Review of Spectre (2015) by Tim W — 24 Aug 2018

Daniel Craig is my favourite Bond by a mile. Forget Sean Connery. Craig is a better actor and his Bond is closer to Fleming's original than all other incarnations. The last three movies are the best. I even liked Quantum, despite it in no way resembling the original story. So what happened here, then? The first twenty minutes or so were the usual high octane mixture of glamourous location, technology and fisticuffs. Once that concluded, the film plummeted. Some decent individual scenes - the car chase through Rome and the fight on the train being two, although I thought Bautista's baddie was poor - but overall the story lurched along waiting to be put out of it's misery. A fabulous cast was wasted and I haven't seen women this thinly sketched in as love interests since the nadir days of Roger Moore, particularly the character of Dr Swann (why didn't they surprise us and have her as the bad guy instead of the dithering bimbo they wrote her as?)., and the bad guys were just too easy to beat. Andrew Scott, so obviously flagged up as umdercover villain from the get go, is an actor who does insouciant psychopath brilliantly. But here his insouciance looked more like boredom and disdain. Ralph Fiennes was hopeless (surely a first) and Ben Whishaw's Q was as underwritten as the females including, sadly Moneypemny, who deserves a better slice of the script every time. For the first time.

Since Craig has stepped into the tuxedo, the franchise looked tired. They keep talking about Idris Elba taking over. It can't come soon enough. Then a woman. Jane Bond. Any doubters can check out Judi Dench as M. M for misogyny, as it happens.