Other Reviews in this Series.
Director: Sam Mendes
Writers: John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Jez Butterworth
Cast: Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Lea Seydoux, Ralph Fiennes, Monica Bellucci, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, Dave Bautista, Andrew Scott, Rory Kinnear
Runtime: 148 mins.
2015
Spectre continues the trend of every Craig Bond film to somehow fumble or dishonor the genre-topping example set by Casino Royale. To be sure, Casino is a tough act to follow, but if any of the next three films had picked a unique identity and stuck to it, they would have fared better. Instead they feel like pale, wrongheaded imitations. Skyfall trailblazes better than the other two because it attempts to salvage Bond's psychological complexity from Casino; Spectre may come out the worst in this regard, because rather than stealing psychological or tonal cues from its predecessors, it merely siphons plot detail after plot detail into its own shambles of a story.
At its best Spectre is a film of moments. The film opens with a stunning continuous shot that follows James Bond and his quarry through a massive Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico City. The camerawork, choreography, and aesthetic are all thrilling, and the subsequent helicopter fight isn't too bad either. Moment.
James Bond and Dave Bautista's charismatically silent henchman character Mr. Hinx rumble in the confined quarters of a train. This is the only time the film packs a punch. Bautista's massive wrestling physique smashes Bond through walls and furniture in a stunning display of brutality. Moment.
James Bond has an unexpected, hilarious, and exceedingly likable conversation with a small animal. Moment.
It's when these moments are strung together into something resembling a narrative that it all falls apart. The connective tissue is forced and awkward. The pacing is glacial. All to eventually disappoint us with a plot that is trying so hard to be something exciting that it ends up being nothing at all. As long as the movie delayed that plot from kicking in (and it spends a considerable amount of time doing so), I was having a good enough time. But when Bond finally faces off with the villain, the movie reveals its idiocy and just sort of plods through to the end.
The big baddie is Christoph Waltz playing Franz Oberhausen or something like that, but hey it turns out he's really the famous Bond villain Blofeld. The great tragedy of Spectre is that it utterly wastes Bond's most iconic villain and an iconic villainous actor in one go. The writers try to make Blofeld's villainy feel so much bigger and badder than the villainy that has come before, but they deeply misunderstand what makes a character compelling. It's as if they sat down and had a purely logical conversation about it: "Isn't the way to make this bad guy the worst bad guy by making him in charge of all the other bad guys we've had?" And so Spectre retroactively folds Le Chiffre, Mr. White, Mr. Green, and even, inexplicably, Skyfall's Silva into the cadre of people who have... what, taken orders from Blofeld? It's unclear why anybody respects this guy, because all he does is tell people how in charge he is. The movie turns Waltz into a banal exposition machine, and makes Blofeld into a guy who is really proud of his nasty schemes. He also has a personal vendetta against Bond because of some irrelevant stepfamily history between them. It's all so dumb. But when the movie gets done slapping us in the face with the names of all the old villains, and instead starts just putting photocopies of their faces up everywhere, it becomes laughable.
In attempting to make Blofeld into the ultimate bad guy, they somehow managed to make him the least threatening Craig Bond villain yet. He goes out like a lamb after a forty-five minute sequence of meaningless mind games and idiot assumptions. He captures Bond twice and is very lax about restraining him. He puts him in a head-drilling death machine straight out of Adam West's Batman, and just sits there grinning like he's bored. It's pointless. Spectre has committed the hateful sin of making me like Christoph Waltz less.
Meanwhile, there's a whole subplot that involves the domestic squad (new M, Q, and Moneypenny) running around and trying to stop this C (Andrew Scott) guy from taking over intelligence and having some sort of Orwellian surveillance thing going on. Skyfall assembled a good cast of characters, so it's understandable to want to give them something to do, but their task is dull and apropos of nothing. Embarrassingly, their climactic sequence involves a timer counting down as Q tries to hack something really fast. Even worse, this happens simultaneously with another countdown timer that Bond has to deal with. This movie could have, without hyperbole, been cut down by half and not lost anything but a bunch of water-treading. I would have liked that streamlined movie better; less time to stew in the inane plotlessness of it all.
What plot there is is clearly derivative of The Dark Knight in the laziest of ways. The final act of the movie is a potpourri of other average action movies. There is even a snow chase sequence that I am perturbed to say reminded me of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The friend I saw it with suggested that the movie had been written by two brothers who couldn't agree on anything. One brother loves the Daniel Craig gritty realism Bond, and the other brother loves the goofy gaggy romance-focused aspects of Bond's past. They then made an agreement to alternate scenes. This is legitimately how Spectre feels, with scene after scene jumping around and invalidating other aspects of other parts of the movie. Spectre is a tonal disasterpiece filled with promising ideas that would work well in other movies, but instead they jangle against each other until you can't concentrate on anything so you just need to put it down and walk away.
1.5 / 5 BLOBS
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