Movie Review – Spectre (2015)
Starring: Daniel Craig, Monica Bellucci, Lea Seydoux, Christoph Waltz, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Andrew Scott, Andrew Scott, and Ben Whishaw.
I will go ahead and get this out of the way right now. I have never been a mainstay on the Bond bandwagon. With the exception of the Brosnan years, I just did not go out of my way to see or get engulfed in the culture surrounding Agent 007. That is, until this year. Earlier this year, I took a long hard look at the entire franchise, and marathoned all 23 prior films within the cusp of a few days. It was interesting seeing the franchise develop from an adapted series of novels into trying to keep up with modern culture, all through sets of uproars over who was going to become the agent from film to film, with each Bond bringing something new and different to the table.
Which brings me to Spectre. For all its bravado and lush photography, the 24th entry in the franchise unfortunately failed to enlighten me, and seemed to coast in Skyfall‘s beauty instead of creating its own. Oh yeah, returning director Sam Mendes fills each other frame with references, winks, and nods to previous incarnations. But while Spectre‘s first hour moves at an imperviously fast pace, its second just kind of lingers, and Bond’s efforts to solve the open ended mysteries of Skyfall get interrupted with loud noises, smoke, & mirrors, which in the end turn out to be meaningless. In fact, this is a great way to describe Spectre as an overall film. The heavy structure Mendes builds in Spectre‘s first hour does not have the leg strength needed to hold it up in its second (and a half), and the film crumbles under its own weight.
That’s not to say the film is an out & out failure. Mendes again directs the film with a certain flare for the exquisite, and Craig is most certainly the picture of a self assured Bond which we have not seen since 2006’s much tighter Casino Royale. Here, he fantastically blends Sean Connery’s self confidence with Roger Moore’s solidarity for sarcasm in Spectre‘s overlong 148 minute main frame. If this is indeed his swan song as Ian Flemming’s character, he picked a hell of a way to go out. The rest of the cast, as you’d expect, is all around excellent. Waltz does everything short of twirling his moustache in the role of darkly lit bad guy Oberhauser. However the cast’s main stand out is Fiennes, who takes the ball Mendes gave him in Skyfall and runs with it, much to my sheer delight. Seydoux’s elegance is an enhancement to her overall performance, and she is balls to the wall exceptional here. Though the end of her less than favorably developed character arc does leave a lot to be desired.
Again, that might be my view of Spectre‘s overall quality. There is so much to love about the film. Between Thomas Newman’s brilliantly conceived score, to Hoyte Van Hoytema’s elaborate cinematography, right down to some of the franchise’s best ever nail biting action, I admired a lot of what was being brought to me. But Spectre gets so bogged down in its own series of problematic plotting and self seriousness, that by the time Oberhauser’s plot is in full swing and the film’s overly familiar climax happens, all which was right about the film didn’t matter.
I would call the quality ratio of my Bond marathon to be a good 30/70. Though people who hold the franchise in a higher light will no doubt find so much more to love about Spectre than its great, almost technically perfect prose. Those who have stood by their favorite agent through its most dire years will quite literally be screaming in delight at the soft strokes Mendes has included for your sharp eye for all things 007. But the sad truth of it is that if Mendes had been compelled to make more than what in the end amounts to little more than a love letter to fans of the franchise, and instead focused on things such as plotting and feelings of entanglement, then maybe Spectre could have been lots, lots better.
6 out of 10