Bond 24: 10 Skyfall Flaws That Spectre Should Improve Upon

3. A Villain Who Was All Over The Place

Javier Bardem received lots of praise for his performance as Skyfall's big villain, Raoul Silva, and rightly so: he gave the role his everything, and offered up one of the most memorable cinematic bad guys in recent memory. And yet for all that is good about Bardem's acting, on paper the character is a lot more problematic. In essence, Silvia is a hodgepodge of other Bond villains: theatrical for the sake of theatrical, his motives unclear and entirely muddy. Which is to say, Silva sort of does whatever the plot requires him to do, changing his personality and agenda to fit the situation. What that leaves movie-goers with, essentially, is a villain who sticks in your memory but actually lacks any true depth. For example, the movie implies that Silva is - at least - bisexual simply because that gives him a "quirk." From a story perspective, it adds nothing. Silva "hits" on Bond, and said interaction is forgotten about. It means zilch. Silva's plan - as described previously - also relies on a bunch of coincidences, which only serves to highlight his character as one giant inconsistency. He's apparently a genius who plans out everything extensively, and yet he's also winging it at every turn. But the filmmakers can't have their cake and eat it all at the same time: what is Silva? Is he an unrelenting perfectionist or a crazy anarchist? Let's hope Christoph Waltz' villain is, above all, consistently realised.