Review: Spectre (2015) (Contains Spoilers...) · 3:17am Dec 26th, 2015
Is this the worst Bond film ever?
Yes. End of review.
...
Okay fine, I'll review the movie properly, since, ya know, that's what I do, I guess.
So anyways, in the continuing saga of me sticking it to The Man, I downloaded a DVD Screener of the most recent entry of the seemingly endless Bond franchise, Spectre.
What I got was a two and a half hour slog of a film that is a borderline incomprehensible mess of half-baked plot lines, rehashing of story elements from a dozen previous Bond films, along with lackluster direction, stale acting, and what's probably the worst Bond song since Die Another Day.
The film starts well enough, with a wonderfully immersive 5 minute tracking shot showing James Bond setting up to take out an enemy agent, which leads into a complex chase sequence through Mexico City in the midst of the Day of the Dead celebrations, which culminates in a spiraling helicopter race over the city. All in all, a very well executed sequence...
And then the title sequence starts and the whole movie tanks.
Let it be known now that Sam Smith's "The Writing's on the Wall" is absolutely abysmal, with Smith's dog whistle of a voice completely failing to capture whatever sense of melodramatic drama that he was attempting to create with the song, whose lyrics are over dramatic to the point of borderline parody, and the music surging and swelling in a manner all to similar to Adele's VASTLY superior "Skyfall". In fact, in many ways, this song feels like a shameless attempt to recreate it, down to the chord changes and vocal styling that Smith attempts. Bonus points for the visual aspects of the opening titles being a completely baffling mix of weird erotic imagery, with the ultimate peak of weirdness being a naked woman getting it on with what looks like an actual octopus...tentacles and all. That's right, a Bond opening title had tentacle hentai.
Moving on from the near vomit inducing mental image of a woman having sex with a octopus made of oil, we move onto the rest of the film, which drags itself along for two and a half hours, with a disorganized plot and stale acting from everyone.
Craig is still too stoned faced to really play Bond, and the film NEVER allows him any real moments of levity, instead keeping him perpetually dour and serious. Furthermore, this film feels obsessed with retreading plot points from all of Craig's previous entries, and trying to tie them together. In doing so, it creates a mess of a movie, and also manages to undermine key emotional and story building moments from those previous films, by implying they were all just part of the larger mechanization of Spectre.
Mendes' direction feels tired, and Hoyte van Hoytema tries his best to recapture Skyfall's visual language, but fails to do so. For one thing, Hoytema favors much darker, saturated colors then Roger Deakins did, and in doing so creates a color pallet that only furthers the sense of downtrodden pretentiousness that this film wallows in. At times, in Mendes' direction, he seems to be trying to invoke elements of psychological thriller, heaping on the surrealism and weirdness, only to snap back to nondescript action directing at the drop of a hat. In doing so, the film gains a wildly uneven tone, and with the aforementioned sense of overwrought self-seriousness, means the film has very little "fun" to it.
The Bond Girls are generic, neither standing apart, and Bond's motivations for staying with Léa Seydoux's character are vague and ill defined. Seydoux, who has done much better acting in other films, seems to be on autopilot here, and does little to earn her chemistry with Craig, of which there is none. The relationship is heavy-handed, yet disgustingly underplayed, leading to an ending that just leaves you wondering what the heck is going on. Also, Monica Bellucci shows up for five minutes, bangs Bond, and leaves. That's it. There's nothing else to say about her character.
In the case of Christoph Waltz, he's obviously having fun playing Blofeld, but at the same time, is utterly wasted. He has maybe less then half an hour of screentime, and his backstory (being the embittered son of the man who adopted an orphaned Bond) is utterly preposterous. It gives Blofeld a pettiness that seems unbefitting of such a supposed mastermind, and the film offers no explanation as to why the son of a middle class mountain climber got to be in charge of what is basically the HYDRA of the Bond universe.
Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw and Naomie Harris are all wasted in a subplot that once more retreads the whole "No Longer Needing Bond" themes from Skyfall. In a plot line that goes nowhere except to rip off The Winter Soldier, Finnes and co try to stop the Obviously Evil Andrew Scott from creating a single super-MI6 by combining the world's intelligence organizations, in order to spy on everybody and gather as much information. It's revealed he's under Blofeld's orders, and one gets the feeling that the screenwriters watched The Winter Soldier and decided to rip it off, except with less foresight or tact. As a side note Dave Bautista just sorta exists. He punches some guys, finger-pokes a guy's eyes out, and then gets yanked out of a train. That's it. Nothing else.
So yeah, overall, the whole movie is a total, complete mess, and I'm just scratching the surface here. Plot lines go nowhere or bend over themselves backwards to create unnecessary plot twists or cul-de-sacs of events, and in the end, it just feels like an overblown disaster of a film. This is easily the worst Bond film I've ever seen.
1 star, if only for the Mexico City sequence, and the fact that Waltz was enjoying himself, even if I wasn't.
This movie is like the Bloodwings: Pumpkin Heads Revenge of James Bond films: nonsensical, will drive you to near homicidal rage and makes you question mankind.
So, Craig's cameo in Star Wars is more entertaining than this movie? Good to know
3643475 exactly
3643765 by a country mile
3643765 YES IT WAS FAR BETTER. He was also better in the Tintin movie and I've heard he's good in Road to Perdition.