This review will be long and likely incoherent.
It's 2:52am as I write this. It's been about five minutes since I finished watching Dr. No, my first ever James Bond film. I don't know how someone goes through two decades of life without seeing one, but somehow I've never been in a situation where watching James Bond has come up. I'm bleary eyed and shouldn't be typing, but here are my thoughts none the less.
I liked it, all things considered. It was fun. It was tense. The James Bond character, who I thought myself to be already familiar with, was not at all what I was expecting. He doesn't appear to be very good at his job, most of the time it seems like he escapes certain death by complete accident. This is compounded with his playboy attitude to make him, at least to me, an unlikable character. Unlikeable in the sense that I don't sympathise with him, that is. Let me be clear here - I could watch Bond trade blows (both verbal and physical) with ever villain presented on screen for hours. And of course I want to see him to success in his mission, but it is wholly for the sake of the mission, not for the sake of Bond being spared suffering.
I don't know or see how this will affect my watching the rest of this immense franchise, but I can only hope this was a once off. The movie was fun, but it wasn't classic. It wasn't special. It wasn't memorable. It was a solid and average 3 and a half star kind of movie.
If you read this review - I don't want to read it back for fear of cringing - please feel free to crucify me in the comments section below.