License to Bore

Rating: 1/10 (14 February 2016)

Watching the newly rebooted "Millennial Bond" film series is like watching a plane in a descending spiral. Just when you think the next Bond installment can't get any worse, it does, and just keeps plunging into a bottomless abyss of pure insipidness.
After the awful un-Bond predecessor "Skyfall" I swore off seeing any more agent 007 films. But the title "SPECTRE" enticed me to give its creators one more chance.
After all, in the previous Bond films SPECTRE a powerful global terror and crime juggernaut. Its syndicate has the audacity of stealing and ransoming atomic bombs, trying to nuke Fort Knox, hijacking manned spacecraft, carrying out cunning assassinations and blackmail. The ruthless leader, Ernst Blofeld, is the Steve Jobs of global mayhem.
But not in this film.
Actor Christoph Waltz is fatally miscast as Blofeld. Rather that exuding the sheer evil of a terrorist mastermind CEO, he comes off as quirky fruitcake. His maniacal smirk and stare makes you think he just got released from a mental health institution. He might do better as "The Joker" in Batman. Blofeld's extent of terror is to inexplicably play at the keyboard of some computerized torture device. Blofeld couldn't find an iPhone torture app? Bond dispatches this psycho-clown with little effort.
Frankly, the Blofeld character has never been properly cast with previous actors either. The character is most unsettling when you can't see his face, just his cherished Persian lap-cat. This was sobering in "Thunderball" and "From Russia With Love."
All you see of SPECTRE as an organization is a boring boardroom meeting in a set reminiscent of Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," and a nonsensical secret desert base that looks like it belongs in a sci-fi version of Area 51. The base doesn't last long. Bond blows it sky-high with little more than a hand grenade disguised as a watch. I though this kind of silliness was only reserved for an Austin Powers movie.
We see so little of SPECTRE that filmmakers don't even bother to spell out Ian Fleming's acronym – Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion. Too polysyllabic for today's audiences?
Once again, Craig – our blue-collar Bond - struggles to be charming and romantic with his leading lady, actress Léa Seydoux . There is a gratuitous, brief one-night-stand on a train -- and that's about it. Craig's sex appeal is in need of Viagra.
The concept of SPECTRE has been so bastardize in this Bond-age bore poor Ian Fleming must be turning in his grave.