Bore... James Bore. (Spoilers ahoy)

Rating: 1/10 (2 November 2015)

So Spectre has landed. Another step in the incremental return to the Connery Bonds: M is male again, Spectre is back and Christopher Walz ends up as close to Donald Pleasance in You Only Live Twice as possible. In fact, the entire film is a giant love letter to the entire series. Hardly a single sequence is truly original: they are all variations (usually bigger and flashier, though not always) on old material.
So is the movie a rousing success? No. It's something of a disaster, really.
First and foremost: Daniel Craig is a terrible Bond. A great actor, but a terrible Bond. Boring, unsexy, self-satisfied, empty, thuggish - and worst of all, he doesn't even seem to be having any fun. Neither as actor or as the character. In the olden days, Bond was the ultimate male wish fulfillment figure. Nowadays, Bond is a tortured, boring individual with a dreary love life and lots of unresolved emotional issues. There are a few quips, but they aren't funny in the first place and Craig's low key delivery robs them of whatever life they might have possessed in the first place.
Secondly, the fanatical determination to make all these new Bond adventures 'personal' is detrimental to the plotting. In CR, Bond had to get his hands on a bad guy's money in order to get him into trouble with his bosses. In QoS, Bond has to prevent Bolivian water resources from being privatized. In SF, Bond has to get a list of agents back - a list which is promptly forgotten about after an hour (barely). And here, Bond has to go looking for... well, basically not very much. There's a nefarious plot about surveillance, but that's M's problem, really. But it all doesn't really matter anyway, because we discover that Blofeld has started Spectre just to ruin James Bond's life (some goal), all because Bond was his foster brother and 'stole' the love of his dad away from him. Not only is this the most ridiculous motivation in the history of the movies, but Bond doesn't even share one personal memory of Oberhausen/Blofeld, making this entire plot twist moot.
Thirdly, the pacing is off. There are a number of action scenes, but there is far too much padding between them. The love affairs (with a far from glamorous Monica Bellucci in one of the dumbest seduction/exposition scenes ever) and with waif-like and dull Lea Seydoux are totally unconvincing. Chemistry between Craig and his female co-stars is non-existent. The lack of a tangible threat means that there is almost no forward impetus to the narrative. Sure, Bond is busy all the time, but the viewer, especially one not versed in Craig canon, often doesn't know why the events on screen are supposed to be important.
Fourth, the movie resembles MI5:Rogue Nation to an incredible degree. Even down to having the penultimate chapter of the adventure take place in Morocco, and the finale in London! And just like in MI:5, the entire final act is a gigantic anti-climax. Possibly the least exciting Bond finale ever. Where Bond isn't even necessary to solve the plot...
We can only hope that this is truly the end of the Craig era, and that the Broccoli/Wilson clan will soon lose control over this property. High time that the 007-niverse was handled by a new creative team.