3.5 stars out of 5
It’s a challenge for any long-running series: They have to recycle just enough of the old tropes to satisfy the fans, while also including new elements to freshen things up. You know, like when your favorite old rocker incorporated trip-hop beats. Here, the Bond crew walks that tightrope, leaning toward the old and familiar, and it’s mostly successful.
For “something new,” we get the threat of Big Data. (“Snowden. Edward Snowden.”) No one is safe from surveillance, not even in Moneypenny’s apartment.
For “something borrowed,” we get… everything else. Spectre is basically a greatest-hits of the Daniel Craig years, as past characters and occurrences are revisited. And of course we also get SPECTRE, the most sinister collection of baddies this side of KAOS. SPECTRE was a staple of the early Bond films, and with legal wrangling over rights to the name seemingly resolved, the specter of spectre is back as expected.
The action is solid. The visually-grabbing opening set piece takes place on the Day of the Dead in Mexico City, featuring a crumbling building and a cool fight inside a helicopter. There’s also a car chase in Rome, hand-to-hand combat aboard a (suddenly empty?) train, plane vs. SUV in Austria, etc. As always, Bond has a Passport to Kill.
Beyond Craig, several of our familiar friends are back again: the hipster-nerd Q, the black Moneypenny, Rory Kinnear (who between Bonds was terrific in that Black Mirror episode) as Chief of Staff Tanner, and Mr. White. Among the new recruits, Ralph Fiennes does a fien job as M, with an air of slightly stuffy authority. The streak of very well-cast villains continues with Christoph Waltz, appropriately creepy. We get Bond girls both age-appropriate (Monica Bellucci in a steamy scene) and not (Léa Seydoux, who I liked in The Grand Budapest Hotel but not as much as Saoirse Ronan so I’ll have to see Brooklyn soon). For a Bond movie, Seydoux’s is a strong female character.
Sam Smith’s theme song is pretty great and doesn’t even sound a little bit like Tom Petty.
Product placement? Sure. I’ll give Aston Martin a pass, but oh what a lingering shot of an Omega watch. There are lapses in logic; for example, Bond wants to travel undetected by his bosses, but then immediately steals a new car from MI6. The attempts at humor generally fall flat, and returning director Sam Mendes is not as artful as he was in Skyfall. For the most part, though, Spectre is a thrilling tale, well-plotted, paced, and performed.
That all being said, I dropped my rating from 4 stars to 3.5. Just when we seem headed to a satisfying conclusion (and the actual ending is strong), they decide to toss in yet another set piece. Beyond being one too many — contributing to the movie’s overly-long 148 minutes — this scene is flat-out stupid, like something out of a crummy superhero flick. Come on, guys, sometimes the world is enough.
Jack Silbert, curator