Spectre ***½ (2015, Daniel Craig, Léa Seydoux, Monica Bellucci, Christoph Waltz, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw, Dave Bautista, Naomie Harris) – Movie Review

Daniel Craig is back for his fourth Bond movie in director Sam Mendes‘s sequel to his smash-hit Skyfall (2012). It’s hard to follow the most successful 007 movie, but they’ve done a pretty bang-up job, accessing events and characters of the last film as well as, again, the classic formula, with a slightly lighter touch, and even a couple of jokes. It is, as they hoped, a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.

Most folks will be happy that they’ve brought Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw and Naomie Harris back as M, Q and Moneypenny, and it’s good to get them all out of the office and into the action, though Harris has perilously little to do. Fiennes’s ‘safe house’, with its immediate access to Trafalgar Square, doesn’t look all that safe, but we’ll let that pass. It’s central London, and one of the big strengths of the movie is the extended use of London as a backdrop, not just as yet another international location for a chase sequence. So that’s good.

And the new actors and their characters? Interesting actors but paper thin characters, as usual. Both Monica Bellucci, as infamous criminal’s widow Lucia Sciarra, and especially Léa Seydoux, as assassin’s daughter Madeleine Swann, make highly seductive Bond girls. Seydoux (from Blue Is the Warmest Colour) even has enough screen time to make an alluring impact.

But Christoph Waltz, no doubt trying to compensate for Javier Bardem’s horribly OTT villain last time, is way too laid back as Franz Oberhauser, or whoever he actually turns out to be. He’s trying for smooth and silky, and sadistically venomous, but he comes across as a lightweight. His heart doesn’t seem in his work in torturing Bond. Goldfinger did it so much better.

However, Dave Bautista has the right stuff as scary henchman, Mr Hinx, so called because they couldn’t use Mr Jinx as that’s the name of Robert DeNiro’s cat in Meet the Parents (but I digress). Bautista has a great chase and a great scrap with Bond. Top stuff.

That’s the personnel. It’s a little thin on Bond girls, and definitely on sex. I know they want Bond to grow up and not be a sexist dinosaur, but let’s have a little love-making, please. That really is the classic formula.

Spectre is as slick and smooth as a movie could possibly be, fast moving and dynamic throughout a slightly over-long running time, with only a couple of obvious pauses for breath or talk that provide good loo breaks. (The talk, by the way, isn’t quite Oscar Wilde witty, though some of it is slyly amusing).

But being actually be super-cool and stylish eludes Spectre, though it makes lots of moves in that direction, right from the start with the long tracking shot of Bond on the killing trail with a view to a kill in Mexico City at carnival time. The plot doesn’t really make any sense or hang together with any logic.

Daniel Craig shoots out at the audience, the Mexico City pre-credits sequence is followed by some exquisite credits, then Bond checking in a with a browned off M and grounded yet again, then a Rome sequence with Italy’s finest, Monica Bellucci, replacing Honor Blackman as the oldest ever Bond girl. Daniel Craig is as impressed as Sean Connery was before him. An older, devastating attractive woman? Bond is hooked!

All this is good, strong stuff, but none of it seems to hang together. The Rome sequence in particular feels like part of another movie. And then finally, after another half hour with the debut of Christoph Waltz and the arrival of Léa Seydoux, the film finally settles down to its rather slim story and by then you’re wondering what the heck Mexico and Rome has to do with it. Ah, yes, we have to go globe-trotting.

The screenplay, indeed, is a bit of a mess, with the feel of too many pairs of hands working on it, too many bright ideas conceived then partly dropped, to be replaced by too many other bright ideas conceived then partly dropped. It’s a rare case of a movie script that needs one less re-write, maybe several fewer re-writes, to be near-perfect.

The credits then are exceptionally stylish, Sam Smith’s song ‘Writing’s On The Wall’ is OK (at least better than the tedious Skyfall) and the score is a good one, though it’s nervously way overused and the volume is turned up to ear-splitting level. Coming out of the Odeon, Leicester Square, into the hubbub of the real world, I could hear only the Bond music and the actual street noise was turning down into a quiet, subliminal background buzz. This effect stayed for an hour or so after the movie. That really is getting a movie into people’s heads. They should have stopped the score for two or three of the big action moments and let the excitement speak for itself.

Did I mention Daniel Craig? He seems ultra fit, looks right and he’s great in the action, doing sterling work on Her Majesty’s Secret Service on several outstanding sequences, though admittedly nothing we haven’t seen before. But then there can’t be anywhere new to take Bond after 24 movies. So everything has to be a re-hash. It’s just how fresh you can bring up the ingredients when you re-cook them, isn’t it? And they taste fresh enough.

Craig is a great mover, action is his forte, obviously doing various death-defying stunts that landed him in hospital for an operation. Great! (Not the hospital bit, which may be why he is wary of doing another 007 movie.) Why then, when so much is done for real, do we have to have CGI explosions, with enormous buildings devastated. This all belongs in another movie, and a much less classy one.

They want to make James Bond ‘real’ and a developing character (well, heck, he’s the only actually developed character in the whole movie!), but Daniel Craig doesn’t seem to want to give much away as Bond. He has as few facial expressions as Roger Moore – three, maybe four – and when he smiles there’s nothing there except fake and phoney. But of course that is Bond. Finally Daniel Craig has nailed Bond and he is 007.

I need hardly tell you that the end is no end at all – the film just kind of fizzles out – and number 25 will doubtless be on our screens this time in 2018, almost certainly with Daniel Craig and all the rest of the surviving personnel. Bond 25 can pick up immediately where this leaves off, and again I’m quite looking forward to it.

Sam Smith and James Napier won the 2016 Golden Globe and Oscar for Best Original Song ‘Writing’s on the Wall’.

Craig’s four 007 movies have grossed $3.2 billion worldwide. Skyfall grossed $1.1 billion but Spectre took in less at $880 million.

Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli said on 24 July 2017 that the next Bond installment will hit cinemas on 8 November 2019. Though Craig said he’d rather slash his own wrists than play the role again, on 15 August 2017 he confirmed that he will be back for the last movie left on his five-film deal, following Casino Royale (2006), Quantum of Solace (2008), Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015).

Daniel Craig fell while sprinting on the set of Bond 25 in Jamaica in May 2019 and was flown to the US for X-rays, resulting in a suspension of the shoot. He slipped and fell awkwardly, was in pain and complaining about his ankle. Filming at Pinewood Studios was postponed.

No Time to Die is Daniel Craig’s fifth and (likely) final entry in the franchise, with Ben Whishaw back as Q, following Spectre (2015), for release on 8 April 2020 (US). Craig’s co-star on the 2019 Knives Out, Ana de Armas plays Paloma.

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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