Metacritic reviews

Fans will appreciate not only that the film is predictably solid and surprisingly sharp but that parts of it are just plain bad.

There's the script -- and that's the problem.

You can't beat a Bond film for adventure on a grand scale.

Isn't quite enough to save the Bond franchise -- but it does prove that 007 is Y2K-compliant.

Apted ("Gorillas in the Mist," "Coal Miner's Daughter") keeps things low-key and low-tech, which makes some of the cliched Bondisms a bit easier to swallow.

Fair, overlong James Bond from the second shelf.

This keeps one reasonably amused, titillated, and brain-dead for a little over two hours.

The hero himself has been denatured for a young, late 1990s audience with little appreciation for real suavity or sex play.

If moviegoers really thought about the violence, sexism, and materialism at the core of the series, the whole shebang might vanish overnight.

James Bond hasn't been this boring since Timothy Dalton carried the license to kill.