Routine Bond, mostly cashing in on Skyfall

Rating: 5/10 (14 November 2015)

Bond #24, aka Spectre delivers the goods, the usual bravado without the inner gist. Action goes bam, innuendo goes swift and fast, romance - yes actually this time around - goes splash. The point is all of this is edited finely to maintain a good pace but it all feels disjointed in the end.
The pace makes it entertaining enough, but when the end credits roll to the sound of the good old 007 theme (by Monty Norman, but Bond lovers know that John Barry actually created 90% of it) you feel that, indeed, they went for the surefire and easy kill.
I guess they were so pleased with their Bond's Early Years backstory from Skyfall that they just based the whole of Spectre on it. Whereas all 23 of the previous Bond movies were 100% standalone stories, this one is pretty much a Skyfall sequel. Which is not a bad thing per se, but the result is clearly a formulaic Bond, devoid of surprises and, worst of all, of real suspense.
To cap it all if, of all actioneers, you can judge a Bond flick by its villain, Spectre is a very weak entry. Since Christopher Waltz is a very fine actor I guess Sam Mendes over-intellectualised and asked him to play the villain straight. I mean we are all used to have our villain served with a little ham on the side. Javier Bardem in Skyfall was too much on the clownesque side but this time they did the opposite and gave us a Blofeld that seems to aim for a spot in the Actor's Studio Hall of Fame. Contained, clinical but emotional all the same: this would describe a great achievement in more realistic movies yet it totally feels out of place/pace/tune here.
PS Frankly, having Bond just taking a lovely trip to eventually walk right into the villain's secret base, surely it's visually beautiful, but could we please have more suspense than this cold testosteroned piece of numbing bravado?