Skyfall

I  know it's a little bit late to comment on this movie.  But I missed it in the theaters and only got to see the Netflix DVD last night.  It's OK, but only OK, even for a Bond flick.  Daniel Craig does make a decent Bond.  He has a hard face, that looks right for a professional secret agent.  The movie opens with Bond in hot pursuit of a villain.  Bond jumps aboard as the train pulls out and finds himself on a flatcar loaded with Caterpillar backhoes.  Bond starts up one of the backhoes and motors up to the next railcar flattening a few shiny new sedans that happened to be in the way.  Pretty soon Bond is fighting it out with the villain atop the moving freight train.  A pretty young sidekick has been driving furiously to keep up with the moving train.  She gets ahead, grabs her rifle, jumps out of the jeep, and attempts to help Bond by shooting the villain.  She never gets a clear shot, and when she fires, it's Bond who is blown off the top of the train.  Then they do the credits over a background of Bond sinking to the bottom of a river. 
   Well, we all know you cannot open a Bond movie by killing off Bond.  Some how he comes back to life and the rest of the movie is a lot of action.  They manage to resurrect the Aston Martin DB6  of Goldfinger fame, but in the final showdown scene it gets blown to bits.  They also manage to kill off M (Judy Dench) in the last reel.  Of the two, I will miss the Aston Martin more than Judy's hard-ass M act. 
  I keep thinking Bond needs to carry a better handgun than that Walther PPK.  If you are going to menace someone, you need a big handgun, a little lady's model just doesn't look all that serious.  Several scenes of Bond moving in on the bad guys waving the tiny little Walthers around just didn't look right.  American gangster Clyde Barrow liked to carry a sawed off BAR under his overcoat.  Bond ought to carry something serious too. Ian Fleming started Bond off carrying a 25 cal Beretta.  After a lot of fanmail from gun buffs, Fleming wrote a scene where M and the Armorer upgrade Bond to the Walthers.  Some Bond flick could redo that scene and upgrade him to something British, like a .455 Webley.