
Emmerich plays an ambivalent character - an honest cop who tolerates the dishonesty of the cops under him, up to a point; only it's hard to tell where that point is. Voight plays a warm, endearingly tipsy father whose pep talks to Norton gradually veer from telling him to do the right thing to ditto the wrong thing. Farrell overacts as a sociopathic creep for whom it is impossible to feel any sympathy - wasn't he supposed to be a good actor? And Norton, though excellent at looking totally crushed so that your heart goes out to him, has such a flat voice and such a lack of charisma that his presence in a lead role could make any movie seem anemic.
The story follows a fairly compelling arc, right up to the one-on-one fight between Norton and Farrell. What happens after that is a colossal let-down. I'm tempted even to use the word cop-out.

He still has M (played by Judi Dench) looking after him, though as part of the general ambivalence she sometimes seems to be chasing after him. He still has Felix (played by Jeffrey Wright) passing him CIA tips under the table. No Q in this movie, though; though I thought the bluetooth earpiece he put in before eavesdropping on the bad guys during a performance of Tosca in Vienna might have looked a bit like the letter Q. It's a leaner, meaner, seriouser Bond series now: less lightened by comic relief and sexually suggestive patter, more darkened by new Bond's tendency to kill first and interrogate second. But it has what really matters to us 007 fans: footage of a beautiful hotel blowing up, fast cars and airplanes shooting at each other, some terrific crashes, lovely women (one of whom ends up wearing nothing but oil), a funny-looking villain (here played by Matthieu Amalric), a hotel room most of us will never see in real life, and a Martini recipe to try at home and see if you can survive drinking six of them in a row, as Bond does.
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