erik lundegaard

Saturday November 28, 2015

Movie Review: Spectre (2015)

WARNING: SPOILERS

Daniel Craig is still wearing a suit that’s too tight and an attitude that’s too tight. His James Bond still starts the movie disgraced and cut loose by MI6—despite all the times he’s saved the world. He still looks like he’s not having much fun.

Seriously, when was the last time James Bond had any fun? Before 9/11, I think. So I guess the terrorists won. Or the feminists.

To me, the quintessential Bond suffers through the fights to get to the girls. Craig’s Bond suffers through the girls to get to the fights. He seems to take no delight in women. Or in general.

James Bond Spectre Daniel CraigIn the last movie, “Skyfall,” we finally got the rebooted Q and Moneypenny, and this time we finally get the rebooted Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) and SPECTRE, and everything is all finally tied together. The villains in the previous three movies—Le Chiffre, Dominic Greene, Raoul Silva? All SPECTRE. Because SPECTRE is a dastardly, secret organization that is interested in...

Um, what is it interested in again? Besides world domination? And taunting James Bond?

Well, in this movie, it’s interested in Big Data. He who holds the most information wins. Sexy.

Ta da
Here’s my favorite aspect of the movie. SPECTRE is working behind the scenes to put online a global security network called Nine Eyes, which will be able to watch us everywhere, including going to the bathroom or something, but that’s not the point. The point is how SPECTRE gets governments to go along with this plan: It blows things up in those countries, terrorists are blamed, then those governments overreact and go along with the plan. Pushed, cultures abandon core values.

No lesson for us there, right?

My least-favorite part of the movie is related. Consolidating the world’s chaos under one secret global network is the kind of conspiratorial plot that leads, in our world, to talk of Freemasons and Illuminati. So be careful, Hollywood. The last thing we need is more paranoiacs.

“Spectre” opens in Mexico City on The Day of the Dead, as Bond abandons a beauty in a hotel room to track an assassin, Marco Sciarra (Alessandro Cremona), who was planning on blowing up some building or other. Instead, Sciarra’s hotel room is blown up, but both he and Bond survive for: 1) a nonchalant pursuit through celebratory crowds (apparently the explosion didn’t deter the party atmosphere); and 2) a battle aboard a helicopter that swerves precariously above those crowds. Sciarra winds up dead, Bond pulls the helicopter out of its nose-dive, but the Guardian still blares a headline reading OUTRAGE IN MEXICO. Outrage? For the explosion? Or because people kept partying after the explosion? Or because of the helicopter? I’m confused.

M (Ralph Fiennes) is outraged anyway, because it looks like Bond went rogue. Later, Bond reveals to Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) that he’d been sent after Sciarra by the previous M (Judi Dench), via a prerecorded message he received after her death. Why didn’t she just send him after Blofeld? Did she know about Sciarra but not Blofeld? Isn’t that like knowing one of the 9/11 hijackers but not Osama bin Laden?

Anyway, with the help of Moneypenny and Q (Ben Whishaw), Bond whizzes around the globe and fills in the blanks. In Rome, he schtups Sciarra’s widow (Monica Bellucci), infiltrates a secret SPECTRE meeting, witnesses the superstrong henchman, Mr. Hinx (Dave Bautista, quite good), doing his “Game of Thrones” thing to another assassin’s eyeballs, and is then pursued through Rome’s streets, steps and along its canals before escaping to a mountain cabin in Austria, where he confronts the now dying and contrite founder of Quantum, a subdivision of SPECTRE. Did you know that Mr. White (Jesper Christensen) was in the first two Bond reboots? I’d forgotten, sadly. A lot of the movie is like this. The filmmakers assume small details from previous films will be fascinating to us. They go “Ta da!” and I just sit there, blinking.

In the cabin, White asks Bond to look after his supersmart, superhot daughter, Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), which is like asking a tiger to look after a T-bone, then he kills himself. Bond finds/rescues/beds Swann and continues his exotic globetrotting until he’s face-to-face with Blofeld, née Franz Oberhauser, who was supposed to have been killed in an avalanche when he was like 16. He’s also Bond’s half brother or something? I guess he’s the son of the man who adopted Bond? Or taught him to ski? So there’s a vague Cain and Abel rivalry. Consider it another “ta da!” moment that falls flat.

World without end
The second part of the story takes place in London, where C (Andrew Scott) is consolidating power and putting online Nine Eyes, that global security network that will watch all of us go the bathroom. We know within half a second that C is no good—and most likely SPECTRE—because: 1) Bond doesn’t like him, and 2) he’s played by the actor who plays Moriarity on the BBC TV show “Sherlock.” Apparently Iwan Rheon was unavailable.

You know the rest. In London, M, Q and Moneypenny square off against C, while Bond is captured, brutally tortured, then runs through a series of improbably designed labyrinths to save the girl and get the bad guy.

It’s implied that Bond retires at the end of the movie. Sure. The world might not need Bond but Eon Productions does. So, as the saying goes, James Bond will return, and go through the same hoops and hurdles, world without end. No wonder he’s uptight. Sisyphus wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs, either.

Posted at 07:14 AM on Saturday November 28, 2015 in category Movie Reviews - 2015  
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