A movie I was looking forward to more than I enjoyed once I finally saw it…
What Works: All the elements for a great Bond movie are there: beautiful women (Monica Bellucci made headlines for being the oldest “Bond Girl” and Stephanie Sigman is the first Mexican one), an actor that’s born to play a Bond villain (Christoph Waltz seemed to be practicing his Bond villain during supposed-to-be “normal” roles in Carnage and Big Eyes), and an interesting plot that could not be more timely as it plays on real fears of the surveillance state using terrorism to justify its every overreaction. I mean, this film even ties together all the other Daniel Craig Bond films into a cohesive whole.
So why can’t I shake the nagging feeling that something is missing?…
What Doesn’t: Maybe because all of those elements are great, but they’re mishandled almost across the board. For starters, Monica Bellucci is barely in the film, and Stephanie Sigman is literally only in half a scene–the opening helicopter duel that is the sole truly “wow”-inducing action set piece–and the film’s real “Bond Girl” is Lea Seydoux’s mundane crime daughter.
Then there’s the bizarre under-acting Christoph Waltz employs for the first time ever. This is a guy who could over-act a reading of the phone book, and you would think a Bond villain would be his opportunity to finally go nuts, but he plays the part as if it’s a struggle to keep from falling asleep.
And Daniel Craig himself looks a little tired. This is the first time he’s failed to be interesting in the role of Bond, and his portrayal seems to align with all the statements he’s recently made about how tired he is of playing Bond. Well, I hate to say it, but this is the first time that fatigue has manifested on-screen.
What I Would Have Done Differently: It’s admirable to tie all of Craig’s Bond films together and I did want to like “Spectre,” but it has a hard time standing on its own as a satisfying movie experience. It’s probably the least satisfying of the Craig-Bond films, but that’s still better than most of the Bond movies. The plot alone is interesting enough that it would have been interesting to see what they could have done with it by itself, and not been working so hard to tie all of the previous films together.