*Nearly* as good as Skyfall, certainly a worthy successor

Rating: 9/10 (11 November 2015)

**OCCASIONAL POTENTIAL MINOR SPOILERS**
I sometimes read reviews of films and wonder if the reviewer saw the same film i did, or whether there's some alternate universe out there which occasionally touches here in IMDb reviews.
Spectre has provoked that thought. There are reviewers who hate it - that's fair enough, it's a subjective thing - but there are also reviewers who criticise things that I simply didn't see wrong.
Let me explain. One of the biggest criticisms is that Daniel Craig is obviously fed up and disinterested. I think that's nonsense - he's playing a character who is fed up and disenfranchised from his department, and he plays it very well. It's been said that Christopher Waltz's character is a bit flat. Maybe - he's clearly a psychopath and therefore emotionally detached (as well as clearly unhinged), so why wouldn't he seem a little flat?
There are faults. In one of the pivotal scenes, the Spectre equivalent of Bond being on Goldfinger's laser cutting table, I found myself wondering what the point of this complicated arrangement actually was. And, indeed, why it would have been built in the first place - it seemed to be a particularly single-minded device we'd not seen anywhere else. There's also the question of why the young lady was seen suddenly walking faster and purposefully before ending up embroiled in the final climax.
But it's a Bond film, and sometimes things don't need to add up. The point is that it is an extremely good Bond film. The opening sequence was brilliant, and as a helicopter pilot I have to say it's nice to see helicopters getting a better (and far more realistic) role. The plot is excellent, established characters continue to grow while new ones are (generally) given space to develop and the whole thing carries on very nicely where Skyfall left off. The thing I like the most is that this series of Bond films has managed to be a very subtle reboot without actually being a reboot at all. That's a trick of which the Q branch would be proud...