SKYFALL: So Much For My Promising Career in Espionage

Skyfall (2012) – The 23rd James Bond Film; the 3rd Daniel Craig Film – Directed by Sam Mendes – Starring Daniel Craig, Judi Dench, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Bérénice Lim Marlohe, Ben Whishaw, Rory Kinnear, and Albert Finney.

If you’re new here, be aware that SPOILERS are coming. Lots of them. I am not bound by your inability to have seen the movie before me. I’ve seen it and I want to talk about it, so if you don’t want anything ruined, go away, see the movie, and then come back and tell me why I’m an idiot. If you’re looking for the answer to the question, “Should I see it?”, the answer is Yes. If you really want to read about Bond, though, I’ve reviewed the other Bond movies, which you can find right here at the James Bond Review Index.

Whenever a new story in a long-running series comes out, there’s this immediate, infantile urge to locate the story’s place in the greater scheme: Best Bond film ever! Worse than Quantum of Snoozefest! Not as good as Octopussy but better than Die Another Day/!

These kinds of comments and lists are ridiculously tiresome. It’s like people are out there waiting for an opportunity to update a list rather than watch a movie. I think they are generally created by people who can’t prove their better than you by buying a Ferrari so they try to shame you with knowledge, or who have perhaps mistaken their fandom for identity and fear new fans enjoying what they’ve been enjoying and thus, the argument goes, somehow ruining it. (I thought this way, too, once. Of course, I was fifteen.) If people have fun with them, that’s fine, but if they’re using it to make you feel dumb, then I hope they sit next to the loudest, dumbest fourteen year old the next time they go to the theater. Why? Because it will be like they’re sitting next to themselves, that’s why.

What irks me the most about them, however, is that the idea of accurately comparing the immediate experience of watching a film in the theater with films that have been around for decades.

No, I take that back. What irks me the most is the person who doesn’t have fun with their lists, who uses the creation of a list or the comparison of one film to another in the series simply as an opportunity to toss some predictable, tired snark around.

I bring all of this up, in part, as a way to call myself out. (What? You thought that I thought I was perfect? You really are new here.) While watching SKYFALL this afternoon in a very crowded theater on the 23rd Bond film’s third day of release, I found myself occasionally thinking of where I’d place SKYFALL in the Bond pantheon. Instead of, you know, simply enjoying and analyzing the movie on its own merits. If you’ve kicked around the Anxiety, at all, you know I hate lists. I think once you get past a few movies, trying to argue that, say, the 14th best Bond movie is better than the 15th best Bond movie is a little specious. I prefer to do my rankings using the tier system; it’s more general, but for me, at least, it’s more accurate. I can make a very convincing argument that CASINO ROYALE (2006) is the best Bond movie ever, but I can also make a convincing argument that GOLDFINGER is the best Bond movie ever, too.

The truth is that sometimes I think ROYALE is the best and at other times I think GOLDFINGER is the best, so I’m content to call them “Tier One” movies and leave it at that.

Is SKYFALL a Tier One Bond movie?

Yes. Probably. Talk to me after the Blu-ray comes out and I’ve seen it a few more times. That snarky comment that kept rattling around my brain during the film was, “This is good, but it’s not CASINO ROYALE good.” For now, I’m confident in saying that it’s not nearly as good as CASINO ROYALE, but then, I consider CASINO ROYALE the single best action movie since Die Hard. I am happy to say that it was worth every penny of the $9 I would have paid if I had paid for my ticket this afternoon. It’s a mature, serious espionage film, dotted with brief moments of wry humor. It’s well-written, well-acted, and well-directed, although on this last point it must be noted that Sam Mendes’ action scenes succeed because of their narrative strength and not because of their visual flair.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and it shows how smart a director Mendes is to play to his strengths and minimize his weaknesses. It also gives SKYFALL a uniqueness to it; there’s a very real sense throughout the movie that SKYFALL is raising the bar and making a real attempt to push action movies in a different direction.

Which is to say, it’s not a Jason Bourne movie. In fact, SKYFALL owes more (visually and narratively) to Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire than any of the Bourne movies, or even many of the Bond movies.

