Another entertaining Bond series entry that gets up close and personal with M and 007 himself. The opening sequence with Bond in hot pursuit of a thief with an important hard drive is great. The rooftop chase on motorcycles followed by a fight on top of a moving train, it's almost action movie overload. When Bond fires up the crane, it's a supremely cool start.

There's a whole lot of Judi Dench in this movie and the relationship with Bond reaches a new level. Bad guy Silva is played by Javier Bardem. He's sufficiently evil and his motive is based on revenge. The computer hacking accomplished by Silva is ridiculous. Technology is so abused (or dumbed down) in movies, it's most often distracting. A rooftop motorcycle chase is far easier to believe than some of the network packet busting on display by a new Q (with Bond's help, no less). And some how Bond manages to find a clue buried within a hexadecimal block of characters. Problem is, some of those characters are not hexadecimal. Silly and stupid. It took me out of the movie almost permanently. And I'll leave the asinine graphic displays, IP address troubleshooting stupidity and unfathomable user interfaces alone.

"Skyfall" fails as soon as Bond takes M to his boyhood home. Getting this personal with Bond was a mistake. It's like two different movies. The first half is excellent and the last half is pretty dumb.

Daniel Craig continues to be a top notch Bond, though, and is my favorite after the great Connery. I'm pleading with the creators to stop softening him up.