By the time Spectre’s opening theme song has ended, James Bond (Daniel Craig) is suspended from duty over an international incident he caused in Mexico City while carrying out a final mission assigned by his former boss, M (Judi Dench), who died at the end of Skyfall.
Enlisting the help of Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Whishaw) to complete the assignment as a rogue agent, Bond finds himself in pursuit of a powerful organization so obscure that no-one has ever heard of it. If that sounds like a line from Quantum of Solace, it’s no coincidence: Spectre is the umbrella under which Quantum operates.
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Spectre Directed by Sam Mendes Starring Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, Ralph Fiennes, Dave Bautista, Monica Bellucci |
And Spectre’s leader, Franz Oberhauser (an oddly subdued Christoph Waltz), has a personal interest in James Bond. Like Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva before him, Oberhauser is the subject of various vague and overwrought warnings delivered to Bond ahead of time by lesser characters, including Lucia Sciarra (Monica Bellucci), the widow of Bond’s Mexico City quarry, and Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), who offers Bond information in exchange for the promised safety of his daughter, Dr. Madeline Swann (Léa Seydoux).
While Bond seeks Oberhauser, getting acquainted with Swann and fending off Spectre’s hulking assassin, Mr. Hinx (Dave Bautista), M’s replacement (Ralph Fiennes) must contend with a new international intelligence-sharing project which will render the double-0 program obsolete.
Spectre’s immediate plan, in which the joint intelligence initiative plays a crucial role, recalls the villainous plot in Tomorrow Never Dies, with security agencies replacing media conglomerates; this is just one of many instances where Spectre regrettably looks backward to established lore instead of plunging ahead into the unpredictable.
Mr. Hinx, the taciturn arch-henchman conceived as an “iconic” opponent for Bond, transparently has a bit of Jaws and Oddjob in him, but can’t match either as a foil for 007, despite a slickly shot car chase through Rome and a violent brawl aboard a train.
Spectre also features a torture device evocative of Goldfinger’s famous laser and the return of a marquee villain from early in the series.
References to Daniel Craig’s three previous Bond outings abound – in fact, they drive the plot – and even with her successor in place, Judi Dench’s M practically runs the show from beyond the grave. The only thing truly new here is that Bond beds a woman older than he is.
Oberhauser finally reveals a more familiar pseudonym, along with a backstory so personal and specific as to be trivial and almost comical next to the machinations of his global terror organization. And yet Specter, while unquestionably nefarious, attempts only to gain control of the flow of international intelligence; the evil plots which would surely follow go unmentioned.
With the fate of the double-0 program at stake, Bond fights for his professional as well as physical survival, but there is no specific global catastrophe to avert, and the only ticking time-bomb is placed in the old derelict MI6 headquarters, with a maximum of just two possible casualties.
The Craig-era Bond franchise has done well to ground itself in something resembling reality and give 007 an ongoing storyline with more coherence between films, and more psychological depth, than ever before. But for all Spectre’s talk of fathers (absent or ersatz) and childhoods, of past enemies in league, hardly any of it leaves an impression in the way of a drill boring into a hero’s flesh, a beautiful widow resigned to her own death, or a murderous henchman putting his thumbs through a victim’s eyes.
And though they are among the film’s high points, even these scenes – the villain’s agonizing triumph, a despairing woman’s brush with vitality, and the arrival of an opponent who physically outmatches Bond as starkly as Bane did Batman – have a strong sense of the de rigueur about them.
It was common in the Connery and Moore days for one director to helm consecutive Bond pictures, but Sam Mendes is the first to do so since License to Kill in 1989, which incidentally was the last Bond picture not to feature Judi Dench prominently (and alive) as M. Just as Quantum of Solace tied off Casino Royale’s story of Vesper Lynd, Specter completes the excavation of Bond’s youth which Mendes began in Skyfall.
Quantum is generally agreed to be the worst of the Craig-era Bond pictures, and Spectre does everything in a radically different way. But this merely proves that the opposite of a really bad Bond is not necessarily a really good Bond.
Quantum began with a frenetically edited car chase, while Spectre’s slow-paced opening is an elaborate, four-minute continuous tracking shot that follows Bond to his assassination target through the crowds of Mexico’s Day of the Dead. Yet its impact is no greater, and the long-take gimmick calls attention to itself more than it contributes to the storytelling.
Thomas Newman’s score, when it isn’t retreading classic Bond motifs – or Sam Smith’s new theme – has moments of clumsiness, intermittently overpowering the action with bombast and then disappearing altogether during some calmer scenes, leaving them to languish in silence.
At the heart of it all, Daniel Craig continues to make a strong case for himself as a plausible “best” Bond. But if Quantum was frenzied, witless and incoherent, Spectre is unoriginal, laborious and self-indulgent, which may prove in the end to be more critical sins in a Bond picture.
Encapsulated perfectly by Sam Smith’s “The Writing’s On The Wall,” Spectre is long, seemingly heartfelt, intermittently dull, and even at its best never as exciting as it earnestly and expensively attempts to be.