I saw the very first James Bond, “Dr. No,” when it first came out in 1962, and, well, it was pretty cool, even if Jim didn’t tussle with giant squid the way he did in the book.* Since then I have, rather to my shame, seen all the Bond pictures at least once, with the exception of “Quantum of Solace.” The film got very bad reviews, and I decided that, since I was past 60, I should be mature enough not to see a Bond picture if it got bad reviews.
Well, now “Skyfall” is out, and I’m a little stunned that it didn’t get reviews bad enough to warn me off, because this picture is seriously lame. The later Brosnans were nothing more than a random series of action sequences—if you ran the reels out of order no one would notice—but in its own way “Skyfall” is even worse, about a “rogue agent,” a double O gone bad, who has somehow “compromised all our codes” and somehow raised a private army that operates with impunity in the UK.
The real point of “Skyfall” seems to be to write Judi Dench (aka “M”) out of the series, so the picture is largely about her. She’s set upon by a myrmidon army of piss-pot Parliamentarians, who, of course, know nothing about the arcana of espionage, and muck everything up while poor Judi is just trying to get the job done. The first rule about espionage is “Don’t ask questions about espionage,” OK?”
The suits never get it, of course, so it’s up to Jim and Judi to settle things, with Albert Finney dragged in for old times sake. The three hole up in the Bond ancestral estate, “Skyfall,” setting a lot of homemade booby traps for the bad guys that, naturally work like a charm. There’s a heavy scent of rewrite in the air, but I have no idea where the original script, if there was one, would have gone—a worse place, quite probably. Anyway, when it’s over, it’s over. And if I ever see another James Bond picture, it will have to get great reviews.
Afterwords
I gave a thumb’s up to the first Daniel Craig Bond here.
*I actually read James Bond before he was cool—that is, before JFK said that Ian Fleming was one of his favorite authors. And the book I read was Dr. No. Since it featured both naked chicks and giant squids, it was right up my 13-year-old alley. In fact, it fit my fantasies so perfectly that it prompted a meta-cognition on my part, my first probably—“this guy has the mind of a 13-year-old boy!”
