A miasma

Rating: 4/10 (26 October 2015)

The prologue in Mexico works very well, and Bond looks exactly the part in his fiesta costume. From there on in I struggled, the bit of the Bond movie that is usually the most reliable ingredient, is the credits song, with Sam Smith's Writing on the Wall, well, to use my poison pen, it certainly is, just as in the ghostly foretelling of Belshazzar's death in the original Biblical writing on the wall, and the movie dies a long death after that (two and a half hours is indulgent). There is a painting of Belshazzar's Feast in the National Gallery in London by Rembrandt, and the dark and gold colours in it are the same sort of colours you will see in this soporific dreamy movie.
Sam Mendes shoots a car chase that is utterly boring, used only to fill in a bit of plot where Bond phones people up and requests information. The villain chasing him seems rather voyeuristic and so the obligatory barging manoeuvre does not come as he pulls alongside, just a comic and bemused exchange of smiles, where Craig uses practically the only facial expression he has.
The romantic element rings completely false with no chemistry between Seydoux and Craig whatsoever, she is an angel with a broken wing in an updated Piz Gloria. She is one of the most promising actresses working in the cinema today, the bit where she writhes on a bed and moans about "tueurs et menteurs" (killers and liars) seems like the only real thing that happens, but why is it happening in a Bond movie?
Thematically, the movie boils down to some patronising lowest common denominator stuff about family angst. A reveal comes that links all the Craig Bond movies that came before, but could I really care what Vesper Lynd was all about by this point, could I even be bothered to remember what on earth Quantum was? And really the arguments that M has about democracy and the sanctity of the double oh program are so lamentable that you wonder if Ralph Fiennes is having a midlife crisis, I think the scriptwriters actually think that this stuff is cogently part of the debate about individual privacy vs protecting against terrorism.
One of the challenges in life is to not dwell on the past too much, and equally to not spend all your time worrying about the future. The magic happens when you live in the now. Connery's Bond lives in the moment. Craig's Bond is now all about his childhood, and worrying about the geopolitics of the future, it has no vigour, it is fitting that the movie starts on the Day of the Dead.
I have yet to understand what Sam Mendes is doing directing these movies, it makes as much sense as it would have made asking Picasso to redesign the Macdonalds logo. The scenes shot in London towards the end are gallingly bad and seem to be poor copies of stock ideas from the Nolan playbook.