Sure, there’s the tired, seen-too-many-times “Bond is getting old” trope trotted out one more time, and when SKYFALL is at its worst it’s indulging in this nonsense. (Which is really silly considering that ROYALE and QUANTUM OF SOLACE were the start of Bond’s career and they happened one immediately after the other.) James Bond is such the epitome of cool that giving him physical frailty is the easiest way to put a dent in his armor, but I feel about this plot the way I feel about superheroes who don’t want to be superheroes: this isn’t why you’re getting my money. It’s harder, but much more satisfying, when Bond films find other ways to give our supercool British spy a hurdle to overcome. Give them a love interest. Give them a personal vendetta. Give them Christopher Lee.

Thankfully, SKYFALL offers a bit of this, too. While it opens with Bond getting accidentally shot off a moving train by another British agent (Naomie Harris’ Eve Moneypenny, though the film doesn’t tell us her name until the end), only to come back a few months later looking haunted and beaten down, SKYFALL eventually moves us to Bond’s family home (named Skyfall) in Scotland. SKYFALL starts in the present with the damaged Bond, but then once he returns to active field duty, the rest of the film is a balance between who he (and the franchise) used to be and who he (and the franchise) is going to be.

That’s not unintentional, of course. This is the 50th year anniversary of the James Bond cinematic franchise, which makes it a fitting time to reflect and redefine.

On that note, it’s both satisfying and a bit disappointing that the answer to where Bond is going is back to tradition. By the end of the film, M (Judi Dench) is dead, Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) is the new M, and we’ve been introduced to a new Q (Ben Whishaw) and Miss Moneypenny (Naomie Harris). The film tries to hold off on the new M and Moneypenny until the end, but given that we don’t hear Moneypenny’s name at the start and all of her dialogue with Bond centers around her maybe not being best suited for field duty, it’s pretty obvious where that plot is going. Similarly, the film introduces the idea that M is going to be forced to step aside and it’s pretty obvious that if she is going to be replaced, Ralph Fiennes is going to be her replacement.

It’s not just the reinstatement of Q and Moneypenny to the franchise, but the whole office set-up that played such a huge role in the pre-Craig era. As SKYFALL is closing, there’s Bond coming through a door, Miss Moneypenny taking her seat at a desk, and Bond entering a small but rich office where he takes a mission from M. Mendes makes these moments work, and it’s a confident shot at other movie franchises. Any franchise that survives for 50 years is going to have a certain amount of malleability to it, and that’s clearly in evidence over the course of Bond’s run. Sean Connery exchanged confidence for parody. Roger Moore went to space. Timothy Dalton made a Schwarzenegger film. Pierce Brosnan oversaw the rise of female equality. And Daniel Craig wasn’t allowed to smile.

None of that is, in and of itself, automatically a bad thing. Malleability is a good thing, in the long run, because it gets the franchise through the years where it has fallen a bit out of favor, and then every so often we’re rewarded with a SPY WHO LOVED ME or GOLDENEYE or SKYFALL that reasserts the franchise’s preeminence.

And that’s really SKYFALL’s biggest strength – this is a movie that does what it does without concern for the latest cinematic trends. SKYFALL is a movie that charts its own course, that’s respective of the past and cognizant of the future. When Bond exchanges M’s Jaguar for his original Aston Martin DB5, it’s not just symbolically cool to see Connery’s car back, but an assertion of the confident style that Bond represents. Far too often over the years the Bond franchise has been the Ford Mustang; no, not the pre-1970s Mustang which was as cool as any car ever, but all of those post-First Generation Mustangs where Ford ripped the guts out of their Pony Car and continually morphed it into whatever the populace was buying at the moment. The Mustang should always be THE MUSTANG. Other car manufacturers should change to rip it off but instead we’ve gotten nearly forty years of the Mustang trying to be the Toyota Celica or Mazda Rx-Whatever or Dodge Charger.

