Lackluster story, characters, action: a poor excuse for a Bond movie.

Rating: 3/10 (21 October 2016)

There have obviously been some negative reviews of this, and there are good reasons. The story is I'm not sure what, just Bond going through his Bondian way full of uninspiring bad guys and trying to save fairly boring women. Using Monica Belluci was a great touch, but we didn't see enough of her gorgeous self, which is truly still gorgeous; they could have reversed the character roles between Monica and Léa Seydoux, who got the main female character role. Léa is a moderately attractive female with a curvy, busty figure that we never truly see much of, and despite her sultry femininity she is a fairly boring & uninspiring character - poor usage of a fairly sexy young woman, particularly in a Bond movie. Recall Ursula Andress in "Dr. No," in her bikini on the beach when Bond (Sean Connery) meets her; although not a powerful actress, she was something to desire and hold your interest. Léa Seydoux is never that, she's just kind of there, another female presence in the movie; she is certainly more sexy and enticing than the way they presented her. Which is pretty much the same thing you can say about the whole rest of the movie, not interesting or gripping enough anywhere, in its story or its action or its character relationships, or the bad guys' evilness, and the total lack of CHARM, that the classic Bond movies had while giving you an actual story to follow. Here, the action is mindless, there just to put some action in the movie, and not very believable action at that, and absolutely NO romance. The intimate scenes between Bond and girl are not very exciting or even interesting at all. It feels like the director said, in the midst of the "story": "okay, cut, now for the sexy scene, but, no sexiness at all." "Spectre" just fails to be interesting on every level. Thankful I didn't pay to see it in the theater; it would have been tough sitting through the whole interminable thing.