In his half-century of cinematic existence, James Bond has been cast and recast, refined, reinvented and rebooted. He's been declared a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur" and gotten his heart broken, and he's been dragged into the present, where he's had to find a new perch somewhere between gritty and ridiculous, between being a stoic modern action hero and a deliberately outsized fantasy remnant of, as one unamused minister puts it in�Skyfall, a long gone "golden age of espionage."
Skyfall is�American Beauty director Sam Mendes' first turn at the wheel of this venerable spy franchise, and he and screenwriters�Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan have managed what feels like the best possible thing that could have happened to Bond: They've made him fun again. When Daniel Craig was put in the lead role and the character was brought back to his beginnings in�Casino Royale, it brought a vividly contemporary jolt to the character ? this Bond wasn't going to be off gathering information on al-Qaeda or anything, but his job was just as likely to involve messy killings as suave seductions, and the possibility of death and pain were much more real. It was a welcome revamp, if one that shifted the films into the orbit of the Bourne trilogy and risked stripping them of an essential element of Bond-ness. Chilly, rough-edged and not yet settled into his place at MI6, Craig's Bond was a little busy with love and revenge to make quips.
In�Skyfall, Bond is literally reborn. During a mission-gone-wrong, he takes a hit that leaves everyone thinking he's dead. It's a misconception he's happy to let stand while he takes a potentially permanent sabbatical involving beachside booze, sex and brooding over a vague…
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