Skyfall = Skyfail

When you marry a man with wildly different tastes in literature and movies, you need to be prepared to compromise. So let me just say that I have seen my fair share of “movies in the James Bond genre” over the last 20 years or so.

With a reasonable amount of internal mental instruction on my part (do not sit here thinking of all the other far more worthy things I could be doing at this time, it is alright to sometimes just be entertained, James Bond is not a misogynistic pig, that scene where he jumps onto the back of a moving train/into moving aircraft/off moving motorbike and into back of moving truck is completely realistic), I have even been able to enjoy them.

So with kids away for the week and Life of Pi tucked into our belts as the first movie we saw this week, we headed off last night to an early evening screening of Skyfall.

I was looking forward to this as an event, early movie followed by dinner – not something we do often. And I was even (I promise) looking forward to the movie. I don’t particularly like Daniel Craig as James Bond; I think he does the whole thing far too seriously – as well as being attractively dangerous, James Bond needs to have a twinkle in his eye and a sense of humour, both things that DC lacks – but I did have the spectacular opening crane scene of Casino Royale firmly planted in my mind and I was prepared to, at least, be entertained.

Let me just say the movie didn’t start well. Yes there was the “fighting on the back of a train” opening scene – belief suspended, popcorn in hand, movie being enjoyed – but then Bond gets shot, falls into a river, and "dies" and really it was all downhill from there. So as not to provide too many
spoilers I'll keep my comments brief and to the point

• Terrible dialogue: Bond: “I didn’t recognise you without a gun strapped to your hip.” Beautiful female protagonist: “I feel naked without my baretta” (or something equally silly along those lines - and this was uttered during the movie's one and only seduction scene.)

• A ridiculous villain who would have better belonged in a batman movie.

• A badly-paced plot that meandered around and never found its feet (mmmmm let me see now, will I be a James Bond movie, or will I be a psychological explorational of what happens to a man with delusions of grandeur who at one stage in his life had a strong, controlling female boss).

• A silly plot with too many inconsistencies to even begin to list.

• A boring plot - honestly by about half way through I could barely sit still and listen to the rest of it. I have never walked out of a movie, but if M hadn't been there, believe me I would have strongly considered leaving this one.

And so it goes it on. In my attempts to validate my views on this ridiculous movie, I found these reviews which say it far better than I ever could.


Huffington Post


Ed Whitfield


Read the reviews. Don't bother with the movie.