Skyfall

With every new Daniel Craig film, we get told that it’s a brand new Bond in a gritty post-Bourne world, where modern sensibilities abound and the cartooniness is gone. Well, it’s not. Daniel Craig isn’t a wise-cracking Brosnan with perfect teeth, that’s for sure, but it’s still the same cartoony silliness – and that’s what I liked about Skyfall.

We have Bond surviving things that will kill anyone without even an explanation. We have lots of ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ moments, with computers doing things like launching trains at people and hiding maps in daft 3D rendered mushes of strings. Bad guys come flying in helicopters blaring out ‘Boom Boom’ by John Lee Hooker, but neglect to buy, y’know, missiles for it, which would have wound up his problems right away (though I suppose it can be justified by his desire to look his victim in the eye…though his tactics anyway could have made that impossible quite easily). Of course, we also get the baddie dithering and speechifying when he could have outright completed all his goals if he just got on with it.

But these things are part of Bond, and part of what makes watching Bond fun.

There are attempts to maintain the veneer of having the franchise grow up. Characters talk about pain and tortured pasts, and the whole thing revolves around MI6 being flawed and accountable rather than able to get away with anything. Bond himself is still portrayed as a bit past-it and out of touch. We get a few examples of having cake and eating it – the new Q dismisses silly old gadgets, but we get the retro fun of the old car with machine guns under its headlights; a little aside about Bond not knowing what the rush hour commute is like hints at a desire for him to be more socially conscious, but he really shines swanning about absurdly plush casinos in Macau; the new Moneypenny gives as good as she gets and teases Bond, but she’s still far from a progressive figure.

But expecting a Bond film to suddenly become a lefty fantasy of equality and progress is to wish for a different film altogether. And a good Bond film is a uniquely tasty occasional treat. The last couple had their moments but really missed their marks, especially the extremely forgettable Quantum of Solace. So for all its rebirth theme, this film subtly asserts that sometimes doing it the old way is best, and comes off much better for it.

Oh, and the intro sequence was fantastic, even if I don’t like Adelle undercutting her big notes in that way she does…