MOVIE REVIEW
movie review
spectre
T
he 'Skyfall' team of director Sam Mendes and star
Daniel Craig take James Bond for another spin,
with messy but enjoyable results, Well, this certainly feels like a full stop. Daniel Craig has been slippery
and circumspect when asked if ‘Spectre’ will be his final
outing as James Bond. From both the tone and content
of ‘Spectre’, we’d guess this could be his swansong: this
is a film that gathers all the great – and some of the notso-great – things about the three previous films in the
Craig-as-Bond cycle into one rousing, spectacular, scattershot and somewhat overextended victory lap. It works
– until it doesn’t. We find Bond in Mexico City – it’s the
Day of the Dead, the perfect excuse for rampaging
masked crowds, unexpected explosions and a swooping, supercharged helicopter sequence that’ll have you
choking on your popcorn. Then it's back to London for
some very bad news: MI6’s Double-0 program is under
threat thanks to the machinations of creepy surveillance
agent C (Andrew Scott), leaving old warhorses like M
(Ralph Fiennes), Q (Ben Whishaw) and Bond himself
facing the scrapheap. Which, of course, doesn’t stop our
James from speeding off to Rome, Austria and north Africa on the trail of the titular band of assassins, terrorists
and all-round global troublemakers run by the literally
shadowy Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz). So far,
so sleek and spellbinding: director Sam Mendes exercises complete control over his material, Craig’s bruised
bulldog charm is in full effect and the visuals by crack
cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema are rich and ravishing. But somewhere between the introduction of Léa
Seydoux’s snappy but underwritten Madeleine Swann
and some antics in the Sahara that unpleasantly (and,
we’d assume, unintentionally) recall the climax of ‘Quantum of Solace’, the wheels come rattling off this Aston
Martin. One major problem is a ridiculously unconvincing villain: the script attempts to shoehorn a spot of ‘Skyfall’-style backstory between Bond and his enemy, which
sadly leaves the character looking more laughable than
terrifying, despite Waltz’s best efforts. And this is reflective of ‘Spectre’ as a whole: in trying to do too much, the
focus becomes lost. As the second half unfolds, the absence of an emotional core becomes ever more glaring,
hopping from one action beat to the next without ever
asking us to care – or, at times, understand – what’s
going on. The result is an unbalanced but never less
than entertaining film, enthralling and deflating in roughly equal measure, and studded with moments of true,
old-school glory. If this is Craig’s farewell to the tux, he’s
going out with a whole string of very loud bangs.
31 | BOOM