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Bond heads into danger in thematic mess Spectre |
Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: Daniel Craig (James Bond), Christoph Waltz (Franz
Oberhauser/Ernst Stavro Blofeld), Léa Seydoux (Dr Madeleine Swann), Ralph
Fiennes (M), Ben Whishaw (Q), Naomie Harris (Eve Moneypenny), Dave Bautista (Mr
Hinx), Andrew Scott (Max Denbigh), Monica Bellucci (Lucia Sciarra), Rory
Kinnear (Bill Tanner), Jesper Christensen (Mr White)
SPOILERS: Okay, surely most people have seen this by now - but just in case I'm going to spoil the big twist of Spectre. It is, by the way, a really, really, really stupid, annoying terrible twist. So you won't mind. But just in case you do... Spoilers.
In 2002, Austin
Powers: Goldmember had, amongst its ridiculous plotlines, a reveal that
Austin Powers and Dr Evil were, in fact, long lost brothers. It was the
crowning height of silliness in the franchise, the ultimate punchline to Mike
Myers’ James Bond spoof. Well the wheel comes full circle: in 2015, Spectre’s shock plot reveal was – James
Bond and Ernst Stavro Blofeld – wait for it – they were only – guess what! –
raised by the same man, so basically sorta brothers! Who would have thunk it?
The world’s greatest spy and world’s greatest villain both grew up together.
Yup, the Bond producers actually thought this was a good idea. Yup they were
completely wrong.
Spectre opens in
Mexico with Bond (Daniel Craig) preventing an attack on a football stadium –
although this attack basically involves trashing an entire city block. Benched
by M (Ralph Fiennes), he investigates the shadowy organisation known as
Spectre, which he discovers is run by Franz Oberhauser (Christop Waltz), a man Bond
seems to know a great deal about. Meanwhile M engages in Whitehall battles with
the intelligence director Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott) and his sinister “Nine Eyes”
programme, designed to control all surveillance in the developed world.
Spectre is a film that
really falls apart in its final third, as ridiculous revelation piles on top of
ludicrous contrivance. After Skyfall, we
all wanted Sam Mendes to come back to do another Bond film, but this makes
every single mistake that film avoided: it’s self-conscious, it’s silly in the
wrong way, it takes itself way too seriously, despite its best efforts it
doesn’t really do anything new, and it attempts to build a “Bond universe”
around a franchise that works because it keeps reinventing itself in stand-alone
films. It’s the Bond producers attempt to do a Marvel film – and it ain’t
pretty. Did we need to create some sort of tenuous link between the Craig-era Bond
movies? Did we need Blofeld and Bond to have a “very personal” connection? No
we massively did not.
Mendes shoots the action with a mock grandeur that seems to
be serving other things than the plot. Critics fawned over the long shot that
follows Bond through the Day of the Dead street festival, through a hotel, out
of a window, across a series of roofs and into the first action scene. But for
me, it’s a self-conscious, look-at-me piece of trickery. It’s an air of
pretention that runs through the whole film: it’s a film that wants you to
think it’s making Big Points around Bond’s psychology and background, but keeps
running aground because it goes about them in such a ham fisted way,
particularly when compared to Skyfall’s
subtlety and willingness to look at Bond’s vulnerability.
Most sequences in the film feels strangely flat and
lifeless. There is a surprisingly sterile car chase through the streets of Rome
between Bond and Hinx. The opening montage in Mexico just never really grips –
maybe because it’s not clear what’s going on, maybe because it feels so
self-consciously grandiose. The film’s tone is over the place – there are
lashings of Moore. Bond falls through a collapsing building only to land on a
sofa. During the car chase, Bond hits a button only to have some Frank Sinatra
start playing on the radio. Craig does at least go through the comedy with a
breezy lightness, though it sits oddly in a film that features a villain
shooting himself in the head, and a guy having his eyes gouged out.
The whole investigation into Spectre just isn’t interesting.
Because the film has been written with such a self-conscious eye on fandom, it
never gives us a reason within the film to care about it at all. Spectre don’t
seem to be doing anything, other than being a shady organisation making money.
We don’t get told why Bond is invested in it or Oberhauser until late in the
day. The film pins everything on a “beyond the grave” video from Judi Dench’s M
to give us a reason for chasing this plot. But nothing feels at stake. Bond
isn’t rushing to prevent anything, and we don’t get told about his personal
stake in it until almost the end – and even when we do, Bond doesn’t really
seem to give a toss about the reveal.
Ah yes. The reveal. A few years ago, Star Trek Into Darkness had a terrible, nonsensical reveal around
Benedict Cumberbatch’s character – turns out he was Khan. This was met with
derision because (a) it had no impact on the wider viewers who didn’t know who
Khan was, (b) it felt shoe-horned in as fan service, and (c) it had no impact
on the characters in the film who’d never met Khan before. So who cared? He
might as well have said “My real name is Fred”. This was the case with the
Blofeld reveal here. The name means little to non-Bond fans. And it means
naff-all to Bond. We’ve never heard it mentioned in the film before. It comes
out of nowhere. It means nothing – it’s dropped into the film to get a cheer at
comic con – so nakedly so, that it just annoyed people.
