Spectre: A Review

SPOILERS BELOW

At this point, James Bond is about as unkillable as a cockroach. And I don't mean just in the movies themselves, but here in the real world as well. With every new movie since the end of the Cold War, there seem to be dozens of people ready to point out the super spy's irrelevance and oncoming demise. And yet, Bond keeps on chugging. But he has been adrift since the fall of the Soviet Union and each new film has tried to help the character find his place in the new political world, to varying degrees of success. The previous film, Skyfall, tackled this problem on headfirst and seemed to set up a new status quo for Bond in the new millennium. As such, Director Sam Mendes and Daniel Craig have returned to see Bond off and wrap up a few more loose ends.

Picking up directly after Skyfall, Bond (Daniel Craig, once more) is officially on leave from his spy duties and is supposed to be staying out of trouble. Unofficially, he's been jetting across the world tracking a mysterious criminal organization whose reach could be incalculable. Bond's search brings into contact with Dr. Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux), the daughter of an old adversary who could lead him to the heart of the organization and finds himself stalked by an almost literal ghost from his past. But Bond's extracurricular activities are causing trouble back home, as M (Ralph Fiennes) finds himself and MI6 under fire from a new defense minister seeking to shut the spy program down. As the film goes on and Bond draws closer to the heart of the beast, these two things appear less disconnected than they did and an even grander scheme comes into focus...

Bond (Daniel Craig) & Dr. Swann (Lea Seydoux)
on their way to SPECTRE HQ.

How much you will enjoy Spectre is dependent on your attitude to the Bond Films of old, because it finally fulfills on the promise of a 21st Century update to the classic Bond formula. Shadowy masterminds, secret lairs, even a gadget or two make an appearance though thankfully the outdated sexism has been dropped. As someone who enjoys the older, more fanciful Bond films I enjoyed this approach to the material. But if that's not really your thing, the film's aesthetic and mis-en-scene is still grounded in the Nolan Realism it's employed since Casino Royale and the action scenes are as exciting and well-choreographed as ever. Though they are somewhat at odds with the tone of the film.

The tone is inconsistent throughout the entire piece, as though it's trying to find a balance between the older, more fanciful films it's narratively borrowing from and the more grounded, realistic films it's visually based on. Case in point, there's a chase scene about halfway into the film where Bond is chasing the villains' armored car (they've kidnapped Dr. Swann) in a small Cesna plane down a snowy mountain. It's as well shot as anything else in the film but it takes enough silly turns, like the wings falling off Bond's plane but still continuing the chase, that it undermines the serious tone of what's going on. It doesn't get silly enough to tip over completely into cartoonishness, but it still feels at odds with what the filmmakers are going for.

Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) taunting Bond.

But there's no clearer example of this than Spectre's biggest misstep, its villain. Just a warning that I'm about to spoil the big twist of the movie. So the villain of Spectre is Christoph Waltz as classic Bond nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld. You know the bald guy in a Nehru jacket with a cat. Now bringing Blofeld is not necessarily a bad idea, I've been waiting for it since Casino Royale, but it's how they go about it that really doesn't work and almost ruins the entire film. The writers and filmmakers decide to make Blofeld a childhood acquaintance of Bond's who's held a longstanding grudge against the super spy, and he's framed the entire plot of the film as an attempt to ruin Bond's life basically out of petty jealousy. And not only that, they connect the villains and events of all of Craig's other Bond Films to Blofeld's weirdly convoluted plot. This just has the effect of undermining the events and impact of those other films and make Blofeld seem so over-arching as to be ridiculous. I personally disagree with the notion of giving Blofeld and Bond a personal connection to justify their conflict, especially because it makes Blofeld seem really petty to go through so much work just to mess up one guy's life, but under different circumstances it could have worked. By connecting all the films together and making Blofeld's motivation so petty (okay, sure, he'd also have control of MI6 but that's clearly a side-benefit for him) it comes across more like a parody of a Blofeld-esque mastermind than the real thing. None of this is to disparage Christoph Waltz though, who almost makes this mess of a character work, the man was born to play a classic Bond villain.

That's kind of the whole problem with Spectre. It has a lot of good ideas about how to follow up Skyfall and revive the classic Bond formula, but how the filmmakers execute those ideas doesn't work. Madeleine Swann is another case of this. Writing a post-feminist Bond Girl is challenging enough, and the film has some interesting ideas about how being the daughter of a man like Bond gives her a unique insight into his character, but it never really does anything with that idea. I do give the film credit for framing the one time Bond sleeps with her as more of a mutual "Yeah, we didn't get killed" outburst than him conquering her. Dave Bautista's henchman character Hinx suffers from the same problem. The film sets him up as a big physical threat, helped by Bautista just naturally looking very intimidating, but despite a few good fights with Bond it never really pays off. I felt like they should have had one more big confrontation before the movie ended.

Ultimately, Spectre is kind of disappointing. It's not as good or as thought out as Skyfall, despite some good instincts on how to further Bond after that film. But despite all of its narrative failings, it's succeeds enough on the technical level to stay watchable. The actors all do well, especially Naomie Harris, Ben Whishaw, and Ralph Fiennes as Bond's MI6 support team back in London, despite the failings of the script. The action is exciting and the opening in Mexico City is very nice. Not Great Bond, but satisfactory. I'd probably be kinder to it if it weren't coming off the excellent Skyfall. 

Final Score: 3/5