Unfortunately, a Bond for yesterday not today, among other concerns

Rating: 6/10 (9 November 2015)

I'll cut right to Pros and Cons after seeing this at the first showing Thursday night (there are enough well-written reviews already for any kind of formal thing).
Pros:
1) Gorgeous backdrops for each stage of the film live up to the tradition of exotic locales in Bond films. I love the Day of the Dead setting in the opening, the connotation of the famous assassin wearing a skull mask. This is not to mention Rome, the Alps, and the Sahara.
2) Cinematography at times. E.g. in the opening scene, the extended take as DC walks out the hotel window and over the rooftops in Mexico City (I'm not an expert so I'd love to see how that shot was filmed).
3) Daniel Craig (enough said?), although I wasn't convinced that he enjoyed the role this time, in spite of the silliness they tried this time.
4) I really liked Sam Smith's "Writing's on the Wall" credits song, and the creepy octopus motif suggestive of Spectre's hand in everything.
Cons:
1) This has been said over and over, but I will point it out again: Daniel Craig's Bond brings realism and grit to the character, and that is a good thing! From the moment Bond falls from a crumbling building at minute 4 or 5, and lands happily on a couch, I had a hard time taking this film seriously. And while it seems we are not meant to take Spectre seriously, the film takes itself way too seriously in the torture scene. It probably could have worked, but for the silliness of the rest of the film (and not dark comedy), the torture scene was no longer consistent. Spectre unfortunately makes a step backward in the evolution of Bond.
2) The fight scenes at times often felt like the dull wrestling of the old films, not the tight, quick and clean choreography of comparable genre films today. This is not to criticize older films (they are valuable for what they are in their time). For what an addition Bautista is to the film, there definitely seemed to be under-utilized potential there.
3) The all-encompassing Spectre organization is apparently behind every villain and death in the Craig era, but how? It felt like the more times we saw their deceased faces or names on screen (which is a lot!) the more likely we are to believe they are actually all connected. Having one villain--Mr. White--show up again helped, but I still just couldn't buy the connection we were supposed to just assume was true because Blofeld says it's true.
4) Although I like the classic Bond, the way he is with women in the old films is, today, plain creepy. I did not get this feeling from Daniel Craig's Bond in Casino, Quantum, or Skyfall, but classic creepiness is back in Spectre. Bond presses himself into an uninterested widow the day after he kills her husband.
There is plenty more to say, but others have said much of it already.