I like QUANTUM OF SOLACE more than just about anyone, but it’s not a traditional Bond movie. It’s a great action movie, but it’s far more Bourne than Bond. It took the grim Craig Bond one step too far into the darkness, and while that isn’t ideal, the reaction has been to bring Bond back into the light with SKYFALL. The care and attention here to not only make a great movie, but to make the reset to a Bond tied to an M, a Q, and a Moneypenny happen organically. In the long history of the Bond franchise, SKYFALL represents a high point in terms of seeing a long-term plan. That’s what I thought was going to happen with ROYALE, but then QUANTUM took a awkward step and financial troubles befell MGM, and so SKYFALL feels like another new beginning. Because of what ROYALE didn’t do (no Q, no Moneypenny, very little sense of humor), SKYFALL took the opportunity to re-establish some old friends and it does it beautifully.

There’s no doubting I left the theater with a smile on my face, but it’s not simply because SKYFALL takes what is old and makes it new, again. No, what makes all of this work is that the mission in SKYFALL brings Bond, old M, new M, Q, and Moneypenny together through the test of battle. Because of the personal attack on M and MI6 by Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) and British politicians, we see our new unit coming together organically. Yes, we get the r-establishment of the lovably contentious Bond/Q relationship, but it’s in the process of Q having to prove himself to Bond when 007 steals M away in order to hide her that his inclusion wins me over.

People have been raving about Javier Bardem’s Silva, and it’s a good performance, but it’s yet another former ally turned enemy plot, and there’s really not a lot here that’s better than Sean Bean’s role as 006. The opening confrontation between Silva and Bond is very strong, but Silva quickly becomes just another thug with a gun and an axe to grind.

Daniel Craig is once again very good as James Bond and SKYFALL is a very good movie. Mendes manages to make an excellent spy film that brings back some of the old James Bond elements that had grown stale and rightly been abandoned. He infuses a grown-up espionage film with plenty of nods to Bond’s past and as the curtain falls on Bond’s 23rd movie and 50th year, Mendes puts all the toys back on the board, setting up the movie franchise for it’s next stage. When M is sitting in front of the government inquisition and a politician is telling her how MI6 is outdated and she’s outdated and blah blah blah, it’s not just a story point but a subtle shot at the changing trends. M’s response, Bond’s response, even Mallory, Q, and Moneypenny’s response is a come back to Jesus moment, welcoming old fans back to a more traditional Bond at the same time it lets us know what the new ground rules are going to be.

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Check out my latest work of fiction, with a time-traveling British secret agent: GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC VOLUME 0: BLOOD OF THE UNIVERSE. Here’s the blurb: It’s 1866 and Jill (a white, merchant’s daughter) and Hanna (a Korean-American servant in the merchant’s house) have fled to the American West to start a new life on their own terms.
They boarded a train in Kansas City, and before the morning was over, they had fought werewolves and vampires, partnered with Bellingham, a time-traveling British secret agent, and made an enemy of Mrs. Lincoln.

And then the train jumped its tracks, crashing violently, and killing Jill.

Hanna is despondent until Bellingham reveals his real reason for being in 1866: the Universe Cutter, a knife with the power to resurrect the dead. All they have to do is find it.

To bring Jill back, Hanna will partner with two time travelers and President Grant’s right-hand man, and battle Confederates, werewolves, lizard men, sun worshipping cultists, and a man from the end of time. All for a chance to bring back the woman she loves … a woman who will never love her back.

GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC VOL. 0: BLOOD OF THE UNIVERSE also features the back-up tale, “Appetite for Appeasement,” starring Bellingham.

LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER: Me Bum’s Gone to Sleep Again

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) – Directed by Simon West – Starring Angelina Jolie, Jon Voight, Iain Glen, Noah Taylor, Chris Barrie, and Daniel Craig.

Once upon a time, I kinda liked this film. Now, I kinda don’t.

Where LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER goes wrong for me is that it’s all just a bit too cold and too calculating and it feels, now 11 years on, like much of its power was temporal. This was the movie, after all, that made Angelina Jolie a bankable leading lady in Hollywood. She’d won the Academy Award for Girl, Interrupted a couple years earlier than TOMB RAIDER’s release, but that was in a supporting role. TOMB RAIDER was designed to do big box office and it delivered to the tune of $275 million, putting Jolie on the international map in the process.

