Thanks, I Hate It: Skyfall (Patreon)

I love James Bond, and Casino Royale is my favorite Bond movie by a country mile. Craig's thuggish, insouciant sex appeal, the tooth-aching torture scene, the small and dirty plot; it's the best Bond gets. The key to its success, though, is its facade of imperial coldness concealing hysterical personal emotion, both of which Skyfall throws over the rail with its Bond-mythologizing plot and gratingly silly cyber warfare antics. In both expanding its scope and centering its protagonist as the hero of a larger story, it dilutes its emotional clout with larger, more archetypal emotions like the cloying sentimentality of suggesting a mother-son bond between Judi Dench's M and her agents.

From its gunship assault on Bond's childhood home, set to John Lee Hooker's ubiquitous 'Boom Boom', to its luridly colorful Southeast Asian island debauchery, Skyfall is all big, bombastic storytelling anchored not in the personal but in the mythic. Bond is an orphan, but he comes from fantastic wealth. M is a steely-eyed spymaster, but she's also a mother to two lost and damaged boys. Scarcely an element is left untouched by this impulse to fortify the grimy, granular elements of spy fiction with pseudo-Arthurian ideas of family and legacy.

Bond is at his best when he's a swaggering misogynist pig whose quips conceal an underlying instability. His job is brutal and in service to nebulous higher-ups, his emotions stunted by the violence it demands of him. He's a smirking theater mask held up to hide a tangled knot of muscle and neuroses, and that's hot and exciting and it can be interesting, too. Make him the center of a story rather than an actor in it whose point of view we happen to follow and the whole thing becomes too sincere, too zipped up. Who cares who James Bond's parents were? Who cares where he grew up? The point of him is that he effectively is his job.

Skyfall is often nice to look at, especially in its wide shots of the Scottish moors and the bizarre, desolate wasteland of da Silva's (a perfectly fine Javier Bardem) island stronghold, but it has no sense of bodies or of physicality. It's too stately, too picturesque. Its big set pieces -- the Komodo dragon pit comes to mind -- are airless and piled too high atop each other with too little room to breathe between. The now-standard captured villain using his imprisonment as part of his plan doesn't hold up well at all, the hacking scene and the new Q are both odiously affected. The movie tries to wring broad familial emotion out of a work relationship at a lethal spy agency. Skyfall has its limited pleasures -- da Silva removing his facial prostheses to show the cost of life as a spy, a few lingering landscape shots -- but in reaching for mythic grandeur it winds up flattening itself into unremarkable tedium.