Spectre: 5/10

James Bond suffers from the Simpsons Syndrome: its biggest enemy is its collectively stellar past, and its refusal to attempt to shake things up often (ironically, the beginning of the end of the Simpsons was a poorly-done shakeup involving the death of Maude Flanders). Bond has been exploring beautiful places and wooing beautiful women for decades, so when the formula gets stale it really meanders deep into the production. However when the franchise flips the switch and alters things while still sticking to the roots, we get cinematic gold. Goldeneye, Casino Royale, and Skyfall are the best of Bond within the past 25 years, and it’s for those reasons. Spectre unfortunately fails to attempt anything groundbreaking.

Daniel Craig is still fantastic. The cinematography is still top-notch. The directing (when the budget and script allows) is quite good. Waltz and Bautista were great adversaries (but with very little material). But underneath that, we have a Bond movie that struggles to live up to recent adventures. We have a Bond villain that doesn’t quite match up to sinister folks of the past. We have a series of locales that had been explored before. And lastly, the producers should have known better then to not bring back Adele after her Skyfall song became the best Bond theme since the 70s. Sam Smith had no chance.

What hurts even more is that the beginning was phenomenal, from the opening shot to the opening action sequence that follows. And just like Skyfall, it was so good that the rest of the movie struggled to truly catch up. What instead follows is a more realistic and grounded approach to the expected and familiar Bond formula; and to be honest it used to be effective but the competition of your exotic action movies in European territory has increased significantly---Jason Bourne, Mission: Impossible, and even the revived Fast and the Furious series. Making the movie a rough 150 minutes doesn’t help at all either; it even felt like the budget ran out towards the end.

The grounded formula was a shake-up to the Bond clichés, but by the end of all this you’ll be clamoring to bring these clichés back. You want the entourage of gorgeous vehicles back (as opposed to several helicopter scenes), you want the outlandish villain back (Give me more 1960s Spectre please), and you want the clever gadgets back. As a matter of fact, I want the cool and calm spy back. In Spectre, they cringingly kept referring to him as an assassin—never a spy. It’s a slight dialogue mishap but it speaks layers as to what we are currently seeing from MGM’s final moneymaker. Remove Bond from the equation and you have a decent summer assassin flick. But as a Bond movie that has seen so many precious films and delightful moments---the past harms the quality.

This is the weakest Bond since Die Another Day, another Bond movie that was ruined because it became too formulaic and frayed far from what we saw in the first act. The movie isn’t a dismal failure, nor is it a total sequel disaster to the likes of Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Yep, went there). The Bond recipe is all here, but it’s been diluted by too much filler and not enough flavor. Trying to connect the recent Bond movies together also didn’t help its chances---James Bond wasn’t meant for continuity because they can never add up no matter how hard you try. Spectre went through four writers, and the result was still messy.

Don’t expect peak Connery/Craig Bond, expect more along the lines of late 70s Roger Moore Bond---when it was obvious that change was needed. Perhaps they’ve run out of ideas with Daniel Craig and Sam Mendes. Perhaps more time is needed between Bond movies (the three great Bond flicks I mentioned had many years between installments). It might be time for that shake-up again. I wonder if Tarantino is still interested…