Bond (Daniel Craig) goes rogue in his latest adventure.
The opening gambit of Spectre — the fourth outing for the 21st century’s James Bond — is absolutely spectacular. It begins with a long and apparently uncut sequence in which the secret agent and a lady friend wend their way through raucous Day of the Dead revelers in Mexico City. They are dressed for the mock morbid mood, and we catch that funereal contagion: If soaking in this gruesome funk doesn’t make you want to instantly sign up for a Halloween trip to Mexico, you may actually be dead inside. And then it graduates to authentically thrilling, as Bond leaps out the hotel window and across rooftops to do a Secret Agent Thing. This is where I started to doubt if it had actually been shot in one take, but no matter — however it was crafted, we are powerfully in the moment with Bond as he goes to work.
There is atmosphere to spare here and humor and action-movie grace. If this is how Spectre begins, what amazing goodies does it have up its sleeve?
As it turns out, not much. Spectre never reaches that same pinnacle of joy again; it’s as if director Sam Mendes (Road to Perdition, American Beauty) departs once the opening has unspooled, leaving the rest of the movie to an understudy. After the brilliant Skyfall (also directed by Mendes), I suspected that perhaps there was a grand unifying theory coming together to wrap all these new Bond adventures into one big tale, and a way to move a dated and unpleasantly retro franchise forward. Yet Spectre only moves Bond backward.
In the immediate aftermath of the events of Skyfall, Bond (Daniel Craig) has gone rogue, chasing hints of a big bad guy around the globe, while back in London, the new M (Ralph Fiennes) is battling with C (Andrew Scott), who is about to launch a new blanket electronic surveillance scheme that will replace the 00 program: something about drone warfare being more efficient than spies with a license to kill.
Everyone might as well be enacting a Bond puppet show, which sometimes descends into that unpleasantly retro ickiness, as in the sequence with Monica Bellucci. For all the astonished to-do over a Bond “girl” being an actual contemporary of Bond, instead of a woman young enough to be his daughter, Bellucci’s character is completely superfluous except as someone for Bond to mechanically bed: They’ve barely met before they are engaging in the unsexiest grappling imaginable, and then her character is completely forgotten, never spoken of again, even though the movie drags on for an unforgivably long two and a half-hours.
Even the second-best section of the film trips over itself with awkward Bondian self-consciousness. It starts out all desert romanticism, classy and smart and funny, as Bond and the daughter (Léa Seydoux) of one of his old enemies travel in and around Tangiers in search of Spectre’s HQ. The mood is lost with the deployment of what is perhaps meant to be a sort of punchline, but might as well be a placard that reads Insert Obligatory Sex Scene Here. (Seydoux, at 17 years younger than Craig, is almost young enough to be his daughter.)
Of course the sex is as empty and as bloodless and as tween-friendly as the violence, which is a particular problem here when there’s nothing but old-school Bond sex and violence on offer. And yet little here works on the level of nostalgia, either. It just feels trite and tired. Which is a particular disappointment for a series that had, until now, avoided that trap.