It doesn’t help that the whole “secret brothers” thing is a
really, really dumb idea. I mean so mega-dumb it was, as mentioned, the final
ridiculous flourish of Austin Powers.
How did they look at this and think “yes”? Again it feels like retreading Skyfall ground – this already had given
us interesting insights into Bond by having him return to his childhood home.
But what did we learn about Bond here? Sweet FA. Whatever iconic status Blofeld
had is also immediately undermined by making him a pathetic envious child.
Christoph Waltz’s bored performance doesn’t help either.
And as the film doesn’t spend any time establishing Blofeld
or Spectre doing terrible things, it has to make a serious of tenuous
connections to Craig’s other films to ludicrously suggest that everything that happened in those films
was Blofeld’s evil plan. This is so clearly bollocks, retroactive adaptation
that it just makes you snort. Skyfall’s
villain was very clearly established as a personally motivated lone-wolf – it
makes no sense that he was sent by Blofeld. The first two Craig films
established a secretive organisation, but it was framed very much as corporate
ruthless villainy – the idea that it was an organisation established to destroy
Bond is nonsense.
The reveal that Blofeld wants to destroy Bond personally
makes most of the film itself make no sense. If Blofeld wants Bond to come to
his base to exact revenge for childhood wrongs, why does his muscle-man Hinx
spend the film so aggressively trying to kill him (especially in the film’s
stand out action sequence, a no-holds-barred scrap on a train)? It makes
no-bloody-sense-at-all. It’s almost like they were making it up as they go.
Even Quantum of Solace held together
better plotwise than this (ironically QoS
goes almost completely unmentioned in Blofeld’s evil schemes – probably because
it’s a bad film). The final confrontation between Bond and Blofeld strains
credulity and patience – reaching for a personal rivalry that hasn’t been
established by anything other than fans’ vague memories of watching You Only Live Twice on a Sunday
afternoon years ago.
I’ve not mentioned the Bond girls either. The film tries to
make a “strong female character” in Léa Seydoux’s Madeline Swann, but she is a
plot device rather than a character, with no consistent personality, who is
solely there to be whatever the plot, and Bond, need the Token Pretty Woman to
be at that moment. When it needs her to be a gun-toting, self-reliant,
go-getter who sasses Bond, she is. When the plot needs her to be a damsel in
distress (which it does twice) she forgets all that firearms stuff and waits
for a man to save her. When the plot needs her to express total devotion for
Bond she does. When it needs her shortly afterwards to leave him, guess what,
she does that as well. She is a character who makes no consistent sense at all.
It doesn’t help that she looks way too young for Craig. The wonderful Monica
Belluci is given a thankless role of informant and brief sex partner for Bond –
she of course was far too close to Craig’s age to be the main Bond girl. Just
as he did with the shower sex scene in Skyfall,
Craig manages to make this seduction seem inappropriate and pervy – it’s not
his strength.
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Lea Seydoux. She is, by the way, 17 years younger than Daniel Craig. Just saying. |
The stupidly unclear, dully predictable “Nine Eyes” plot
doesn’t make things any better either. One of Skyfall’s neatest tricks was to cleverly mislead us about Ralph
Fiennes’ Gareth Mallory, setting him up as an antagonist to slowly reveal him
as an ally. This film attempts an inverted version of this trick with Andrew
Scott’s Max Denbigh. Problem is, Scott is at his most softly-spoken Moriarty
sinister – you are in no doubt he’s a wrong ‘un from the first frame. What
would have worked is making Denbigh Bond’s ally early. This would make further
sense for the overall plot (if Denbigh is working with Blofeld, why does he
want to block Bond getting to him…) and also make the reveal of his villainy at
least a surprise for some people in the audience. As it is the whole reveal is
no shock what-so-ever. The whole plot starts to feel like plates being spun in
the air, a way to give Fiennes, Kinnear and Harris something to do on the
margins of the film.
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I mean - he just LOOKS like a villain doesn't he? |
Okay Spectre is
well filmed. It’s got some good scenes. Ben Whishaw continues to be excellent
as Q – and gets loads to do here which is great. Craig actually does some of
the comedy with charm and skill – even if he hardly seems as engaged with the
material here as he did before, as if he was already becoming tired of the
whole enterprise. But it’s too long (over 2 and a half hours!), and straight
from its pretentious “The Dead Are Alive Again” opening, it’s straining for a
thematic depth and richness that it constantly misses. It makes nothing of its
family feud plotline and we learn very little about Bond as a character at all.
It mistakes stupid fan-service and pointless reveals for plot, and it builds
itself towards a reveal that it expects to get a cheer from the audience, but
has no real connection to the plot of the film we are watching, and is in no
way earned by the events of the film.
Spectre is, at
best, in the middle rank of Bond films – too self-important, incoherent and
(whisper it) a little dull in places to really work. It’s not a complete
failure – but it is a major disappointment. There is enough here to entertain
most of the time, but not enough to really engage the mind or the guts. For Sam
Mendes, lightening didn’t strike twice.
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