Double O 7 1/2 out of 10

I have been won over by Daniel Craig after Skyfall. I remember a critic (Charles Spencer, I think) describing the shock of the new thuggish Bond rather brilliantly when reviewing his first outing in Casino Royale, something along the lines of:

"many of us prefer our Bonds to be able to save the world with a well-placed Bollinger cork in the workings of an atomic bomb, whilst smoking sobranie cigarettes and indulging in a lot of boisterous rogering; the new Bond behaves in the way you might expect of someone fighting in a pub car park in Dagenham at midnight".

I paraphrase, having failed to find the quote on google. But you get my drift.

Craig and the great Judi Dench have established a complex and extraordinary relationship which is the crux of this film. Indeed, the baddie is motivated completely by his own relationship with M, too. I'm not going to give anything away (indeed, when I went to a pre-release screening on Thursday evening, they confiscated our mobile phones!).

This is emphatically NOT 'the best bond film ever' (Mail on Sunday, and others). The plot is tissue thin (sorry, Rob, me old housemate at school, who has written this and the previous five or six films), and the set piece finale in the cardboard granite lodge incongruously plonked on a boggy moor near Glencoe didn't quite do it for me. Has ever so big a schloss had no outbuildings, no garden, not even a solitary tree? I think not. And I cringed when the (miscast Lancastrian Albert Finney) old gamekeeper and retainer hands Bond a twelve bore shotgun, saying 'of course we couldnae sell your faither's HUNTING RIFLE'.

The 007 and M show is brilliant, however, the camp baddie a witty throwback to the early films, and the girls, such as we see of them, luscious - but in truth, the Bond Girl for this movie is an actress called Judi Dench. This is good Bondage, well above average and Craig's best. Seven and a half out of ten. There is life in the old dog yet.



UPDATE: Idle has been corrected. It IS a rifle, an old Anderson Wheeler .500 Nitro Express. 'Hunting' with rifles is an Americanism, however.