November 4th in Miami, FL. So the marketing agency I work for has a client that had a advanced screening of Spectre for its customers. I was in Miami on some other work and offered to help out. It appears that they were desperate and the accepted my offer. After the sign-in I was able to stick around and see the film. This is Daniel Craig's fourth film as James Bond and there's been a lot of buzz about Craig not wanting to be James Bond anymore. I can understand that Craig may not want to get pigeon holed as he is a talented actor (his best non-Bond role to me is Layer Cake) but Craig doesn't become the international star that he is without Bond.
When the announcement came that this film was being released I was pretty stoked that 007's old nemesis was being revived. Spectre was last seen in 1971's lackluster Diamonds Are Forever and it's CEO, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, was killed off in 1981's For Your Eyes Only. With Sam Mendes returning to direct and a cast that includes Monica Bellucci and Christoph Waltz, I was going to see this film. I did miss the first few minutes of the film but I will probably view the film again in it's entirety at some point.
Now I don't want to go too much into the plot as it's very detailed. In all of the Craig bond films, there's been that hint of a larger criminal organization at work behind the scenes. In this picture, it all comes to fruition in the form of SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion). A shadowy organization that has far reaching tentacles.
Hence the logo.
Bond starts of in Mexico, then travels to Rome (where he attends a Spectre meeting with the ring he took from a dude he killed in Mexico), Austria and Morocco. Leaving a trail of damaged equipment and bodies in his wake. Bond comes across the elusive Mr. White (again) and finds out that he was poisoned and fears for his long lost daughter's (played by Léa Seydoux) life. Whom Bond naturally vows to protect.
I often wonder how much Bond would "care" about the women he comes across if they weren't attractive.
The two wind up at at overly elaborate complex which houses Spectre and eventually Bond finds himself being elaborately tortured by Blofeld (who gave some overly elaborate exposition for his origin) and eventually gets away and destroys the lair. Then we go back to London for the final showdown that deals with MI6 going to shutdown the 00 program in favor of a massive surveillance system (remember the cell phone surveillance that Batman used in The Dark Knight? Kind of like that) that's secretly run by Spectre. In the final showdown there's some monologuing by the Blofeld, Bond saving his girlfriend and yada, yada, yada.
There were some dumb things in this film and it seemed like a lot of scenes were driven solely by product placement (there were several unneeded wardrobe changes that shouted, "look who James is wearing now!"). There were also a few scenes that were stolen (Hollywood prefers to call it an homage). For instance, there's a big fight between Bond and Spectre's top assassin, Mr. Hinx...
and it's very reminiscent of the fight scene on a train between Sean Connery and Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love. The film didn't seem cohesive to me, they tried to tie all of Craig's Bond films together and it didn't really work for me. After Skyfall, Spectre was a bit disappointing. Skyfall was tough to top given but they had over 2 years to come up with something and they fell short. I got the feeling that Daniel Craig didn't want to be in the film, he just didn't seem to care (IMHO). The quality of the even numbered films of Craig's run has seen a drop-off (Casino Royale has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 95%, Quantum of Solace is at 65%, Skyfall is at 93% and this film is at 64%). Numbers don't lie. This is a decent film, nothing more but I had higher expectations.
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