The Dark Knight is Home Alone

Skyfall: written by Neil Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan; based on characters created by Ian Fleming; directed by Sam Mendes; starring Daniel Craig (James Bond), Judi Dench (M), Javier Bardem (Silva), Ralph Fiennes (Gareth Mallory), Naomie Harris (Eve), Berenice Marlohe (Severine), Albert Finney (Kincade), and Ben Whishaw (Q) (2012): The new 007 is certainly enjoyable, though it also imparts a sense of deja vu...for Christopher Nolan's Batman movies. Javier Bardem's Silva is the most Joker-like of all Bond movie villains, ever, and even turns out to have a horrifying smile hidden behind dentures. He's all dyed-blonde, giggly, sexually ambiguous menace.

A very convoluted plot starts off like the non-canonical Never Say Never Again, with an aging Bond running into trouble in the field, and ends up like Home Alone, with Bond, M, and Alfred the Butler....errrr, Kincade the Groundskeeper...fixing up Bond's abandoned boyhood home so as to hold off an army of terrorists bent on killing Judi Dench's M. In between, Bond does battle in a Shanghai skyscraper that seems to have beamed in from Blade Runner; in a Macau gambling den complete with its own pair of Komodo dragons; and on a deserted island stronghold right out of Life After People.

Craig is taciturn and business-like as usual, certainly the closest thing to Ian Fleming's original secret agent of the novels. The occasional quips fall like lead balloons in certain places: there's no way to interpret Bond's "waste of good Scotch" quip after a woman's death as anything other than dismayingly misogynistic, one of those moments in which the 'deadly jolite' of the Bond film (thanks, Michael Moorcock) is about as unfunny as a blockbuster can get.

Many action sequences occur on trains, above trains, in subways, on desolate Scottish moors, and underwater. Very few gadgets appear, though a new, young, sarcastic Q does appear. It all moves very quickly for its nearly 2-1/2 hour length, though like most modern action movies, its climax goes on forever. And if you're going to set your climax in an abandoned church, you're going to have to live with somewhat unfair comparisons to John Woo's masterful The Killer. Recommended.

Cake Walk

Layer Cake: adapted by J.J. Connolly from his novel; directed by Matthew Vaughn; starring Daniel Craig (unnamed protagonist), Tom Hardy (Clarkie), George Harris (Morty), Colm Meaney (Gene), Kenneth Cranham (Jimmy), Michael Gambon (Eddie Temple), Sienna Miller (Tammy), and Nathalie Lunghi (Charlie) (2004): Director Vaughn produced some of Guy Richie's films about the British underworld, and it shows in his directorial debut both in subject matter and style. This is a flashy, frothy picture that loves camera tricks and twisty plot developments.

Underneath the flash is a fairly simple story about a London cocaine producer (Craig) who gets sucked a lot further into his boss's schemes than he wanted. The McGuffin -- the boss asks Craig's unnamed protagonist to search for the missing daughter of a business colleague -- is dropped less than halfway through the film. Layer Cake has other things to do, most of them revolving around a huge shipment of ecstasy stolen from the Russian mob. Well, an Eastern European mob, in any case.

Crosses, double-crosses, and a little of the old ultraviolence ensue. Daniel Craig dresses up like a ninja in an assassination scene that pretty much destroys all suspension of disbelief. There is much screaming and beating in of heads and bullet holes in foreheads. Colm Meaney and Tom Hardy do what they can with their supporting roles, while Michael Gambon is the soul of high-level corruption.

Nonetheless, this is a fun movie if one has a high tolerance for graphic violence and under-developed characters. If it riffs unsuccessfully on Get Carter from time to time -- well, so it goes. Lightly recommended.

Unreal Estate

Dream House: written by David Loucka; directed by Jim Sheridan; starring Daniel Craig (Will Atenton), Rachel Weisz (Libby), Naomi Watts (Ann Patterson), and Elias Koteas (Boyce) (2011): A talented director (Sheridan directed Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot) and a solid cast result in a major stinker. Studio tampering fingerprints this production, though I'm not sure how much better the film would have been without interference. The grim lifelessness of many of the scenes doesn't seem to have anything to do with the whims of focus groups.

Daniel Craig quits his job and moves his family (a wife and two daughters) into a dream house in a small town. He's going to write a novel. But a family was murdered in that house, a fact the real-estate broker didn't tell Craig. The father apparently killed the mother and two girls but got shot in the head by the wife in the process, a head wound that put the father into a mental asylum for five years. But now the father's out, never convicted of the crime. And a mysterious watcher lurks outside the windows at night, scaring Craig's wife (Weisz) and children. A divorced neighbour (Watts) seems to know more than she's telling.

And then, 45 minutes in, the movie implodes with a twist that really needed a lot more build-up. The movie wanders off into the woods, bumping into trees. There's a half-hearted attempt at another twist in the final scene, though the scene is ambiguous enough to explain away as just another plot development and not another reversal.

You can at least add Dream House to that long list of films in which fire is only dangerous if it actually touches you, even when it surrounds you. These movies exist in a universe in which air doesn't transmit heat, and what a marvelous universe that would be.

Craig acts a lot like late-career Harrison Ford here, joyless and withdrawn. He looks like he's ready for a brawl with the key grip at any second. Watts's character seems to have had all her character-development scenes edited out of the movie: she's all plot device. Weisz is fine in a thankless role as a loving yet sexy wife. Sheridan pretty much disowned this film, and I can see why -- it's not even bad in an enjoyable way. It induces 80% boredom and 20% rage. Avoid! Not recommended.

Cowboys & Idiots

Cowboys & Aliens, written by a committee, directed by the guy who directed Iron Man, starring James Bond, Indiana Jones and the hot woman from House, M.D. and Tron: Legacy (2011): Intermittently enjoyable though repeatedly frustrating. With that title, it should be a dizzy romp. It isn't. It's really sort of a slog, strangely self-serious and numbingly dumb. It was written by a committee, and as with a lot of committee end-product, the good seems to have been thrown out in favour of the bad and the mediocre.

Harrison Ford's performance could have earned the movie the title Dead Man Walking: it's one of Ford's worst late-career sleepwalks. Though Harrison Ford would be a very angry sleepwalker based on his performance here: he pretty much alternates between looking constipated and looking like he wants to kill everyone on the set, possibly because they're on his lawn.

Giant alien leprechauns come to the American Old West in the 1870's to mine gold and kidnap people for insidious experiments aimed at determining how best to eradicate humanity. Daniel Craig plays a stagecoach robber who's lost his memory and now has an alien wristwatch/energy weapon attached to his wrist. The aliens kidnap a bunch of townsfolk. Craig and angry-granpa rancher Ford lead a ragtag group against the aliens, aided by an alien from a different race who's currently cosplaying as Olivia Wilde.

Thankfully for humanity, these aliens are even dumber than the aliens in Skyline. Also, they belong to the gigantic sub-category of advanced interstellar races who are also nudists (see: Skyline, E.T. , The War of the Worlds, Independence Day, ad infinitum, ad nauseum) who despite possessing devastating energy weapons prefer to get it on like a man and beat you down with their hands and bodyslam you in the Wild Wild West! Not recommended.