At the time, stars aligned and Jolie’s mix of attractiveness, smoldering glances, faked British accent, and a decent mix of weapons, treasure hunting, and cool gadgets struck a chord with audience. Me, too. I remember seeing and liking TOMB RAIDER enough that over the years I’ve been tempted to buy it off the bargain rack. I always resisted, then partially regretted it, and I’d check the shelf every time I hit the store to see if it was still there. Eventually, of course, it wouldn’t be and I’d be partially disappointed, but never enough to buy it the next time it came around.

I also have no memory of the sequel, so I clearly didn’t love TOMB RAIDER all that much. Still, I had lukewarm positive vibes about this first movie and since it’s been so long since I’ve seen it, I was really looking forward to it.

Around ten minutes in, I realized something was off. The opening sequence here has Lara Croft (Jolie) fighting a big robot. There’s plenty of jumping and twirling and shooting, and it’s all clearly designed to show off Lara/Jolie as hot-looking and cool-acting. When she’s finished killing the machine, her technician (Noah Taylor) is disappointed because Lara severely damaged his robot, and her butler (Chris Barrie) is disappointed because she’s not enough of a lady.

In case you missed that Lara is super attractive and super cool, we get a shower scene and large dollops of Jolie’s British accent, which she sets on seductive and never changes. Jolie plays Croft as part-elitist snob and part-playful. It’s not an entirely ineffective performance, but it’s as phony as everything else in the movie, and that’s where TOMB RAIDER falls down for me – I’m never not aware that I’m watching a movie.

Everything about TOMB RAIDER is so cold and calculated that it all feels just a tad bit phony.

This includes the story and the casting. The film drops in on Lara’s life as the Earth is on the verge of a once-in-a-5,000-year solar eclipse, and this has the Illuminati all revved up to find a key that will unlock a triangle that will allow them to master time and space. Lara’s dad, the Lord Croft (Jon Voight), is dead but a predetermined letter arrives from him telling her about a special clock that’s the key to unlocking the triangle and oh, isn’t this all exciting and dramatic?

It’s just all so … obvious, I guess. We’re approaching a super special day, we’ve got the Illuminati as the bad guys, there’s a super special clock hidden in the Croft estate, Lara starts dreaming of her dad blah blah blah. There’s nothing wrong with being predictable if you do it all well, but TOMB RAIDER doesn’t. There’s nothing particularly wrong with Simon West’s direction except that there’s nothing particularly distinct, either.

The casting of Jolie’s real father as Lara’s father was a nice idea at the time, but given their very public and very dramatic estrangement since then, it feels a bit awkward to watch. Not enough to ruin the movie, but it’s no longer fun to see them together.

With this new knowledge, Lara is off in a race against the clock and the Illuminati and a bunch of stuff happens and none of it is all that memorable. Whenever there’s a big set piece to watch, it’s all professionally executed but lacks any kind of real passion. All of the sets look exactly like that: like sets. I don’t feel like I’m actually in a Cambodian temple; I feel like I’m at Disney World.

The biggest problem with the movie, though, is that it’s neither particularly exciting nor fun nor tense. It’s acceptable entertainment and if Angelina Jolie is your definition of Hotness Personified, then she rarely looks better than she does here. The only time this movie gets any traction, however, is when her path crosses with Alex West (Daniel Craig), a fellow tomb raider that lacks her morals. Jolie and Craig demonstrate some nice chemistry (in the few scenes where they get to play off one another), and Craig is the only performer in the film that has a presence that can stand up to Jolie.

The final set piece is worth a look because the big, rotating stellar model is pretty cool, but that’s it, really. But even then, all of the puzzles that Lara has to solve feel … like overly silly puzzles. They don’t feel functional and I don’t believe anyone would actually make them.

LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER is a mediocre movie with a star-creating turn by its lead. As I mentioned, it’s been a while since I watched it and it’ll be a while before I watch it again. There’s just too many other good treasure hunting movies out there.

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: I’ll Not Be Doubted by Some Pipsqueak Tuft of Ginger and His Irritating Dog

The Adventures of Tintin (2011) – Directed by Steven Spielberg – Starring Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Tony Curran, and Toby Jones.

I don’t have much history with Hergé’s Tintin, so I come to this movie rather clean – no preconceived notions, no emotional history, no expectations of any kind. I have so little history with the character that if you had shown me a picture of Tintin, I could have told you his name, I could have told you he was a Hergé creation, and … that’s it. I knew so little about Tintin that I didn’t know the name of his dog. I didn’t even know Tintin was a journalist. Heck, I didn’t even know he was an adult; I thought he was a 15-year old kid or something.

