5/10

The James Bond movie franchise is now 60 years old! I'm only 5 years older, but somehow, the 27 movies, the 6 (primary) actors, the theme songs, the zany villains and the world conquering plots are woven into the background story of my life. When I see a certain James Bond movie or I hear an opening theme, I'm reminded of that decade and what I was doing at the time.

A Bond movie was traditionally a delicate recipe of the following ingredients:

• The opening credits animation and artwork.
• The opening action scene.
• A confident and supremely versatile hero who every man wants to be and every woman wants as a blind date.
• The Bond women.
• The misogyny (mostly in the earlier movies) which is more laughable than offensive now.
• Panoramic and iconic international shooting locations.
• Colourful cinematography (up until the Daniel Craig reboot era which was poisoned by colour desaturation).
• Futuristic gadgets and weapons.
• The hand-to-hand fight-to-the-death scenes with a menacing hired assassin (mostly in later movies).
• Glamourous cars.
• Glamourous fashion.
• Quirky and eccentric villains.
• A polite meeting between Bond and the villain when they pretend they don't know each other.
• Evil bases (preferably inside volcanoes).
• Lots of evil black-clad henchmen (aka red shirts or mooks) being mown down.
• Bond catchphrases, usually after killing someone (that perhaps inspired many Swartznegger lines). These sorts of jokes would dial back the dread and help lighten the mood and take the audience back to escapism.

While composing this list I suddenly realised I was wasting my time because the website tvtropes has a James Bond page that analyses the movies in staggering impartial detail with almost academic rigor. Read and enjoy.

A seismic shift happened in the Daniel Craig era ... the light-hearted disarming humour and fantasy elements of the earlier movies was sucked out and it turned into a version of the Jason Bourne series. This latest movie is the inevitable culmination of the latest Bond era: it is meandering, overly serious, humourless, artifically action-packed, fatalistic and utimately rather depressing without closure.

I've only seen this movie once, and I have no desire to see it again (no revisit value), so this review is made from fragmented memories.

There are some acceptable action scenes in the movie, as expected, but they all felt contrived. The action contains so many rapid-chop edits that at times I thought I was watching 1980s music videos. At one point, a CIA trainee lady named Paloma surprisingly transformed into some sort of armed Buffy.

Then there's about 120 minutes of plot regarding some MacGuffin nanobots that seem to have dropped in from a 23rd century Star Trek plot. These bots can apparently kill people based upon some tiny genetic differences like skin colour or your 'race' (run a web search and learn how preposterous this is). Imagine a nanobot that can kill only left-handed people, which is the first stupid counter-example of this idea that entered my head.

Nanobots are the new Phlebotinum, the laziest thing an unimaginative and scientifically illiterate writer can throw into a plot in an attempt to pad it out and sound futuristic.

What was Rami Malek doing in this movie? I don't mind his work normally, but I have no memory of what his part was in the plot. Rami just kept wandering into scenes randomly, trying to look menacing and sounding like Peter Lorre or Kiefer Sutherland in Dark City. Rami could be the most insipid and forgettable villain in Bond movie history.

Bond runs up and down lots of stairs and grimaces and gets heroically injured and kills the baddie and sacrifices himself for something (I can't remember what, but I'm guessing it's something about the nanobots). Political correctness of some flavour tips the balances in the end so his sacrifice results in a touching scene where his treasonous wife is showing his baby where daddy was blown to smithereens.

This is the first time in 60 years that James Bond has died. Why did they let that happen? I thought he would live forever.

Humanising Bond and killing him was a big mistake. He's not a normal man, he doesn't have a girlfriend, he doesn't get married (look what happened back in 1969!), he doesn't go to the supermarket and live in the suburbs like Bruce Willis in Red or Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight. This movie has finally drained all of the myth and mystery out of James Bond.

Apparently this movie went through some sort of scriptwriting development hell and finally Phoebe Waller-Bridge was called in to finish the script. This would explain why the overall plot feels like it's been stitched together with bits of brain-storming ideas, and Phoebe was obviously responsible for the arbitrary insertion of irrelevant 'strong female characters'.

Pray that gossip of Lashana Lynch playing a female James Bond in future movies is never realised. For the reasons bullet-listed above, such a change would kill the franchise forever. James Bond movies are a frieze of pop culture and movie history, and I hope they continue to be politically incorrect fun for generations to come with a swaggering leading hero man like the one that Ian Fleming invented in the 1950s.

No revisit value. Nothing really memorable … except Bond dying for some reason.

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