Spectre (2015)

While Skyfall was for a lot of us the fulfilled promise of the Bond update kickstarted by Casino Royale, a kind of “And we’re back” (as Mark Kermode has, as always, so eloquently put it) Spectre is the second half of that sentence, a sort of “...and we’re here to stay.” To be fair Spectre isn’t the triumph that Skyfall was – recall Skyfall made #2 on my definitive ranking of every Bond film ever, though it’s too soon to rank Spectre. But it’s a worthy successor, a fine if occasionally too personal 24th installment.

After receiving an order from the late M, James Bond (Daniel Craig) follows a trail of criminals to the den of a mysterious figure (Christoph Waltz), heretofore presumed to be dead, and his organization known as SPECTRE. An encounter with an old friend leads Bond to Dr. Madeline Swann, who will help Bond and Q (Ben Whishaw) take down SPECTRE, while the new M (Ralph Fiennes) and his aide Miss Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) work against the surveillance project of rising bureaucrat Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott).

I’m going to go so far as to label Skyfall transcendent – breathtakingly beautiful and tightly narrated, with all the action you’d want from a Bond film without the foolish frivolity toward which the franchise is occasionally prone. It’s so good that I daresay Spectre never could have lived up to it, in the way that Thunderball could never have been as good as Goldfinger. Taken on its own merits, though, Spectre is good enough.

Starting with the pre-credits sequence, a staple of any Bond flick, Spectre doesn’t disappoint. In a long-take opening (whose CGI trickery takes away none of the punch of seeing Bond really do his stuff), director Sam Mendes takes us into the heart of a Day of the Dead celebration, cuing up the thematic content of the film with a lovely bit of eye candy in the form of Bond’s effortless heroics. Like Skyfall’s opener, it moves through a number of sub-setpieces rather quickly, lacking only a snide one-liner to cap it all off.

The rest of the film’s action is top-notch: a car chase through Rome, a fistfight on a train, a ski chase in which neither participant is actually skiing, and then two variations on the escape-from-the-compound trope. All of these play very well within the narrative, striking a great balance between the Bourne-inflected realism of the Craig era and the gentle absurdity we’ve seen in older films, but they’re played to delight, not to strain credulity. Indeed, they serve as nice reminders of what film we’re watching; just when the film starts to take itself too seriously, we’re treated to a nice bit of levity, like Bond surviving the collapse of a building by landing on a sofa.

There’s the rumor – an evergreen, really – that Spectre is Craig’s last outing as Bond. Much as we’ve heard that one before, Spectre does feel in a lot of ways like the end of an era. It pays off a lot of narrative threads from the last three films, including the most delightful amplification of the roles of M, Q, and Moneypenny. Largely absent from the early Craig films, this supporting cast gets a great opportunity to shine in their own subplot, from which Bond is largely absent but which manages to be as compelling as his conflict with Waltz’s villain. If it’s Craig’s swan song, I hope Fiennes, Whishaw, and Harris stick around – the MI6 gang are as interesting as they’ve ever been.

On Waltz: he’s every bit the scenery-nibbler we’d want out of a classic Bond villain, a fine successor to Javier Bardem’s Raoul Silva. There’s an intriguing way that Waltz unites both the campy classicism of the Connery era with a very contemporary sensibility vis-à-vis surveillance and anonymous terrorism. And if this is the last Craig film, it’s clear that the filmmakers are eager to tie it all up in a way that I don’t actually think was necessary. It doesn’t detract from the film, though it is a little distracting how overt this move is. There’s a beat where those who hadn’t recently seen Casino Royale might be a little dizzied by the reappearance of that film’s Mr. White, and there’s an unconvincing move to tie Skyfall into a larger narrative (when it works just as well, if not better, as a Goldfinger-esque standalone).

There’s what I would say is my biggest critique of Spectre (aside from a disappointing show by the film’s soundtrack, with a forgettable title track by Sam Smith and a score by Thomas Newman, who phones it in a little too much, borrowing heavily from Skyfall both in motifs and, in a few moments, in what sound like actual edits from earlier musical cues): the film tries a little too hard, a little too openly, to unite the previous films together. Maybe it’s just the tenor of the earlier films, where there were loose and insignificant attempts to hold the films together; where the Connery era had SPECTRE as a shadowy bogeyman whom, we assumed, Bond was always already fighting, Spectre attempts to make that unifying thread the stuff of revelation, of narrative twists, but there are ways to do that which don’t show the filmmakers’ hand so baldly. Additionally, we’ve been glad to see Daniel Craig as a more personal James Bond, in that his Bond takes things more personally – mourns the dead more willingly, pursues cases more intensely, and even hooks up with Moneypenny (finally!). He’s been a more personal Bond, but Spectre tries to move that more-personal quality out of the realm of subtext and into the arena of the actual plot, with Waltz’s Franz Oberhauser linked to Bond’s past. While this isn’t a bad move for the franchise (and I suspect the filmmakers have their eye on ways to continue this narrative thread), it comes off as largely unnecessary; the subtext was already there, and excavating it to the surface doesn’t actually do much more for the film.

Here’s the thing, though – it doesn’t take away from Spectre. The move toward the much more personal Bond isn’t hamfisted or sloppy; it’s just not essential for this viewer, but what we have is still quite entertaining. There are a number of frankly breathtaking action beats, fascinating developments in Craig’s Bond, who continues to be the most compelling Bond (even if Sean Connery is still a fan favorite), and moments of pure exuberance that remind you why Bond has endured for more than fifty years and twenty-five films (counting, as we ought, Never Say Never Again). It’s no Skyfall, but then what is?

Spectre is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of action and violence, some disturbing images, sensuality and language.” There is the usual quantity of Bond heroics, including car chases, fist fights, and explosions. One character is facially disfigured in an unpleasant way, and Bond makes out with two separate women (the rest is left to implication). One or two S-words (no, Mr. Connery, not swords) are invoked.