So, yeah. I’m rather blank on this topic.

That said, it’s hard not to get excited about a project that features the combined talents of Steven Spielberg (director), Peter Jackson (producer), and Steven Moffat (co-writer), especially when all three men have plenty of other projects on their creative plates. Since they’re working with an established property, it’s a pretty easy leap to see that this project must have been a labor of love for them.

And that’s really what ADVENTURES OF TINTIN feels like to me – a love letter to a character and series. (Hergé and his drawing of Tintin even make an appearance in the film’s opening scene.) TINTIN is a beautifully rendered film and a completely satisfying adventure about a journalist (Jamie Bell) and his sidekick dog (his name is Snowy) who track down a missing treasure. What I love about the movie is how it manages to feel both large and small at the same time. For all of the globe-trotting and treasure hunting, it’s also a simple story about a dude and his dog who get caught up in something beyond what they had ever anticipated would come from buying a model of a 17th century ship at an outdoor market.

Tintin buys the model of the Unicorn and instantly one man (Barnaby, an FBI agent is disguise) tells him to get rid of it and another man, Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine (Daniel Craig), offers to buy it from him at any price. There’s no reason for Tintin to keep the model other than he likes it, but the efforts of these two men make him realize there’s something unique about the model. He takes it home to study it, but the ship is broken when Snowy and an interloping cat get in a tussle and tear through the apartment. A small metal cylinder falls out of one of the broken masts, but Snowy isn’t able to get Tintin to see it and it slides under a dresser.

After heading to the library to do research (with Snowy in tow) on the ship, Tintin returns home to find the model stolen and his apartment ransacked. Tintin’s response is to do the pure boy adventurer move – he goes to Marlinspike Hall, the country estate of Captain Haddock, the former captain of the Unicorn. There’s a great bonding scene between Snowy and the estate’s guard dog which allows Tintin to break into the estate, and once inside he is set upon by the estate’s butler and Sakharine. Tintin sees a model of the Unicorn and assumes it’s his, but then Sakharine reminds him that his model was broken, while the one before him is in perfect condition.

Upon returning home, Snowy is finally able to get Tintin to look under the dresser, where he finds the cylinder. Inside the cylinder is an actually a rolled-up parchment that contains a clue to a missing treasure. The FBI agent returns but gets shot by unseen assailants, and Tintin gets kidnapped and brought about Sakharine’s ship. The best part of this sequence is Snowy’s determination to not let the kidnappers get out of sight, and the loyal dog ends up sneaking about the ship and helping Tintin escape and partaking in the adventure.

On the ship, Tintin meets Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), who’s kept in a state of permanent drunkeness in order to all Sakharine full run of the ship. A whole slew of adventures happen after this – on the ship, in a boat, on a plane, in the desert, on the docks … it all moves swiftly and effortlessly as Sakharine and Tintin compete to find the third model of the Unicorn for the final piece of the riddle. There’s an historical parallel at play in TINTIN: Haddock is the descendant of the original Captain Haddock, who sunk his ship so it wouldn’t fall into the hands of Red Rackham, who just so happens to be Sakharine’s ancestor. Eventually, Sakharine is captured and Tintin and Haddock find a part of the sunken treasure in Marlinspike Hall, and agree to keep looking for the rest, setting up a sequel that Peter Jackson has said he wants to direct.

ADVENTURES OF TINTIN is a wonderful film, fun and fanciful, full of life, energy, and brilliant color. TINTIN is Spielberg’s first animated movie (though he shot much of the film using motion capture), but the world he (and the digital artists at WETA) create is alive and beautiful. While I didn’t read the TINTIN stories as a kid, it feels familiar to the stories I did read. The adventure narrative is preposterous but the characters are grounded, and because they feel real it’s easy to follow along with them on this crazy ride. Despite all the darkness at play in the film with the near-constant threat of violence, a wondrous sense of optimism and permeates the movie.

I’ll be buying TINTIN for the collection and I’m already looking forward to Jackson’s sequel.