SPECTRE
Dir: Sam Mendes
2015
**
SPECTRE is the twenty-fourth Eon James Bond film, Daniel Craig's fourth outing as 007 and the second film in the franchise to be directed by Sam Mendes. Fans of the series will know of SPECTRE's role in the films but they might not know about the rights issues the fictional organisation and associated characters have had over the years. Kevin McClory and Ian Flemming got into a legal battle after the completion of the Thunderball script. Flemming made the film without crediting McClory who it later transpired had actually written the screenplay. Flemming got the rights to the novel but McClory got the rights to the characters and sued when they were used subsequently. SPECTRE and the character of Ernst Stavro Blofeld are owned by McClory, who remade Thunderball in the largely panned but financially successful Never Say Never Again. So, when Sam Mendes and Eon announced that the next Bond film would be SPECTRE, speculation was rife. Did this mean that Ernst Stavro Blofeld was coming back? Kevin McClory did indeed make a deal with Eon in 2013 and both SPECTRE and Blofeld were fair game once more but as M says at one point in the film 'A licence to kill is also a licence not to kill'.

SPECTRE's opening scene is awesome. It may well be my favorite of the franchise so far, with a beautifully steady build up and explosive finale. It is this opening scene that really captures the essence of Bond; his sophistication, confidence and blind luck that make him so charming, endearing and untouchable. I was thrilled. Then came the staple surreal title sequence (which I didn't like), that song and it never quite hit the mark from then on in. The first third of the film is pretty impressive still, there are some beautiful shots of Bond traveling across a lake, an exciting interrogation and rather chilling scene whereby Bond is spotted in a secret meeting but these shouldn't really have been the highlights. The last two-thirds of the film are poor attempts at breaking the mold, something the Daniel Craig films keep trying to achieve but fail at with every attempt. The writers and Mendes have tried hard to emulate the character, the classic Sean Connery films and Flemming's novels while trying something new but in doing so they have actually made cheap imitations and made irreversible decisions. In SPECTRE Bond goes rouge, again. He has almost the same car chase as he did in A View to a Kill, he has the same fight on a train as he did in The Spy Who Loved Me, gets into trouble in a snowy mountain-top resort as seen in On Her Majesty's Secret Service and he is tortured in a scene that is straight out of Goldfinger. The evil henchman is essentially a night-club bouncer and his gimmick is that he has long thumb nails. The bigger roles given to Miss Moneypenny and Q made me wonder if Eon are slightly worried about the Mission Impossible films success and have stupidly tried to make it more of a team film. There are many things Bond hasn't yet done, I'm not sure they really need to cover so much old ground, again. You could almost say that SPECTRE is a remake but I think re-hash is a more apt description although that said, the script has more in common with Bond spoof Austin Powers in Goldmember and I wish is was joking. This is straight out of the Star Trek Into Darkness school of how not to re-boot a franchise. Christoph Waltz's character is a huge disappointment. His big evil plan, that ties in all of the Craig Bond films, is as far from terrifying as you can get. In fact it's been done in real life, which is far more scary. When his motivation for being so evil was revealed I wanted to throw the little old lady I was sitting next to in the cinema at the screen. I dare say she wanted to throw me too, the poor dear. The film has too many writers, I'm sure John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth thought they were being post-modern by rather knowingly blowing up the secret layer before the last sequence and showing up the main villain somewhat but what they have essentially done is make Bond redundant and made a mockery of the ethos and what the fans cherish. After said lair explodes Bond quips "It's not over yet" making the audience believe they'd finally come up with a more original ending but they don't, they just blow up another lair. They and Mendes have essentially said 'Try and top that!' which isn't really in the spirit of the franchise, for all intents and purposes they've killed the series. They may think they've steered Bond down a new road and taken a new direction but they haven't at all, they've essentially destroyed everything and merely suggested a change without doing anything creative in order for the character to continue. Sam Mendes does dazzle with his glorious visuals but it's all far too theatrical with very little content. Most shockingly of all, they all forgot to make it fun. At one point 007 is told by a bad guy that 'You're a kite dancing in a hurricane Mr. Bond' but the truth is there is no hurricane, just a lot of hot air.