Daniel Craig looks tired in Spectre — not in the frazzled, intense way he was in Skyfall, but like a bored waiter who just wants to be paid so he can go home at the end of a long shift. This is how Craig’s James Bond probably ends: sleepwalking off the stage rather than flaming out in the spectacular silliness of Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan’s last turn as 007.
After the drab third act of Spectre, one almost longs for the return of the invisible car and Madonna and the ice palace and the bad CGI. Anything to bring some joy into a film that turns James Bond into such a slog. That’s not to say Spectre isn’t absurd — it takes a plot point from Goldmember, no less — but that it lacks both the conviction and the light touch of Casino Royale and Skyfall.
Spectre brings the Craig Bond saga to a disappointing conclusion, failing to find an emotional centre or a sense of fun. It wavers between the grounded, Bourne-like tone of Craig’s previous Bond films and reintroducing campier elements from the Connery and Moore eras into the cinematic universe, doing neither style particularly well. It’s Austin Powers played as a dirge.
Excluding Quantum of Solace — where Bond treaded water for a whole movie in a script rushed out during the screenwriter’s strike of 2007-2008 — the Craig Bond films follow the arc of trilogies such as Star Wars and Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. Batman Begins set the template for the gritty Bond reboot in Casino Royale; Skyfall deconstructed Bond and reconstituted him for a new age, as The Dark Knight did Batman; and Spectre mires him in the self-importance that suffocated Batman in The Dark Knight Rises.
In retrospect, Skyfall skated on thin ice with its Oedipal psychodrama and awkward attempts to fill in Bond’s back story, but it had the visual panache (courtesy of Roger Deakins, who is not back for Spectre) and supple wryness to get away with it. The first half of Spectre — which runs for 150 minutes, or a half-hour too long — has its moments.
With Skyfall director Sam Mendes at the helm once more, it gets off to a cracking start with a virtuoso helicopter chase set in Mexico City during the Day of the Dead. Bond follows a breadcrumb trail, left by his late boss M (Judi Dench), to the steps of a shadowy terrorist organisation and its mastermind (played by Christoph Waltz).
Some interesting cards are thrown into the mix: the smoky, sultry wife of one’s Spectre’s men (Monica Bellucci, the oldest Bond “girl” yet); a slithery British secret service securocrat (Andrew Scott, Moriarty in Sherlock) who wants to replace human agents with pervasive electronic surveillance; and expanded roles for the new M (Ralph Fiennes), Miss Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Whishaw), all settling into their roles with charm and good humour.
Just when things are starting to look promising, Spectre falls completely to pieces. The frustrating thing about all of this is that e-mails leaked from the Sony hacks (major spoilers) in 2014 show that the film’s makers knew that the last stretch of Spectre’s script was awful before the cameras started rolling. Yet an ill-advised twist in the screenplay survived several rewrites. It — and Bond’s stilted romance with Léa Seydoux’s insipid Dr Madeleine Swann — are clumsy fudges in the absence of real danger and motivation to drive the action.
Spectre keeps riffing on old glories, but its references to earlier 007 films are as stale as Craig’s listless performance. There’s the bit where the villain reveals his secrets to Bond, including a trite retrofitting of the Bond mythology. Waltz, who oozed such malevolence as the verbose, urbane Nazi in Inglourious Basterds, seems muted in a part that should have been perfect for him.
There’s the part where Waltz tortures Bond a la Goldfinger with an elaborate machine. He should just have played him Sam Smith’s Spectre theme, Writing’s On the Wall. Series staples like the quips, the near-invincible henchmen, and the villain’s lair are all back, but they’re not handled as amusingly as they were in Kingsmen earlier this year.
A train battle between Bond and a Spectre heavy (Dave Bautista) is an empty echo of similar fights between Sean Connery and Red Grant, and Roger Moore versus Tee Hee and Jaws. Some of the other action scenes are decent, if overblown — an On Her Majesty’s Secret Service-inspired chase through snow slopes is a highlight — but there is nothing here as lithe and surefooted as the best sequences in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.
The film’s cowardly, unearned ending hedges its bets between rounding off Craig’s Bond career and leaving room for a sequel. Given just how well Spectre has done at the box office, Craig will almost certainly be back. Yet Eon Productions and Sony seem uncertain about how to reconcile Bond’s legacy with his future direction.
Besides Quantum of Solace, Spectre is by far the worst of the Bond films with Craig, with the weakest script, villain, Bond girl, Craig performance, and action of the three. The writing is indeed on the wall, and it says it’s time for yet another reboot. — © 2015 NewsCentral Media
- Read more reviews by Lance Harris
