[Review] Skyfall

At first I wasn’t impressed with the choice of Daniel Craig as the new James Bond but he kind of grows on me. Yes, he still looks like a miner (and like not the sophisticated secret agent I think he should look like) but he’s portraying a Bond that harks back to the times of Sean Connery. That's good. As an added bonus my wife thinks he has hard cool eyes (and that reminds her of myself).

The plot of Skyfall is very weak. Somebody steals a list of secret agents from the computer of MI5 and it turns out that it is done as a personal vendetta against M. If you really are a critic you will have to reach the conclusion that the bad egg is a very intelligent psychopath who should have used his abilities for a better cause. And having that list of agents on a disk? Do these disks still exist in the real world? The movie gives the impression that the director first filmed a series of spectacular stunts and only then the writers went in search of a plot to string these stunts together.

Bond remains a misogynic anachronism of an age long gone by. He correctly identifies Severine as a former prostitute who was once kidnapped and enslaved as a child by human traffickers. She gives no sign of being sexually interested in Bond, merely of being incredibly scared. So he creeps uninvited into her shower cubicle and has sex her.

In the end, Bond is all right but the only character that really feels at home in this movie was Eve, played by Naomie Harris, who’s possibly better known as Tia Dalma/Calypso in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. During the trailer, Eve thinks she killed Bond but - after his ressurrection - is teamed up with him again.

Some discrepancies remain. In Skyfall the government sold Bond's ancestral home, because he was officially pronounced dead. Scriptwriters obviously forgot that James Bond was dead once before in You Only Live Twice and your house cannot sold twice. Can it?

Both Daniel Craig and Naomie Harris are rumoured to be in the next installment of James Bond. Which is a good thing. I hope they hire a good scriptwriter too.