Tsaiberspace

Meh.

Not a bad movie by itself:

• High-stakes gambling. Favorite line: Bond: This is for you. (Throws $1M chip as tip to dealer.) Dealer: Thank you very much, sir.
• Assassin who needs two more hits to get promoted. Hit men have corporate ladders, too.
• Fewer in-your-face blatantly-obvious advertisements for Smirnoff, Heineken, BMW, Omega, etc. Or maybe I just didn’t notice this time around. Or maybe sponsors weren’t sure about Daniel Craig.
• Car chases, hand-to-hand, gun-to-gun, and nailgun-to-gun combat are all there and all good, but nothing we haven’t already seen in ten years of Rambo and Lethal Weapon.

But, not a great James Bond movie:

• No gadgets. I understand that this movie is a prequel of sorts, but the gadget-guy does make an appearance, so therefore should have bestowed gadgets.
• Not a full harem of Bond girls. There’s supposed to be a “good” Bond girl and a “bad” Bond girl. We only get a single tragically flawed villainness who might actually be good deep deep down inside.
• No absurd “wow” intro scene. Yes, Bond is not yet a 00 agent, but it doesn’t mean he can’t engage in some fancy spywork. I’m thinking Pierce Brosnan at the beginning of Goldeneye, shooting up some terrorist location, then riding a motorcycle off a cliff sans parachute to dive after and pilot away the only plane out of Dodge. There is a nice parkour chase scene, but it’s more an example of the movie simply following a trend than it is of the movie breaking any kind of new cinematic ground.
• No diabolical villain with dreams of world domination and a grandiose plan-revealing monologue. Just some math geek who likes to play poker and play the stock market. He has some kind of messed-up nasty-looking eye, but that doesn’t quite cut it for “diabolical villain”. Crispin Glover looked more sinister in Charlie’s Angels.
• Daniel Craig doesn’t really strike me as a suave James Bond spy. International hard-core hitman? Definitely. Spy who finesses the wetwork and doesn’t wrinkle his tie? No. This movie could have very easily been retitled as The Transporter 4.

Honestly, if you saw this photo, would you think this was a James Bond movie, let alone a shot of James Bond himself?