Tim here. Four films in, it feels like it's been enough time for the Daniel Craig era of James Bond films to stop doing the origin story thing, but nope, Spectre – the 24th film in the franchise, and the first in its second half-century of life – once again finds the rebooted series putting a whole movie's worth of energy into establishing something that was covered in, like, one scene back in 1963's From Russia with Love. That being the existence of the titular criminal organization, the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion. It's not so much frustrating as it is baffling: "learn more about Spectre" is basically the whole of the film's plot, with no real threat that needs to be stopped. There's some weird and unsatisfying business with a multinational agreement to share espionage resources, I guess that's the thing driving the plot. A cache of stolen nukes or an attempt to start World War III, it ain't.
Does any of that really matter? If anything, Spectre reveals the core pleasures of the Bond franchise, by removing even the vestige of an actual narrative. It's an exercise in lifestyle porn globetrotting, with Craig handsomely filling out a whole bunch of Tom Ford suits as director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema take great pains to make a lot of extremely gorgeous locations in Europe and North Africa look, well, gorgeous. At frequent intervals there is an action setpiece, most of which are pretty terrific. [More...]
In fact, Spectre opens with one of the best action scenes in the decades-long history of the franchise. Bond is in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead, tracking down an Italian terrorist, and following him through a parade, into a hotel, and then back out of the hotel along its roofline in one apparently uninterrupted take. It's bravura filmmaking, but it's bravura fimmaking with a purpose: to show the smoothness of Bond's top-notch spying skills, slicing through space with the fluid motions of a barracuda. And then when that's all, he gets into a fistfight on a helicopter that's performing corkscrews over a huge crowd, and Thomas Newman's score jabs at us intensely, occasionally throwing a riff on the Monty Norman surf rock theme that has defined Bond for all these years.
It's an opening that no film could sustain, but Spectre is better than its muted critical reception would have you believe. It just requires admiring the sleekness of its photography and set design more than its cumbersome writing. And in the case of a Bond film, the series faithful have had decades of practice at doing just that. Admittedly, when Spectre goes off the rails, it goes off the rails hard.
That happens exactly at the point where the shadowy villain Franz Oberhauser, played by Christoph Waltz in a significantly less Christoph Waltz-ey mode than he usually manages, steps into the light, with one of those elaborate torture machine sequences the series often brings in. For it's here that the movie fully commits to all of the hints of backstory that have been swirling around the whole time, making the film the bow tying up immediate predecessors Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, and Skyall into one overarching narrative that's pretty well daft, any way you want to look at it.
Worse yet, it manages at the same time to tie all those movies into a life history of Bond himself; if it's not quite a Chosen One narrative, it's looking at houses in that neighborhood. All of this is quite desperate and dimwitted, and it makes one long for the days when Bond films could just be one-off adventures of madmen with underwater lairs trying to remake the world in their image. The serialization and world-building of the Craig-era Bond films has gotten tedious, and the bloated last third of Spectre pays the price for it.
But what of the first two-thirds? They're not perfect, but the film has more than its share of pleasures: Ralph Fiennes, as spymaster M, Naomie Harris, as quick-witted secretary Moneypenny, and Ben Whishaw as sardonic tech guru Q, have a lot of fun camaraderie with each other and Craig, and an appealingly expanded role in the proceedings. The ad-hoc family feeling of their interactions are the one truly new thing Spectre brings to the franchise, and it's great. In a much too small role, Monica Bellucci is terrifically flinty as the first-ever age-appropriate sexual partner for Bond; Léa Seydoux's much bigger part as the "actual" romantic lead isn't quite as special, but she does come across as exceptionally self-reliant, intelligent, and prickly in her independence for a woman in a Bond picture, right up until the film makes the terrible choice to really commit to their emotional connection.
Meanwhile, the film's action scenes are mostly reliable – one gratifyingly large explosion to kick off the last act, and a basic but beautifully-shot car chase focusing on the most gorgeous car in the entire franchise (an ultra-rare Aston Martin DB10, made specifically for the movie) – if not ever particularly jaw-dropping in their originality after that Mexico City opening. Even as pure spectacle, this isn't up to the level of Skyfall (which has, honestly, only a slightly better screenplay), and its superficial pleasures have a lot to overcome as the plot disappears into its own rectum. I would not want to speak of the film's value to anyone who isn't already onboard with Bond's characteristic absurd action and glossy aesthetics, but for those of who look forward to those things, Spectre delivers. It's not a film worth loving, but there's really a good deal to like.
Rating: B