SkyFlinch

               With a brooding and palpitating rhythm in its characters and a mesmerizing sobriety in its tone, ‘Skyfall’ excels through its damaged subjects but ultimately fails to support itself upon an eccentrically off-balance pace. The subtle tenacity and vigorous elegance of the film are found lurking behind its main players; menacingly reserved, poetic, and coarse. The director seems almost enamored with his own characters, attempting to remain faithful to the Bond franchise while avidly re-defining it.  This strained dichotomy of focus fundamentally fails. 
               The quality of villainy in the film is potent and frightening, enough to substantially subvert the assumed Bond narrative in preference of a familiar, yet equally effective, sub-text of eloquent societal decay.  Erratically commenting on the vivid and obstinate malignancy of society’s underbelly, the film breathes through a distinctly somber tone - a tone that eventually fails through a lack of cohesion with the necessary camp and action of the franchise. The refined pathological grimace of the focused yet belligerently malevolent villain is akin to that of ‘The Joker’s,’ and the film’s pre-supposition and effortless illustration of society’s unflinching dependence on 'chaos' provides a tumultuous, thrilling, and eccentric playground for the lead villainous character.  The overall fortitude and profundity of ‘Skyfall,’ however, are injured by the film’s supreme lack of nuance in every other area of the film (save for one silhouette-fight scene).  The film sets up an intoxicating portrait of a villain and a quite literally intoxicated Bond; however seems to carelessly and haphazardly ‘fill in the blanks’ with the remainder of the film’s structure. Lacking directorial wit with the wide-scale action sequences and proceeding with some of the most tiresome repartee that I’ve had to sit through, the film secures its place as a thoroughly iconic portrait of a villain, a successfully damaged James Bond, and a film palpably tired with antiquity.