2.5 007- melodramas out of 4
Loud, action-heavy, stunningly choreographed, and lacking in any semblance of character or plot, Spectre is the unfortunate culmination of the James Bond character as played by Daniel Craig. Regardless, underneath the martinis, mindless sexism, and hyper masculine bravado lies an impressive piece of action cinema. Sam Mendes crafts together a film that is beautiful to look at, interesting to briefly discuss, but, ultimately, forgettable.
Allow me to be clear: I entered Spectre having loved Mendes’s last foray with Bond, in Skyfall. However, I entered the latest Bond film knowing quite well that this particular interpretation of the Bond character – in lesser hands – is capable of producing all of the emotional resonance of a pomegranate.
Skyfall may have been the best Bond film in a long time—and one of the finest offerings in the action cinema genre—but it arrived on the heels of Quantum of Solace, a film that served as the disappointing sequel to the stunning Casino Royale. My point is this: Daniel Craig is a fine actor and his Bond is the most brutal interpretation of Fleming’s character, but his track record has been nothing if not polarizing.
In regards to Spectre: Calling the film shallow does a disservice to shallow films, because it implies that Spectre has little to offer its audience. Indeed, this is far from the truth.
Mendes has a keen eye for choreography, and every sequence in his film deserves to be viewed in complete cinematic glory. As Bond jets around Mexico City, Rome, London, and Tangiers, Mendes and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema capture a world of stunning browns, greys, whites, and blues. Hoytema lent his talents to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, and the same knack for visual flair appears again in Mendes’s film.
The film’s first—and, sadly, last—Stupendous visual trick is a spectacular extended long-take sequence that begins with an overhead shot that slowly moves through a large Day of the Dead parade before eventually settling on two masked characters walking through a crowd. We follow the couple as they meander through an enormously crowded street, while Mendes skillfully showcases the scene’s finer details.
The sequence culminates in a moment of violence, and we are thrust into the inner workings of Spectre. According to his handlers, Bond is apparently irrelevant. The film spends the majority of its runtime attempting to tackle this issue, insisting that special agents are necessary for a nation’s security, without ever truly answering the question of why. Make no mistake, Bond’s alternative is an international intelligence gathering network that gathers as much information in as many ways as possible. The audience, therefore, is never asked to sympathize.
However, Bond’s disobedience, his refusal to cooperate with his fellow agents, and his general smarminess suggest that perhaps the film’s team of four screenwriters had accidentally gotten into an argument about the need for Bond movies, only to reconcile once they realized how much they like the idea of James Bond pouting in the sunset while breaking a henchman’s neck.
To say that Spectre coasts from set piece to set piece is not technically accurate, as Mendes takes great care in ensuring that incredibly tense moments of action are offset by nuanced character drama. Thankfully, the result is not a cobbled together mess. Instead, the result is a film that slows down to a snail’s pace every few moments to ensure that supposedly meaningful exposition is delivered. First we see Bond smarm, then we see him murder, and then we see him wane at the loss of the women in his life. The cycle repeats itself until the final credits roll, when the audience is told that James Bond will return.
I began this review by claiming that Spectre is the culmination of Daniel Craig’s role as Bond. Over the course of four films, we’ve seen Craig embody the most violent, brutal, savage, and emotionless 007 in Bond history. However, audiences have been given a clear emotional framework for the kind of lifestyle one must sustain in order to truly earn a license to kill. Craig has, perhaps more than any actor, revealed Bond’s motivations, while simultaneously making the spy an almost endearing character. In short, we’ve seen James grow into Bond. Spectre suggests that, now that Bond is finally Bond, perhaps it’s best if we just let him retire. A pomegranate by any other name, of course, remains a pomegranate.