SPECTRE

Mexico City. Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead). MI6 field agent James Bond (Daniel Craig) hunts down a criminal, Marco Sciarra (Alessandro Cremona), to assassinate him on what seems at first to be an official mission. This leads him to a larger crime syndicate led by a mysterious recluse with, unsurprisingly, a penchant for granting his enemies too much insight into his psychological motivations.

Back at HQ, bureaucracy abounds as MI6 stands to be merged with MI5 under one entity—telegraphically named CNS—and one chief, Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott, whose casting alone says too much).  SPECTRE unfolds into a personal vendetta which, like many other reveals in this 24th go-around, is a tired Bond trope. Hollywood has never learned that the more writers you add, the worse the result.

Veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade are joined again by John Logan (SKYFALL) and the addition of Jez Butterworth (EDGE OF TOMORROW). Once we get past our own need for a spy movie fix, what precisely is it about SPECTRE that fails the audience?

One of the delights of SKYFALL’s departure into the Scottish highlands was the opportunity given to develop M’s relationship with Bond. We learn much about the two characters with little bearing on the plot. Here, director Mendes and his army of writers have failed that cardinal filmmaking rule: Show, don’t tell. With the exception of a chase sequence that puts Q (Ben Whishaw) in the field, a first since LICENCE TO KILL, nearly all of the dialogue and situations serve to advance the plot. If SKYFALL had hints of Mamet, SPECTRE has heaping servings of Bay with slightly more interesting location shoots.

Sequence after sequence seems rehashed, however. From the opening rooftop chase which echoes that of the intro in SKYFALL, to the ski resort gondola, to the train brawl with the evil villain’s muscle, Hinx (Dave Bautista, whose monosyllabic grunts sadly replace awesomely deadpan delivery that made GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY watchable).

This begs the question: In a film franchise that takes us to exotic locales to meet nefarious characters, why introduce the law student/supermodel/actor/goddess Monica Bellucci as Sciarra’s wife for two minutes of G-rated physicality immediately following the gangster’s funeral in Rome? Was Mendes completely unaware that the woman speaks four languages, one of which is quite obviously Italian? The filmmakers made headlines for age-appropriate casting (Bellucci is 51; Craig, 47), then tossed her aside immediately for Lea Seydoux, twenty one years her junior.

As Madeline Swann, Seydoux is likewise there to advance the plot. Nothing is established ahead to make us care about the character, whose safety is entrusted to Bond by her father, a cog in the SPECTRE wheel. She too is a cog, getting us closer to the truth about this criminal organization. It’s a truth so appallingly obvious that I’m not even going to discourage you from reading the spoilers ahead. You’ve already figured it out.

Yes, Christoph Waltz plays the criminal mastermind, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. What a stretch for him. Maybe he’s wondered his entire career what he looked like in a Nehru jacket with a Caesar hair cut, or maybe they gave him a fat paycheck… maybe both? Whether he can creep us out is not the question. It’s fair to say that Waltz can unsettle audiences with the most menacing cheshire grin since Conrad Veidt in Paul Leni’s THE MAN WHO LAUGHS. However, it’s a bad sign when even he is upstaged by a torture chair that appears to have been designed by Jony Ive.

Composer Thomas Newman phones in an uninspiring score, perhaps set off balance by the absence of cinematographer Roger Deakins. Hoyte van Hoytema (INTERSTELLAR, SHE) is an able Director of Photography, but stands in Deakins’ shadow with barely a third of his repertoire. Gone are the syncretisms of glowing lanterns, towering skyscrapers bathed in cerulean light, punctuated by a half-synthesized/half-orchestrated score.

Fans, including myself, will settle for another go-around just fine. But it won’t amount to a memorable outing. Opportunity is even lost in the barely sincere attempt to resurrect the SPECTRE umbrella in a Marvel-like strategy to potentially open up the franchise to an entire pantheon of baddies. While there are smatterings of the smug Bond, it’s mostly nods and attempts to look tough. Hinx’s predecessors, Jaws (Richard Kiel) and Oddjob (Harold Sakata) were walking, politically incorrect sight gags. SPECTRE is itself a clunky backronym–SPecial ExeCutive for Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion–a throwback to a goofy era of kickier spy flicks that reveled in absurdity. Not so much as one wry quip from 007 about it.

The problem isn’t, as Daniel Craig surmised in a recent interview, that AUSTIN POWERS ruined the gags for Bond. American studios are simply too paranoid, and studio executives too full of themselves, to emasculate the male lead and throw him headlong into something like the OSS 117 remake that opens with Jean Dujardin (appropriately equal parts Peter Sellers, David Niven, Sean Connery’s eyebrows and Yves Montand) at a nightclub in Gstaad (a sarcastic running commentary on the exotic locales of the 60’s spy oeuvre) obliviously shooting everything in sight.

How does Craig keep a straight face when Waltz, the man who brilliantly leveraged his creepiness in a parody of Eduard Khil (the “trololo” guy), stands right before him saying, “I thought you came here to die.” More importantly, how can Waltz resist the urge to poke fun at Donald Pleasance and Mike Myers at the same time?