Spectre

Director: Sam Mendes
Screenplay: John Logan and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth (story by John Logan and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade; based on characters created by Ian Fleming)
Stars: Daniel Craig (James Bond), Christoph Waltz (Blofeld), Léa Seydoux (Madeleine Swann), Ralph Fiennes (M), Monica Bellucci (Lucia Sciarra), Ben Whishaw (Q), Naomie Harris (Eve Moneypenny), Dave Bautista (Mr. Hinx), Andrew Scott (C), Rory Kinnear (Tanner), Jesper Christensen (Mr. White), Alessandro Cremona (Marco Sciarra), Stephanie Sigman (Estrella)
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Year of Release: 2015
Country: U.S. / U.K.
Spectre
SpectreLongtime aficionados of the James Bond franchise know the importance of Spectre, the shadowy, ultra-villainous espionage organization that played the heavy in six of the earliest Bond films, starting with Dr. No (1962) and ending with Diamonds Are Forever (1971). Thus, its resurrection as not just the villain, but the very title of Spectre, the 24th official Bond film, is of no small consequence in terms of the both connecting the film with the old-school pleasures of the franchise’s earliest incarnations and suggesting that the film will be, in some sense, the “ultimate” Bond film. Ambitions are certainly high, as the film attempts to tie together all the villains from the previous three Bond films—Casino Royale (2006), which rebooted the franchise and introduced Daniel Craig as Agent 007, Quantum of Solace (2008), and Skyfall (2012)—via their association with the organization, but it may be those very ambitions that nearly sink it.

Spectre is not a bad film, but it feels consistently disappointing, especially in comparison with Skyfall, the best Bond film in years. It is particularly surprising that Spectre fails to hit the target given that some of the most significant contributors to Skyfall, including director Sam Mendes and screenwriters John Logan, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade, are returning and the film is essentially a direct sequel, picking up 18 months after the end of the previous entry and incorporating all the major characters it introduced, including Ralph Fiennes as the new M, Ben Whishaw as Q, and Naomie Harris as Moneypenny. Craig, in his fourth appearance as Bond, continues to wear the role well, endowing the character with his own unique sense of steely-eyed intensity while maintaining a few glimmers of humor that keep him from becoming overly glum. Like Skyfall, Spectre aims to elaborate on Bond’s past, an area that the older films left largely untouched, which helps to separate out this newer incarnation as something potentially deeper and more emotionally significant. It worked beautifully in the previous film, but for various reasons it never quite gels here.

As expected, the plot takes us all over the world, beginning with a bravura opening setpiece that finds Bond in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead tracking an Italian assassin. The sequence begins with a dizzying long take that follows Bond from the streets to a room in the Gran Hotel Ciudad De Mexico, and out the window and across several rooftops, and it ends with a fistfight on a helicopter doing barrel rolls above the Zócalo while thousands of revelers in full costume run for their lives. It’s the kind of stuff that make the best Bond movies fantastic, and as he did with Skyfall, Mendes proves to be an impressive director of vertiginous action, maintaining the intensive continuity that modern moviegoers have grown to expect without sacrificing a certain level of classical economy.

As it turns out, Bond was not in Mexico City on official assignment, but rather his own personal mission to finish what the original M (Judi Dench, seen only in a video here) entrusted him to complete. This does not sit well with the current M (Fiennes), who is under great pressure from C (Andrew Scott), the head of the newly created Joint Intelligence Service who is pushing to eliminate the Double-0 program. Bond is relieved of his duties, but that hardly stops him from continuing his globe-hoping mission to uncover the nefarious organization behind so many of the world’s ills. This takes him first to Rome, where he seduces the widow of the assassin he killed in Mexico City (Monica Bellucci) and learns from her about the existence of Spectre. Bond manages to infiltrate a Spectre meeting, which is where we first meet the organization’s leader, Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), who knows who Bond is because he and the British agent share a secret past of which Bond is unaware. Bond eventually teams up with Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), the daughter of one of Spectre’s members who is resolutely unimpressed with Bond’s suave charms and confident derring-do (for a while, anyway). Along the way they are both pursued by Mr. Hinx (Dave Bautista), a burly Spectre operative in the mold of Richard Kiel’s Jaws in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979)—only one of numerous allusions to the classic Bond canon.

The film climaxes in the revelation of a bunch of intricate backstory amid the ruins of MI-6 headquarters, which we saw destroyed in Skyfall, and while you might sense that you’re supposed to be floored by the intensity of it all, you may find yourself feeling underwhelmed. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where Spectre goes wrong, probably because there is no one thing that doesn’t work (like the overall tone in Quantum of Solace, which was so grim it sapped out popcorn enjoyment). Rather, the film as a whole feels slightly disjointed, as if all the parts aren’t quite lining up and the progression of action that is supposed to build emotionally instead feels more like little more than a series of plot points.

Familiarity has never been the enemy in the Bond franchise—it’s part of what has kept people coming back to it for decades—but nothing in Spectre feels particularly daring or unique. It says something that Christoph Waltz, who has staked such a unique claim to suave villainy since his Oscar-winning turn as a Nazi Jew hunter in Inglourious Basterds (2009), makes almost no impact here; it’s almost as if his casting as such an iconic villain was too obvious. There are flashes of inspiration—the Mexico City sequence, for instance, or the amusing cut from Bond and Madeleine breathlessly asking each other “Now what?” after a bout with Hinx to them passionately embracing—but it doesn’t add up. Instead, we get a film of good and even great moments scattered throughout a story that takes too long and doesn’t build as we perhaps desperately wish it would.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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All images copyright © Sony Pictures / MGM

Overall Rating: (2.5)




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