As for the Bond spy gadgets, we'd categorize them as mostly whimsical plot devices that are either impractical or unworkable, but who wouldn't like to have an ejection seat that would send one's passenger flying out the car's roof if he or she proved undesirable. For that matter, who wouldn't have liked to, at one time or another, had a license to kill. Okay, killing isn't nice and of course we're all goody-goody, so it's not as though we're saying we'd have used it, but it would have been cheery to know we could have.

Unfortunately, Bond movies seemed to have run short on cleverness and begun compensating with an ever increasing spiral of special effects. These too seem to have run their course leaving  Bond with the appeal of a day-old glass of Champagne, which brings us to the current Bond installment.

What do you do when the fantasy has gone flat? Answer: pump it up with some reality. Well sort of, it's a highly stylized reality with just about all the usual movie physics clichés. Bad guys firing submachine guns endlessly without so much as nicking anyone, characters repeatedly jump from 20 or more ft without so much as a twisted ankle, people running on foot routinely catch up with various motor vehicles, and an indestructible, indefatigable good guy. The list could be quite lengthy.

For those who expect it, the movie does have its share of amazing but highly unlikely specially effects scenes such as the gun battle inside a collapsing building. And, yes the gismos are there but not with the usual whimsy. Clearly some of the constants in the formula have been altered.

When engaged in what has to be one of the highest speed chases ever filmed, at least for a foot race, Bond chases a bad guy to a high rise construction job. Desperate to escape, the bad guy naturally runs to the top of the highest possible structure, a horizontal crane boom from which there is no escape, but then does so in a series of highly improbable but spectacular leaps to nearby structures. Bond follows and eventually catches up. We'll have to wait for the DVD before we can analyze whether the leaps could or could not have been done as depicted, but from an artistic standpoint, the entire scene was reminiscent of a Jackie Chan movie, superbly choreographed yet grounded in real physics.

When Bond steps up to the gambling table in this movie he actually loses, and when he eventually does win, it's by a combination of psychology, mathematical analysis, and luck, not just because he's Bond. The new sense of reality actually makes the scene dramatic. Could Bond's new gritty sense of realism extend to other venues? Are we about to see some improvements in Hollywood's movie physics that lead to better movies? Who knows, but Bond's new infusion of realism has definitely freshened his Martini.