taken franchise, but it feels nothing like Bond.

So what you have here is a film that starts as a great Bond film, suddenly goes full-retard, and ends as a completely different movie.

Bond Quality: Craig is solid again as a cold-blooded, efficient killing machine Bond. There are cracks this time, however, and those make this his worst performance of his three films. For one thing, there is a strong vibe of Bond being too old or too tired to continue. Fortunately, this fades as the film progresses. But then we are shown careless Bond.

One of the things that made Craig so great in the first two films was how ruthlessly efficient he was. He never wasted a step, a bullet or a punch. Here, he burns through his bullets repeatedly and then actually throws away his gun... repeatedly. He almost never hits anything he aims at. The punches he throws seem ineffective. We also get stupid Bond. He never has a plan. He races to Scotland to set up a confrontation with Silva on turf that is familiar to Bond, but never stops to get any weapons. Instead, he just assumes there’s still a gun case he hasn’t seen in 20+ years, a gun case that won’t hold real firepower. These are the kinds of things Craig did not do in the first two films and that makes Bond seem far less than he has been. Still, even playing stupid-off-target Bond, Craig remains better than all but Connery in the role.

The Bond Girl: Was there a Bond girl in this one? Technically, it was probably Judy Dench as M... but we’ll look past that. The Bond girl here is either Naomie Harris as Eve or Bérénice Marlohe as Sévérine. But neither is in the film all that long. Eve shoots Bond by mistake early on in the film and has a non-plot-related surprise at the ending. Sévérine is Silva’s mistress and leads Bond to Silva. The total airtime for both is about 10 minutes. The scene where Bond meets Sévérine is pretty sexy and they have great chemistry, but she’s really just a prop.

Villain Quality: The villain is Javier Bardem as Raoul Silva, a former British agent gone rogue after M surrendered him to the Chinese in exchange for a number of other agents China held. A large number of people have said that Silva is one of the best villains ever in a Bond film. They’re smoking crack.

Silva is basically a copy of Heath Ledger’s Joker with the added suggestion of homosexuality. He copies the Joker both in terms of mentality and even plot by using explosions as distractions and letting himself get captured as part of his plan. This is a problem, however. The Joker worked because he was so random. He was dedicated to chaos without a specific target. That meant anything he did made sense and it made him so dangerous because he wasn’t predictable. Silva, on the other hand, is obsessed with hurting M. The difference is significant because it means that his actions need to make sense in that regard, and they don’t. Why wait all these years to get her? Why not get her in some far less Rube Goldberg way? “I shall wait until she has a list the release of which will embarrass her, then I’ll steal the list and let them capture me so I can escape, so I can go shoot her before Parliament.” Uh, why not cut out all the impossible steps and just go shoot her?

Silva also brings back things that Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace specifically removed from the series. Silva has an island lair. He has armies of killer henchmen. He has no subtlety whatsoever as a villain. He’s insane. He’s also unrealistically powerful. Unlike Green or Le Chiffre, Silva brags about how easy it is to destroy anything he wants. He is clownish Blofeld in a world that is supposed to be realistic. That makes him a poor villain.

Summing this up, the first part of the movie is probably the best Craig has done, and that’s high praise. The second part is crap and belongs down with Die Another Day. The third is a good film, but not a Bond film and doesn’t belong on the list. The public loves this film, having made it the most profitable by far, but I think that the favorable view of this film will slide as the “event feel” passes. Over time, I suspect this will slide below Quantum of Solace and possibly even Goldeneye. For now though, it sits at No. 0010 of 0023.