Spectre review

by Luke Jones

*BEWARE OF SPOILERS*

With Craig’s Bond it’s all in the eyes. From the moment he walked towards camera in the opening credits for Casino Royale, the black and white pre-007 Bond coming into focus around those startling baby blues, eyes have been a recurrent motif for the three directors to have worked with Craig. Spectre’s opening titles see a close-up eye before tentacles move in to obstruct the iris. It’s a fitting image for a film that is at times beautiful, is very James Bond, but too often gets lost in the many tentacles of story that the writers try to weave together.

Where Skyfall hit the pause button for the overarching ‘Quantum’ storyline of Craig-Bonds 1 and 2, Spectre is full of more call-backs than a mythology episode of the X Files. References to Vesper Lynd, Quantum henchmen and old friends pop up regularly. The plot kicks into gear as a direct result of the third act of Skyfall. We’ve been down the direct sequel route before, with 2008’s Quantum of Solace, but this is the first Bond film where newcomers may genuinely struggle to understand the relevance of many plot developments.

Worse still, too often it feels like the film is trading on past glories to add weight to its own underwritten elements. Thus archvillian Oberhauser is revealed to be intimately connected with Bond’s previous foes, but without doing much in the way of actual menacing in this film we’re expected to care because this is the guy that made Vesper break Bond’s heart. Silva worked so well in Skyfall because by the end he’d really put Bond through the ringer. Heck, even QoS’ Greene had Gemma Arteron covered in oil (steady). The worst that Oberhauser manages is giving Bond some nasty injections; by that logic Spectre may as well have focused on Bond getting his annual flu jab.

There’s also an unpleasant move to incorporate some of the worst elements of the Moore era. Bond girls Léa Seydoux and Monica Bellucci are reduced to sexy-time punchlines, in one case questionable and the other borderline rapey. There are not one but two points where a bystander goggles at something crazy that Bond has done (Mendes already used his quota with the tube couple in Skyfall). I was waiting throughout for a snowboarding scene set to the Beach Boys.

Yet Spectre is rarely boring. The pre-credits sequence is a hoot, Ben Whishaw’s Q continues to have great chemistry with Craig, while a mid-film train fight has a physicality that hasn’t been seen from a Craig Bond before. Which makes it all the more frustrating that such a talented group of film-makers, on the back of arguably the best Bond in the series, have turned in a film that was desperately in need of a few more drafts before going before cameras. I haven’t even mentioned the awkward backstory retconned for Bond and Oberhauser, which is so undercooked that it ought never to have made it past the first edit.

The hope was there that this would be the one to break the curse of the 4^th Bond film. Sadly Spectre joins Thunderball, Moonraker and Die Another Day in the history of lacklustre Bondage.