Spectre
Director: Sam
Mendes
Writers: John
Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Jez Butterworth
Starring: Daniel
Craig, Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, Ralph Fiennes
Rating: Three stars
out of five
Available in
theaters now
[SPOILERS for people who have not watched the trailer and/or have never seen old Bond movies.]
Few things are more
promising than sitting down to a movie and immediately being
presented with a knockout sequence of not only extreme technical
difficulty but also one that understands the activities and
proclivities of the characters it depicts. That is how the latest
James Bond installment, Spectre, begins. Director Sam Mendes,
returning after 2012's Skyfall, picks up with the splashy
pizzazz of his first go-round with this franchise and perhaps even
tops it in a long take winding through a Mexican Day of the Dead
celebration. Several moments of mastery follow each other in quick,
unbroken succession. Striking, colorful costume design indicates
exactly who we should be watching in this crowded, vaguely malevolent
party. Bond's prey is decked out in an impeccably cut white suit
while 007 himself is disguised in a black skeleton getup that makes
him appear shrunken and wiry rather than the broad-shouldered hulk he
has proven to be in the Daniel Craig era.
Bond, in his
frightening skeleton mask, skulks around holding the hand of a local
woman, never letting himself lose sight of the man in white. The
camera retreats as they walk, then pans and follows them into a
hotel, up the elevator, into a sleazy room with pealed paint where it
appears some standard Bond seduction will take place. After a quick
pause on the beautiful woman on the bed, her facial expression turns
to confusion as the camera turns back to Bond removing the last
vestiges of his disguise as he calmly wanders out the window and
across the roofs of the Mexico City skyline, unspooling a
high-powered rifle and preparing it with the cold precision to match
the grim but most likely necessary task that awaits him at the end of
his preparation. As the camera continues its perpetual backtrack and
Bond readies for the assassination of the man in white, Mendes says
much about process and the act of work, the determination to do a job
efficiently. It's not a Hitchcockian obsession with voyeurism,
although watching people without their knowledge remains part of what
Mendes does with the camera in this moment. It's a glitzy,
high-octane heightening of actual spycraft, the kind more
“realistically” depicted in the films based on John le Carré's
novels, like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. And it melds perfectly
with the chase sequence and fist fight aboard a barrel-rolling
helicopter that immediately follows it. It is Bond done to
perfection.
The problem is,
from the point that opening Mexico City sequence ends and Sam Smith's
wholly uninspiring broken heart anthem, “Writing's on the Wall,”
kicks in – it's such a bland, mid-tempo choice for a 007 adventure
flick – Spectre goes off the rails. The deft, almost
wordless love letter to Bond that was the opening sequence segues
into a movie littered with confused motivations and a half-hearted
love story.
It never falls into
full-on badness, because Mendes and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema
use the beauty of each exotic locale – Spectre goes to
places like Tangier, Austria, the African desert, and more – as
thematic backdrops for each turn the story takes. The buildings are
huddled closely together in Tangier, which reflect the frazzled
state of mind Bond and love interest Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa
Seydoux) find themselves in. The snowy expanses of Austria are
desolate and open, showcasing the loneliness of Bond in his solo
pursuit of Christoph Waltz's primary villain, whose desert-based
compound is so expansive and overwhelming so as to seem like it is
impossible to get out of the way of its surveillance capabilities.
But the underlying
elements of the relationship between Bond and Waltz's Franz
Oberhauser/Ernst Stavro Blofeld do not work. This is the fault of the
script more than any other element. It forces a childhood connection
between the two and implies that the horrors of the preceding three
Daniel Craig-starring Bond films were all orchestrated as a piece of
jealousy. It is perhaps implied that the three torturous adventures
before Spectre were a “side project” for Blofeld on his
path to becoming world dominating megalomaniac. However, the lack of
clarity suggests that this trillion-dollar worldwide conspiracy to
control humanity is all because of some petty jealousy between two
kids who couldn't get along 25 years ago. Even in a universe that has
an indestructible, catchphrase-spouting suaveness machine at its
center, this setup strains for believability.
Ditto for the love
story between Bond and Swann. The age difference between Craig and
Seydoux – 17 years – isn't quite as extreme a logical leap as the
reasons for their falling for each other in the movie. In Casino
Royale, Craig's first foray as 007, he had Eva Green's Vesper
Lynd as an opposite-but-equal, a rival in the cool-and-collected
department. Her death has reverberated through Craig's tenure as a
tragedy he is unable to get past, largely because there is a simple,
organic connection between them in that movie. This time out, Bond
promises Swann's father he will protect her as a piece of transaction
to get information – not the strongest start to a romance. It could
have worked, though, if the romance had been less jarringly
integrated. They go through half their time together as mere
traveling companions, with little chemistry beyond some annoyance at
the situation that binds them. A thrilling fight sequence (not
between them) on a train later and suddenly they're soul mates. It's
a snap of the fingers love story, with no gathering, forward momentum
where they gradually enjoy learning more about each other. It's quick
and mostly senseless but treated like Bond is getting his happily
ever after.
For those deep
structural faults, Spectre maintains the exquisite action
filmmaking that has defined the Craig era, while lightly dropping in
some of the silly, jokey stuff that has largely been eschewed in the
same four-film span. There is a car chase through the winding streets
and staircases of Rome, plus the aforementioned train fight between
Bond and the Guardians of the Galaxy's Dave Bautista, who
stands a good chance of becoming the new recurring henchman that Jaws
was in the Roger Moore days. The confrontation at Blofeld's desert
fortress is the natural place for a climax in the movie, but it is
used half an hour before the actual climax, which is probably the
only action-based disappointment in the picture.
And for all the
messiness that follows it, that opening sequence will always be
there. That thing is wonderful and cannot be tarnished.
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