Time to put Bond out to pasture

Rating: 3/10 (10 November 2015)

I should preface this by saying that I'm not a huge fan of the 007 franchise - my wife is actually the Bond fan of the family. She owns them all on DVD, can't pass one up when channel surfing and insists on going to see each new movie in the theater. So by osmosis, I've seen way more Bond flicks than anyone should be subjected to, and this latest one may have been the last straw.
I realize that this entry in the series was supposed to be a throwback to earlier films, and it quickly became apparent that they were trying to tie all the Daniel Craig plots together with this one, but stop me if you've seen this before: Open with a visually spectacular action sequence that puts Bond on the villain's trail. Cut to opening credits, which feature suggestively nude women writhing to a just god-awful theme song (the song was so bad this time that when the vocalist broke into falsetto I literally laughed out loud). Next M tells Bond that he's gone too far and takes him out of action. Bond goes to Q anyway and gets exactly the gadget he'll later need to save his life. Q is used to inject a bit of humor into an otherwise overly-dark movie.
Next 007 visits the widow of the guy he killed in the opening sequence, and after making it clear that she hates him, she immediately jumps into bed with him anyway. From there on out it's just scene after scene of Bond being in just the right place at just the right time to get the next clue he needs to push the plot forward, while also engaging in car chases, fights with seemingly unbeatable henchmen and an insane sequence of flying an airplane down the side of a mountain.
Eventually Bond hooks up with a young lady who can lead him to the villain's ridiculous lair. This time it turns out the bad guy has created an international crime syndicate and spent billions of dollars tracking Bond because...I'm not making this up...daddy loved James more than him.
The young lady, after making it clear that she can take care of herself and wants nothing to do with 007, turns out to not be able to take care of herself and suddenly falls in love with Bond. After yet another unnecessarily gruesome Daniel Craig torture scene, they manage to defeat the villain and destroy his lair...but the movie's not over yet.
Cut back to London. It turns out that the new C has been secretly working with the villain, a plot twist that anyone with half a brain probably saw coming an hour earlier. He conveniently falls to his death out a window. The villain is somehow still alive even though his entire lair complex blew up for no particular reason with him inside it. He has Bond's love interest trapped in a building that's going to blow up in 3 minutes. There's no way Bond can find her and escape in time...except that he does. And then shoots the villain's helicopter down with a handgun. The end.
The only thing that set this movie apart from Bond films made decades ago was a sub-plot about the government trying to replace 007 with a massive surveillance program, which would have been topical if the movie had been made five years ago.
I found myself looking at my watch a lot during this movie, wondering when it was going to be over and towards the end thinking "we've already had at least two natural end points, why is this movie still going?" Don't waste your money seeing this one in a theater...in fact, just don't see it at all. If we stop encouraging them, maybe they'll finally put this dead horse out to pasture.