Disappointingly bland.

Rating: 3/10 (27 December 2015)

I've seen the entirety of the James Bond franchise, and this one is well toward the bottom of the list. Even Moonraker with its cheesiness beats out some of Spectre's wishy washy swipes at humor and suspense.
The Spectre of old was a sinister organization with its tendrils everywhere, yet nowhere. Inscrutable, yet tangible. But today? It's dry corporate meetings, faceless roid-raged bad guys poking the eyeballs out of a rival's skull, all chaired unremarkably by James Bond's long lost brother.
Really??
So much of this film is a cardboard cutout, two-dimensional and readily blown overboard, much like the beta villain C loses his balance and falls backwards to his death in the new CNS headquarters, or how Blofeld gets blown back by Bond's terribly inelegantly deployed last-ditch watch bomb.
Keen listeners might recognize the re-use of a few tracks from Skyfall, perhaps this is the producers' acknowledgement that they didn't quite know where to begin, and couldn't carry it to the end effectively. Sure, Léa Seydoux makes for strong yet feminine eye candy, and Q flaunts a few bits of technical skill, but there is completely none of the synergy of previous iterations of Bond.
It's all become a stale patchwork where things have begun as a figurative lump of goo on the potter's wheel and were left spinning until finally idling to a stop as an amorphous pile of vaguely-describable stuff.