Solid, but messy.

Rating: 6/10 (2 November 2015)

In 2012 Sam Mendes gave us Skyfall, which instantly penetrated the list of best films in the franchise for many fans; reaching such heights again was never going to be an easy task.
With Skyfall, Mendes was channeling Christopher Nolan, giving us perhaps something akin to what Nolan would have given us if he did come on to direct (as he was rumored to be doing, several times). With Spectre, Mendes avoids the trap of retracing those steps and we can see from the first few minutes that Spectre is something completely different, stylistically. That said, while the film does not channel Nolan in any way, it does at times feel to Skyfall, what The Dark Knight Rises was to The Dark Knight. Both Skyfall and The Dark Knight are incredibly tight movies; they are focus and well-paced. Spectre, however, like the final Batman movie, feels at times like it is not quite sure what it wants to do and it wants to do a bit too much. Spectre is the culmination of what was at a point said to be a two- movie arc and while the final script will probably have been changed significantly since then, it does feel like it is a bit squeezed. There is a bit too much plotting, making a lot of it disappear in the mix.
Making matters worse it doesn't always know exactly what it wants to do. At times the movie seems to continue the gritty James Bond from Casino Royale, but then in the next it feels like an old school whimsical James Bond. Skyfall did a great job of finding the middle ground between the two, but here it usually feels like it is either or.
The movies is definitely at its best when it captures the feel of old James Bond; there are some truly preposterous action sequences that would feel right at home in a Roger Moore Bond and they are a blast to watch.
If this is the final Bond for Craig it is a interesting one to go out on. Without getting into spoilers, I will say that the ending is very interesting for a Bond film; it plays on a classic bond trope, but turns it on its head and puts it into a grander narrative. As it stands now, it does not quite work, mostly because certain characters motivations to allow the ending to happen make no sense whatsoever and so it does feel incredibly forced. Bond has never been about realism, but as the franchise now seems to want to be taken a bit more seriously as a grander narrative, it must also learn to better handle things like character motivations.
The movie can be summed up in its open one-take; it is exciting, a bit messy, ambitious and a bit over-long.
6/10