Better than Skyfall, sort of. Meh.

Rating: 3/10 (5 December 2015)

Superannuated super-agent noisily and expensively kills nasty rich people during exotic travelogue and finds love. The end.
Bond, having deconstructed himself, deconstructs the British Secret Service. Better stunts than usual, more humour, but Jeez is it EARNEST. By this I mean we're supposed to give a flying finagle about James Bond's sad childhood and his loss of a mother figure ('M', we get it). NOBODY DOES. NOBODY, not even Bond. Get on with the story!! Future writers and directors of Bond films, get one thing through your head: the audience KNOWS Bond is going to win. No amount of torture, low-exposure camera-work or CGI collapsing buildings is going to alter that outcome. Therefore to base your suspense on 'will Bond make it alive?' is a major error, because there is no suspense that way.
The only suspense available to the Bond filmmaker is, 'What crazy, improbable, unexpected scheme will the villain come up with next, and how will Bond foil it?' Therefore you have to have a crazy, improbable villain with crazy, improbable schemes, NOT torture-fetishist, ex-good-guy, seriously menacing men-about-town double-agents. These are cannon fodder, not adversaries. The current Bond villains are way too clever and nasty - if we feel no grudging respect or affection for at least their stylish megalomania - as we did for Goldfinger, Scaramanga, etc., then Bond is boring. Fear of the villain is wasted, because Bond always wins.
And even though the Mi6 seems to have entered the austerity age like the rest of us, essentially 'Spectre' is painfully dated, as Daniel Craig's portrayal is becoming - in future years the dour, vicious, and pouting Daniel Craig Bond will be seen as how NOT to do it. Come back Timothy Dalton.