Mind your M’s and Q’s
Daniel Craig has played British Secret Agent James Bond three times now, and he still looks hewn out of prehistoric stone. If MI6 had retrieved a caveman frozen in the Tundra wastes and somehow revived him, trained him to fire a Walther, instructed him in the ways of lovemaking and thrown a tuxedo on him, they would have come up with Daniel Craig’s 007.
Yet somehow that’s his charm. He’s a caveman in a world of tweets and drone strikes. In Skyfall, Craig’s third Bond outing, he’s dealing with something that even Batman had to face in his last cinematic outing: middle age. After being cut down by a bullet during a daring train-top attempt to recover an important hard drive in the opening sequence, Bond finds that he’s lost some of his vim and vigor. He can’t quite cut the mustard. He can barely pass his training reqs, can’t shoot straight, and even mucks up a word association test. Still, MI6 mother figure M (Dame Judi Dench) sends him back out into the field. What else is 007 going to do? Retire to eating fish and chips in front of the telly and playing weekly lotto?
Bond is sent to Shanghai, following a trail leading to the missing hard drive, which contains the secret identities of all British spies in NATO countries. The bearer of this hard drive threatens to reveal the names, six at a time, compromising their safety and that of the Free World. Sure enough, a YouTube video goes viral showing the first six agents being executed, now that their cover has been blown.
In other words, Skyfall asks, what if someone decided the whole world needed to know every government’s dirty little secrets? Well, then you’d have a website called WikiLeaks. But this is a much darker proposition: WikiLeaks times a thousand.
This development shakes up things at MI6 where head of Intelligence and Security Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) confronts M about the security breach. He suggests it’s time that M take voluntary retirement, because the world is a different place, now that the Cold War has ended and the Internet has spilled the beans on everything governments do. “We can no longer work in the shadows,” Mallory barks. “There are no more shadows.”
Skyfall, with an often witty script by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan, keeps playing the old ways off against the new, and though Craig has not reached mandatory retirement age (the actor’s only 43, after all), he is a bit older and more brooding than Bonds of the past. This is apparent when he meets up with the new MI6 quartermaster, Q (Ben Whishaw), a mere pup compared to 007. Q gives him a relatively small gift box of gadgets for his mission: a special palm-encoded Walther and a radio transmitter. “Not exactly Christmas, is it?” Bond quips. “What were you expecting? An exploding pen?” Q shoots back.
Another contrast between old and new is Skyfall’s depiction of Asia. Shanghai is viewed as super high-tech, a bed of sleek skyscrapers and HD-clear graphics à la Blade Runner; meanwhile Macau, in the next scene, retains an exotic, old world oriental look, like something out of the 19th century. So there’s a nod to the future in this Bond outing, as well as the past. (Compare this version of Shanghai with that of Armageddon, the 1996 Michael Bay flick in which the modern city is depicted — I swear — as some kind of medieval port with Chinese junks in the harbor and dim sepia lighting just as the asteroids are about to hit. It’s funny how much Hollywood has had to grow up in its depictions of Asia onscreen.)
Yet that doesn’t mean there aren’t the usual Bond cocktail ingredients in Skyfall: martinis are shaken, not stirred; Asian baddies are fat and skilled in martial arts (until they’re chomped by Komodo dragons); women are expendable (after seduction, of course); and even Bond’s prized Aston Martin DB5 is pulled out of the dusty garage and put back in service.
The main baddie here is Raoul Silva, a former MI6 played by Javier Bardem, in a clear attempt to outdo his maniacal turn as Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. Complete with hilarious blonde wig and gay mannerisms, all I could think of during the first 10 minutes of seeing him onscreen was Cesar Romero’s campy version of The Joker on the old Batman TV show. Then I thought he was trying to one-up Heath Ledger’s Joker; then Bardem seemed to be channeling Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs in one scene. With his oddly unsettling Picasso-like face, Bardem cranks the overacting machine up to “11” here, going waaaay over the top in some of the funniest moments in Bond’s 50-year history.
Craig shows his usual balance of reserve and stone-like coolness. The only time he actually seems bent out of shape is when the Aston Martin gets firebombed by Silva’s men. All this is a little more interesting than A Quantum of Solace, the previous Bond outing. Skyfall has a crisp, stately pace and just enough juice left to fire the old cylinders. There are some primo action scenes involving trains, motorcycles, mortal combat atop neon-lit skyscrapers, crashing subway cars and, in a clever touch, an attack helicopter that broadcasts The Animals’ Boom Boom (shades of Apocalypse Now). Oh, and Adele sings the title song — and it’s not bad! In a way, this outing is designed to bring the older characters to the end of their natural cycles and bring in — the franchise hopes — a gallery of familiar faces, such as a new “M” and (finally) a Miss Moneypenny. Apparently it’s working: Skyfall is touted as the highest-grossing Bond so far.
Clearly, though, it’s time for Dench’s M to pack it in. In her senior years, she’s become crotchety and her judgment has grown a bit dim. At one point, riding in the Aston Martin with Bond, M’s constant kvetching provokes 007 to hover a finger over the car’s familiar red button. “Go ahead, eject me. See if I care,” M pipes up without missing a beat. As proof of how doddering the MI6 chief has grown, we see her called before a parliamentary hearing in one scene, asked to defend her earlier mishaps. Accused by one Minister of Parliament of clinging to an antiquated world of “spies and espionage,” M proceeds to defend her job in a lengthy, meandering speech, even as Silva and his army stealthily work their way inside the Parliament building, guns drawn. She continues her counter-harangue even after her assistant receives a message on his laptop noting that the bad guys are just outside the door; they could easily excuse themselves at this point and slip away unharmed. Still, M, oblivious, launches into a snatch of remembered poetry from the Romantic era to demonstrate how vital and important her work at MI6 is — just as Silva and his men burst through the door, guns blazing.
Note to self, M: Next time, skip the Tennyson.
