Skyfall Review

Roger Deakins is the star. The Shanghai fight, staged in silhouette against a shifting neon screen, is the most beautiful sequence in fifty years of this franchise, and the Macau casino and the burning Scottish house are close behind. Mendes uses the fiftieth anniversary to ask whether any of this still works, and Judi Dench gets the real arc, defending an old idea of service to a committee that has stopped believing in it. Javier Bardem enters on one long unbroken walk and a monologue about rats, and the performance manages to be camp and genuinely unsettling at once.

The problem is what he wants. Silva's plan requires being captured, requires an exact sequence of doors, and requires everyone else to behave with a precision no plot can support, and once you notice it the last act becomes a series of arrangements rather than a chase. The finale in the Scottish dark is atmospheric and a little silly. Thomas Newman's score sounds anonymous next to Adele's title song. Gorgeous, confident and emotionally serious, built on a mechanism that falls apart when pressed.