A tale of two films.

Rating: 7/10 (11 November 2015)

When I walked out of my first viewing of Casino Royale, I declared to a person I had gone with the very simple truth of the matter. That is how Bond should have been from the get-go. No fantasy "shag-me-baby" Austin ****facing, no romancing of the trade of being Her Majesty's Secret Killer. Just the brutal reality as conveyed through making Bond watch his girlfriend die and endure one of the most terrifying tortures a Human male can undergo. For the first time, Bond was as grounded in reality as his premise needed him to be. Other Bonds, namely Lazenby and Dalton, went towards it, but Casino Royale was the first Bond film to dive in with both hands out. The problem is that after one rushed, truly insipid sequel that introduced shaky-cam to the Bond universe, and was derided as it deserved, the producers panicked. Skyfall had most of the things that made Casino Royale great. A truly memorable villain who challenged Bond in truly important ways, a sense of consequence, and the knowledge that the hole in Bond's soul grows that little bit bigger every time we see him.
Unfortunately, it also gave us what I will call "resurrections" of everything that I came to despise about Bond. The new Q looked like he really ought to be terrified of Bond, the new M, at least in Skyfall, looked like the sort of person Bond would break over his knee on the way to the main villain, and people in the audience could see me wincing every time the new Moneypenny spoke. Which brings us to Spectre. I call it a tale of two films because once you watch past a certain point, it becomes evident that two scripts were meshed together in order to make this story, and the fit is not a good one. The first half of the film, accounting for a hundred minutes or so, is exactly what I had been hoping for since Casino Royale and mostly got in Skyfall. A slow boiler in which Bond is pushed to his psychological limits and shows us through his eyes that even when you do it for King and Country, killing people can have consequences that last the rest of your life. But there is a certain point in the film, after Bond gets off a train in a desert, where I encourage everyone to stop watching. Go out the door and imagine your own ending.
Because when that point in the film arrives, complete with a clunky, ineffective attempt to recreate the awesome torture sequence that had every male in the audience weeping sympathetic tears, it all comes apart in a big hurry. It is still entertaining, do not get me wrong, but it is to Casino Royale as RoboCop 3 (or RoboCop in name only as it should have been titled) is to RoboCop. The Casino Royale sequence, as I said, made every individual with those bits in the audience grind their teeth in sympathy with Bond. The attempt to recall this sequence in Spectre, which brings to my mind the Get Smart joke "I murdered my dentist", is limp-wristed and ineffective. It may as well have had Roger Moore in it. And it gets worse from there. From the equally tension-free escape onwards, you might as well paint an S on Bond's chest and be done with it. Or call him James Rambond. Take your pick. Rambond. James Rambond. Yes, Casino Royale had him surviving things that have you desperately holding onto your disbelief, trying to stop it from breaking its leash. But Spectre subjects you to around 30-50 minutes of them.
To be fair, Moneypenny gets better things to do this time than make the audience ask her to shut the hell up. But she also gets some lines about Bond just getting started that make an intelligent viewer want to rip their seat out of the floor and throw it at her enormous mouth. And Rafe-M shows us he is able to be more than just Bond-nagger. But in the end, the second component of this uneasy blend demonstrates to us that true to the form they have been in for all but one of the prior 23 films, the Bond producers are cowards and will only try new things when their proverbials are to the wall. The Rambond half of the film is only comparable to Pierce Brosnan Bond at its best, and that is so far below the best of what Daniel Craig has offered thus far, there is just no comparison. The less we say about our main villain, the better.
Daniel Craig apparently is a co-producer in this affair. And he has but one film left in his contract. So if I could tell him what I wish he would do in the next film, it is this. Make the rest of the Bond production team go back to what made Casino Royale, most of Skyfall, and the first chunk of Spectre so great. Make Bond an ordinary man who has to endure the absolute limits of what men can be pushed to. Make him suffer the consequences of his professional choices, and make the audience feel it with him. Because the more consequence-free Bond is (as demonstrated in Other Half Of Spectre), the less he works as entertainment. Spectre could have ascended to be the Fury Road of this franchise. Instead, it is just another above-average.