Good enough

Rating: 8/10 (9 November 2015)

"Spectre" - aka "All good things" episode of Bond *** Spoilers ***
The last installment of the Bond franchise with Daniel Craig starts off with a great, atmospheric and action pumped opening scene. It has some flaws unfortunately. Even though it's a big budget movie green screen was painfully noticeable during helicopter fight and if they want us to enjoy well-choreographed fight scenes they should finally forget about shaky cam. It can work in a very skillful hands but more often than not it doesn't allow viewer to see a single things. Fortunately Spectre has only a handful and not very annoying shaky cam scenes.
Rest of the film follows Casino Royale style of storytelling: three acts with long epilogue. Main story is not only predictable but so overused in recent years that it already became one of a typical TV / movies tropes. Some of the subplot choices can also appear as very lazy screen writing, but Bond movies never were too complicated. Even though story is not very challenging, the script following Casino Royale's example gives us another Bond's first: main villain not only lives but gets arrested in the end. To say Spectre is not very original would be an understatement of a century. Almost every scene or location is "inspired" or simply copied from previous Bond movies: fight on a train with Jaws like character, ejector seat during car chase, Blofeld defeated during helicopter scene, top of a mountain therapy clinic and so on. Getting inspiration from older films would be OK, but copying almost verbatim an opening scene from Casino Royale? That goes way beyond homage and one can wonder if it's an overkill of fan service or very, very lazy writing.
When I first heard Ralph Fiennes would be joining the franchise I was really happy since he's a tremendous actor and could add interesting depth to the story. Unfortunately he was casted as M which meant he wouldn't be doing much more than being a glorified set piece. I was glad however that Spectre showed him involved in the main plot more than I think any of the previous M's.
Fantastic music score is another aspect of this movie worth mentioning. It makes the action scenes very dynamic and is perfectly synchronized with the pacing of the whole story, which is very good almost throughout the movie with the exception with slightly dragged Spectre members conference scene.
Overall it's definitely above average, very enjoyable Bond franchise installment, with Christoph Waltz performance as I think the best Blofeld so far. However it leaves you with a feeling of huge wasted potential. If only creators took some chances with the story. Finally Bond met a mature woman which could lead to interesting developments but no, Monica Bellucci is on screen for about 5 minutes and then vanishes without a trace. Lost brother sub plot just screams lazy writing, not to mention extremely flammable main villain's base. I think we can call it another Bond's first, while before for example it required whole ninja army to take out "Super Secret Base", now all it takes is one well-placed shot to a small gas tank. So like with this single bullet it seems that creators thought it doesn't take much to score a hit with the movie going audience. It may be true as far as box office goes, but after Casino Royale we know that even nowadays, cash grabbing Hollywood can deliver a top quality Bond movie.
Let's hope another reboot starts as brilliant as this one had.
Score: 7/10