As someone who has never particularly cared for the James Bond series, the Daniel Craig era has been a breath of fresh air. It’s too bad, then, that his latest adventure feels more like an homage to Bond's past than a continuation of his hot streak.
It’s all there, from the multiple Bond Girls to the semi-indestructible meathead underboss to the head villain who literally ties Bond to a chair and tortures him for no good reason. Even the name and evil organization at the heart of the film, Spectre, is a throwback.
We open in Mexico, where 007 (Craig) is enjoying Day of the Dead. The street is an ocean of skeletons parted by a parade; a masked man is seducing a senorita while following another man dressed in Tom Wolfe white. The masked man is Bond, his target a bigwig in a terrorist organization. The bigwig does not carry out his plot. Bond sees to that.
It’s a bravura sequence, one that’s probably worth the price of admission alone: Director Sam Mendes takes us on a seamless, cut-free tour of the street before getting to the action. He guides us through the scene with almost nothing in the way of dialogue, simply drawing our eyes where they need to be with his gliding camera. If the rest of the film were as good as this, it would be in the running for film of the year.
Alas, that is not the case. Bond is soon globe- (and bed-) hopping around the world, trying to unravel a conspiracy that ties together the action of Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, and Skyfall. When he returns to Britain, Bond is confronted by his boss, M (Ralph Fiennes), about the havoc he has wreaked. Unbeknownst to Bond, the new head of British intelligence is angling to shut down the Double O program. He hopes to replace the Cold War man of action with a more modern data-intensive program—backed up by drone strikes, of course.
Some have described the latest Bond film as pro-Snowden—the traitor who fled the nation in possession of American national security secrets to the notoriously civil-liberties-friendly Russia. And there’s some truth to that insofar as the main villain, played by Christoph Waltz, is interested in building a network that can capture all data everywhere in order to, I dunno, be evil, I guess. There’s no real sense of what Waltz’s character would do with all this data; its collection is simply seen as an evil unto itself.
But it’s an amusing "critique" of the international security state if it’s intended as one, given that the brilliant alternative as presented in Spectre is, well, a guy running around shooting everyone who gets in his way, ignoring borders and laws and just about everything else as he does so. "A license to kill is also a license not to kill," M informs C (Andrew Scott), contrasting James Bond and the Double O program’s famous subtlety with the bluntness of a drone strike. It’s a classic false choice: Why settle for data collection and drone strikes or murderous secret agents who don’t care a whit about international law when you can have both?
Spectre is long, clocking in at about two-and-a-half hours. Its pacing is not as good as Skyfall’s or Casino Royale’s; this was the first time in a long while that I’ve checked my watch. I recommend seeing it in IMAX, as the film is not being released in 3D and the opening sequence deserves to be seen on as large a screen as possible. Craig remains my favorite Bond. I just wish he’d had a bit more to work with.