My Thoughts on SF:
1. Pretitle sequence is a mess. We had Bond arriving at a hotel room in Istanbul, with a dying 00 agent slumped in the chair, and then Bond calls home to receive instructions. He then gets in a vehicle driven by someone else, a field agent. Then he is reportedly killed by the same dithering field agent who had to receive instructions from a command center to fire a weapon. Did anyone bother to search for his body? How long did they wait before they sold his possessions, a week? We are then told by M in a parliamentary committee that the purpose of the 00 section was to “fight the wars in the shadow”. If two 00 agents and a field op could not recovery a simple hard drive in a hotel room, how are they going to fight SPECTRE? Contrast this with Dalton-Bond 25 years ago in The Living Daylights where Bond is relatively alone, no earpiece, using the skill and knowledge entrusted to him as a 00 agent in Bratislava, in control of his situation, making split seconds decisions on matters of life and death, right or wrong and without regret.
2. Bond and Severine. No chemstry. Was she just the ferryman who was supposed to take Bond across the river Styx? They had more energy and interest in the Heinenkein ad.
That sequence was rather silly, given that the agent had any number of better strategies at her disposal. Fire the weapon in such a way as to get James Bond's attention. Then once Mr. Bond realizes that he has sniper support, he can separate himself from the other agent, leaving that agent as a sitting duck for the sniper. I can't really think of much the other agent could do against such a strategy.
There was a lot of silliness in the movie, but I enjoyed watching it with my wife after a good dinner. I thought the ending cranked things up pretty nicely, though it seemed like darkness fell awfully fast. Was there a proper day/evening/night sequence that I managed not to notice?
Jason Statham, a former diver on the British National Diving Team, a Guy Ritchie favorite, transporter 1,2,3. Nah, not man enough to be a James Bond.