Daniel Craig’s 007 had a busy year in 2012, engaged in arguably his most crucial mission – making sure Her Majesty the Queen got to the Olympics opening ceremony on time. Greg D. Smith checked out this brief but vital mission…

Roger Moore may have got a decent lookalike actress playing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but he never got the actual Queen, did he?

Directed by Danny Boyle for the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, Happy and Glorious is the shortest Bond movie to date, at roughly six and a half minutes. But what a lot of progress it packs in for the character and the franchise in those six and a half minutes!

Let’s start with the opening credits – nary a scantily clad lady in sight here, and none of that ridiculous dark-filtered artsy stuff either. Proper British backdrop, complete with needlework, the Queen’s Guards, and a London Taxi, all set against some classical music. Makes you proud to be British! A full Shirley Bassey!

As to the Bond Girl – well, here Bond gets the ultimate version, the actual Queen Elizabeth the Second of Great Britain and the Commonwealth. Her outfit is modest yet stylish, she doesn’t have a silly name and she’s shown to be completely independent and capable, not even turning so much as a flirtatious glance Bond’s way. For his part, Bond is respectful without being overly familiar and the brief working relationship they share on screen is utterly believable. Ten Walther PPKs out of Ten.

Stunt wise, the movie is slightly lacking, thanks to pacing, but the one stunt we do get is a big one. Purists might quibble at the very sudden transition from daylight to darkness on a short helicopter flight across London, but surely none can fault the commitment of both actors to the cause as they engage in the helicopter flight and then sensibly (if not quite seamlessly) let the professionals take over for a paired parachute jump from above the stadium with twinned Union Flag parachutes completing that quintessentially Bond feeling and recalling that classic opening sequence from The Spy Who Loved Me. Loses marks for certain small continuity errors but still a solid 4 out of DB5.

But the key question is, where is the villain? Mathieu Amalric’s Dominic Greene may have been a fairly anonymous presence in Quantum of Solace, but at least he actually turned up on screen! Arguably the real enemy here is the ticking clock which necessitates the rather unconventional method of arrival, but Boyle forgets even to give us one frame of said clock. Not even an analogue tick in the background (presumably at the time a digital beeping countdown might have caused calls from Jack Bauer’s lawyers.) It’s a good job everything else is so spot on. Poor villain showing. One Dominic Greene out of Graves.

And what of Craig himself? Superlative. In fine physical form before the rather shabbier look he would sport in Skyfall, he conducts himself impeccably in the presence of both the Royal Personage and her Corgi entourage (sensibly left at the palace – no fur was ruffled in the making of this picture). Better still, this iteration of Bond displays budget consciousness, taking a cab to the palace rather than risking the paint on his expensive Aston and raking up a huge congestion charge for MI6. Extremely judicious use of public funding – 5 expenses forms out of 5.

All told, it’s a brief piece which, though straying quite far from Fleming’s source material, nicely updated the character for the 21st Century and refreshingly avoided many of its more distasteful tropes. While it likely won’t challenge for the top spot in Bond canon any time soon, it marks a nice entry in the franchise and handily replaces Casino Royale (1967) as the premier Bond spoof.