Entertainment

New Bond film ‘Skyfall’ falls flat

Like the Rolling Stones, James Bond movies turn 50 this year, and you can’t blame either for playing their hits. What more do you want from “Start Me Up”? Violins? A hip-hop beat?

But like the Stones, 007 is showing his wrinkles, and in the utterly routine effort “Skyfall,” we’re actually expected to cheer each chord we’ve heard so many times (here’s a martini shaker! Look, it’s a Walther PPK! And there’s an Aston Martin!) We’ve been turned into wretched Pavlovian dogs, salivating at the bell instead of the snack. The highlight, by far, is a classic animated credit sequence: Adele, you are the new Shirley Bassey.

Bond (Daniel Craig) is nearly killed in the opening scene, yet another Third World chase (again, with the motorcycles and the bazaar? Really?) in which 007 inexplicably keeps calling home to the boss, M (Judi Dench), for direction. Guys, James Bond does not use permission slips. Where’s the moment where he throws away his headset and goes it alone, consequences be damned?

Worse, he’s highly dependent on the heroics of a groovy co-secret agent (Naomie Harris) who seems thrown in to make Bond seem less alarmingly white and male. The sparks between them are nonexistent and brace yourself for an amazingly idiotic exchange between them at the end.

Worse still: Bond survives something that is unsurvivable (he’s not Superman) then, feeling his life was endangered by M, he hides, whines, sulks, stops shaving and (this is truly unforgivable) drinks a Heineken. (To his credit, he does cover the label with his hand, ashamed at being caught drinking Austin Powers’ brew).

Back at MI6 spy HQ in London, there’s a bombing and M gets chastised by her political overseer (Ralph Fiennes), yet when told to resign, she simply refuses, which seems contrary to the British spirit of taking responsibility. A nerdy new Q (the boy-pixie Ben Whishaw) hands Bond his new sidearm . . . in the middle of the National Gallery? These are secret agents? Do they post photos of their kills on Facebook?

Soon we’re off to China and the Pacific in search of a stolen list of the true identities of secret agents (the idea itself is stolen: Remember the NOC list from “Mission: Impossible”?) and to meet the gay supervillain behind everything. He is the campy Silva (Javier Bardem, in a Princess Di wig), who caresses Bond’s thighs and whispers, “Let’s see who ends up on top.” Silva, it turns out, is an ex-colleague of Bond’s who was betrayed by M for no reason except being overenthusiastic in his duties.

“American Beauty” director Sam Mendes, now riding a streak of five bad movies, borrows heavily from “The Dark Knight,” giving Bond a Bruce Wayne back story and a big, silly shootout at a Wayne Manor-like estate. Silva becomes a Joker-ish master of disguise. But there’s no wit or spirit to the action scenes (if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen all of the good stuff in this movie), and the imagination-free script keeps expressing amazement at these things called “computers” that can apparently wreak so much havoc.

Bringing on Mendes and “Shawshank Redemption” cinematographer Roger Deakins turns out to be a bit like hiring Mark Rothko to paint your house, and I don’t mean that in a good way. “Er, Mark, what’s with the splotch of burnt orange here and the splotch of crimson there? I wanted it all the same color. Also, that color was blue.”

Mendes and Deakins are so busy trying to be visionary that they don’t notice that characters are wandering too far from their roots, and half the time you can’t see what’s going on. A sequence in Shanghai in which Bond fights a fellow assassin against a gorgeous giant screen of jellyfish images degenerates into two anonymous backlit shadows. Silva is introduced with a shot that’s so ridiculously deep-focus, the camera work becomes a distraction. The scenes at the country house (which feature an amusing cameo by Albert Finney, trying his best to sound Scottish) are a bedlam of shadow and blasts of mustard-colored light.

There is a nice symmetry between underwater scenes at the beginning and the end, but just to summarize how perfunctory most of the movie has been, Bardem chimes in: “All this running, jumping around, it’s exhausting!”