Movie Review: Spectre

Movie Review: Spectre

Spectre is the long awaited and widely anticipated 24th installment in the James Bond franchise. Also debuting is a new style of plot for the Bond franchise, no longer is Bond fighting an independent evil baddie, but rather one big baddie that encompasses all of the other baddies from all of Craig’s movies. Because of this, Spectre has to be one of most perfectly executed Bond films of all time in order to effectively combine all of the stories from the last three films. But does it accomplish that? Not really.

It begins just like any other Bond movie, with an explosive entrance sequence introducing the new exciting villain bond will be chasing after this time. Along with introducing some new characters and gadgets he’ll be using. Which it does pretty well. I felt as though it was a fresh start after the events of Skyfall, Bond was back and better than ever and ready to take down a new villain. Except not really. When we finally do get some context about what was going on in the usual out of context prologue, we see that this isn’t really a fresh start for Bond. He is actually just doing a super-secret mission that M sent him from her deathbed that for some inexplicable reason nobody else can know about except for him. This hunt goes on for about an hour of nothing but chasing down this guy while simultaneously trying not to be killed by one of the most boring assassins I’ve ever seen. This all ends with a sloppy mashed together ending where all of the other Daniel Craig films are annoyingly brought together in a way that just does not make sense.

Some of these narrative distresses could be forgiven if the acting was better, and the action was exciting. But it really just falls flat. Daniel who was the star of the show for the previous films was just bland. He never changes his expression or shows any emotion to what should be an emotional scene. This film’s Bond girl doesn’t really show much enthusiasm either. She says what she needs too and at least attempts to elicit some reaction during the few emotional bits.

I really wish that this movie was better executed that it was. It could have easily been the best one in the franchise if it was. It could have easily been the excellent sign off to Daniel Craig that we all were hoping for. But what it gave us was a misguided and boring plot with some stiff acting and a 150 minute run time.

 

Editor’s Note: Spectre is not the worst Bond film in the franchise, but it is far from the best. The films biggest offense, in my opinion, was that it failed to use Christoph Waltz as much as it should have. He was a wasted opportunity for a great Bond villain. This film reverted back into the Bond movie formula that the previous three films have been working to break from. Hopefully Daniel Craig will return for one more Bond film with Martin Campbell, who directed both Goldeneye and Casino Royale (Two of my favorite and best Bond films), that can be a proper sendoff to a great Bond.