I saw this celebration of 50 years of James Bond the first Tuesday it was available. Suffice to say I was very pleasantly surprised.
-◊-◊-◊-◊-
Starring: Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Judi Dench
Director: Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road)
Rating: M
-◊-◊-◊-◊-
I never thought I would be comparing a James Bond film to a Batman one. Not in my wildest dreams. Yet here I am, having watched a sucker punch of a 007 film that quite possibly ranks as one of the best instalments in one of cinema’s longest-running sagas, doing just that. Emotional, lengthy and fraught with unpredictability, featuring great action scenes that for all their grandiose ambition don’t stick in your mind as much as the quieter character-driven interactions; yep, to say this movie wasn’t influenced even a little by Christopher Nolan would be a bit daft. Throw in a skin-crawling villain who has already been compared to Heath Ledger‘s Joker in The Dark Knight by several critics and you get a film that is worthy of a certain category of artistic praise and yet is still quintessentially, unmistakably, Bond.
Vagrant Rant 