Spectre (3/5 Stars)

It would be unfair to comment only on the drawbacks of Spectre without at first highlighting the things it brings to the table that other films simply cannot accomplish. That would be the epic globetrotting landscapes of the James Bond franchise. This movie directed by the returning Sam Mendes (Skyfall, American Beauty) with a new cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema (Her, Let the Right One In) is especially impressive in this regard. It was shot on film in the classic style and plays great on a big screen (I saw it at the Ziegfeld). The exotic locales include Mexico City during the Dia de los Muertos festival, Rome bathed in a nighttime orange-green glow of conspiracy, London in a chilly bureaucratic blue, a supervillain headquarters in the middle of the desert, and at least one beautifully soft lit train interior great for white tuxedos and fistfights. It really looks good but enough about that.

Spectre seems to be the culmination of the last three Daniel Craig Bond films. At various times in the movie the images of past characters find themselves on screen. Included are Eva Green from Casino Royale and Judi Dench from Skyfall. Conspicuously absent are any characters from Quantum of Solace; a movie that I really liked for reasons everybody else hated i.e. a realistic supervillain scheme. All of the shadowy bad guys in the previous movies are connected to a secret organization called Spectre that has an octopus as a mascot. It’s really big and does a lot of things. And here is where the last series of movies finally experiences a thematic disconnect between the reactionary pedigree of the franchise and the radical version of the Daniel Craig James Bond.

The James Bond supervillains have historically been colorful silly things. They generally have some outlandish goal like wanting to take over the world (or blowing it up). They have exhorbitantly expensive secret lairs. They have exotic henchmen with quirky ways of killing people. None of these things are all that believable. The Daniel Craig series of movies took the silliness out of the franchise. They took away almost all of the gadgets. They took away the scene stealing physical deformities of the villains. They involved evil schemes that were more or less real (in fact the scheme in Quantum of Solace actually happened which is the main reason I thought the movie had some serious chutzpah.) Heck even the blatant promiscuity is gone. I believe Daniel Craig refuses sex at least once in each of his movies. In this one, the refusal takes place within the first ten minutes during an impressively long tracking. It feels like a nice inside joke. The effect of all this seriousness combined with the retention of superior action sequences and decent character development has produced, I would argue, the best Bond movies in the franchise. Spectre has the look of the last three art house Bond movies but the plot of one of the old sillies. The whole thing feels like a setup to the production of more of the forgettable kind of Bond movies. It seems counterintuitive to me that the last three great James Bond movies would culminate into a standard James Bond movie. But that is me. James Bond movies do have a structure and the franchise has been around for a very long because that structure works for the most part.

If you have many Bond movies there are plenty of tropes here that you will recognize. The running joke of Bond’s propensity to destroy all of the equipment built by the continually annoyed Q (Ben Whishaw) is on full display here. Bond flirts with Moneypenney (Naomi Campbell). Bond rebels against M (Ralph Fiennes now). Bond gets captured by the bad guy, tied to a gurney, and uses a trick watch to escape. There is even a scene involving the love interest (Lea Seydoux) tied to a chair with a ticking time bomb and Bond has to decide whether to save her and probably die or just save himself. You have seen all of this before, but rarely in the Daniel Craig series, (or shot so beautifully by a great director and cinematographer team), which always took itself more seriously than the previous installments.

Nowhere does the disconnect present itself so glaringly then when the evil scheme presents itself. Spoiler alert I guess although I don’t think you will care so much by this reveal. The scheme is a world dragnet of surveillance, the sort Edward Snowden told us about and is in vogue currently as a supervillain plot. James Bond’s part of the British Secret Service MI:6 is portrayed as the responsible old fashioned way of doing spy stuff. Of course it isn’t. I mean the first scene of this movie has James Bond going AWOL in Mexico City having a fistfight in a helicoptor over a parade of several thousand innocent bystanders. It is a seriously dangerous irresponsible stunt by a agent going rogue agaist all orders. I know this is a James Bond movie but I wouldn’t judge the scene on its safety to the public if the movie itself did not intend to grandstand against the surveillance issues of our times and take the position that those are worse. There are too many dramatic conversations where characters inveigh vaguely against the danger of a police state in between set pieces of extraordinary violence that only with movie magic would not kill scores of innocent bystanders.

But let’s be positive about some of those set pieces because they are very good. My favorite parts of the movie have to do with the henchmen, played by a former pro wrestler named Dave Bautista who first came on the movie scene in last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy. He is a big brute of a man. After an awkward introduction he becomes the antagonist for a great car chase through Rome. It’s thrilling and very prettily shot and I was impressed that they got access to the Vatican. James Bond gets away but Dave Bautista catches up on a train as James Bond, in a white tuxedo, and Lea Seydoux, in an elegant dress, are sitting down to drinks. He bursts in from another car and havoc ensues. The fight is interesting in that it becomes clear that James cannot win it. Bautista is too big and too strong. It is a very cool thing to watch. I was wondering if they could end it in a way that wasn’t bullshit. They did.

I wish Cristoph Waltz was more entertaining as a Bond villain to me. On paper he would seem to be perfect. But I can’t say it was a particularly memorable performance or character. Oh and the bad guy from BBC's Sherlock Holmes is in this movie as well. He had far more potential on paper too.