The James Bond films starring
Daniel Craig have instilled that 50-year-old movie franchise (the
longest in movie-making history) with a new
frisson
of sexual energy and creative juices that have been surprising to many. The
latest entry,
Skyfall, is no
exception. This is primarily due to the quality of the creative team brought to
bear in its production. The director is
Sam Mendes (Oscar winner for
American
Beauty) and
Skyfall has the
high-powered talents of Oscar winner
Dame
Judi Dench (
Shakespeare in Love)
, Oscar winner
Javier Bardem (
No
Country for Old Men)
and
Ralph Fiennes (
Harry Potter films,
The
English Patient). Upcoming British actors like
Naomie Harris (
28 Days Later)
and
Ben Whishaw (
Cloud Atlas) also have pivotal appearances. Even
Sir Albert Finney (he’s not dead yet!)
makes a significant contribution to the 3
rd act.
The measure of the success of a Bond film is often about the
quality of the villain, the beauty of the Bond girl(s) and the exoticism of the
locales visited. Sometimes the Bond theme song can be the most memorable thing
about the film (I defy you to tell me what Live
and Let Die is about).
Skyfall has an
excellent villain (played with just the right amount of quasi-homophobic
creepiness to not go over the line by Bardem),
an excellent theme song (by
Adele of
course) and some of the various locales visited by Bond are Istanbul, Shanghai,
Macau and London.
One interesting aspect of the latest Bond films has been
their willingness to explore the vulnerability and fallibility of James Bond
himself. For example, in both Skyfall
and Casino Royale Bond’s body
undergoes substantial abuse (naked torture in the latter and a gun shot to the
chest in the former) but Daniel Craig’s body is in clear and constant focus of
the camera. Both clothed and unclothed, the camera’s eyes, and thus the
audience is drawn to the sculpted nature of his frame. Even in a suit, the
tight-fitting contours of Bond’s finely tailored suits leaves enough to the
imagination to enthrall and excite. I’m not sure how much Bond’s straight male
viewers react to another make being the subject of the camera’s gaze, but as a
gay man this is something of a treat, especially in a mainstream, big budget
Hollywood action movie ostensibly aimed at (and marketed to) pubescent boys.
The general belief has always been that “women want to be with him and men want
to be him” but does this still apply
when James Bond’s antics can get you declared dead by your own government and
your digging bullet fragments out of your own tautly muscled chest in front of
a mirror? There is some clearly some subversion of the typical hero fantasy
going on here.
One of Daniel Craig's best assets that he brings to the role of Bond
are his eyes. Craig’s eyes are an almost unnatural cerulean blue, and the
director uses all sorts of cinematographic tricks to get us to see them in
various lights, exhibiting various emotions. Bond has the kind of eyes which
can instantly suss out whether you are a threat to him or his mission and can
also communicate to you that you better get out of his way because he has a
license to kill. It almost is irrelevant to what Bond is doing, because just
watching him doing it is so entertaining (and requires little or no cogitation
by the audience).
That being said this time the story revolves around computer
hacking of MI6 (the British equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency) to
obtain a list of secret NATO agents embedded in terrorist cells around the
world, who will obviously be executed if they are exposed. The real attack is
on whoever is at the head of an agency who has suffered such an egregious security
failure, which in the case of MI6 is “M” (short for Minister, of course), played by Dench in every Bond film since Goldeneye in 1995 (the last 6 films).
It becomes clear that the cyberterrorist is a former 00 agent named Silva, played by Bardem, who in a confrontation reveals his hatred for M because she traded his life away for 6 hostaged agents and when Silva tried to kill himself in captivity by activating a tooth with cynanide gas, the method did not kill him, but only grossly disfigured him.
After another attack at the Houses of Parliament where M is testifying, Bond and M go off together to Scotland, to a safe house which turns out to be Bond's ancestral home, cleverly named "Skyfall."
I don't want to give
a spoiler in this review so I will conclude the plot summary here. However,
Skyfall is a well-directed, well-acted film with a very attractive lead who appears in almost every scene. The action is fast-paced and almost non-stop. The plot is irrelevant but relatively easy to follow if you decide to, and there is a somewhat surprising ending. You will leave the theater realizing that despite the fact the Bond franchise is 50 years old, it is still as fresh as ever and that they will be making these movies for a long, long time.
Title:
Skyfall.
Director: Sam Mendes.
Running Time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for intense violent sequences throughout, some sexuality, language and smoking.
Release Date: November 9, 2012.
Viewing Date: November 21, 2012.
Writing: B+.
Acting: A.
Visuals: A.
Impact: B+.
Overall Grade: A- (3.67/4.0).
