What are they trying to do, kill the James Bond series all over again?

Rating: 3/10 (18 June 2016)

Spectre. Great name, great opening sequence (the moment they start speaking is when the film turns downhill) and great to see Monica Bellucci, beauty she is, still charming the audience.
...But what a bad movie. All of that million dollar budget, hundreds of hours spent in production, the rich character history to draw on...
Well. Actually. Maybe the Bond history is part of what's tripping this movie up.
Blofeld makes his return to this rebooted series of Bond films, and props for giving him his classic cat and scar. The cat only gets about five seconds of screen time, blink and you miss it/him. And they went out of their way to find the absolute ugliest cat they could find, but I digress. Blofeld's motivations are completely misplaced.
As it so happens, he and Bond are half brothers or step brothers (or something.) So Blofeld's evil machinations are spurned by fraternal jealousy, sibling rivalry, or something *utterly* contrived like that. In trying to tie the film together with the rest of the Bond mythos, the filmmakers trip themselves up.
Plus, Daniel Craig's Bond is meant to be an icy-eyed assassin. A killer. But, in a maddening, audience-infuriating moment towards the end of the film, Bond spares the life of Blofeld. In the Daniel Craig Bond films, he's killed dozens of people in cold blood. Why on Earth would he spare the life of an evil mastermind responsible for all of the carnage and death Bond has faced thus far? Why?
...Oh, yes. Sequels. Nothing more complex than that. Come on, guys. The good guy letting the bad guy get away was old hat even back in the 60's. Seeing it on screen these days is just insulting.
Maybe we should take a rest from Bond for a while. Daniel Craig certainly is, given his announcement that he's retiring the role. Craig's a good actor, but I never bought him as Bond, and none of them have ever replaced Sean Connery. Plus, Bond was born out of the Cold War. That's been over for awhile now.
The problem with Bond today is lack of relevance. Bond should be targeting terrorist groups like ISIS, not killing time in mountain resorts in Switzerland (or whatever ritzy white ski hill he spends a third of the movie in.) If Captain America "socked Adolf Hitler in the jaw," Bond today should be stopping terrorist bombing plots, or at the very least dealing with something topical.