Prole Hole vs James Bond

Hmm. At least we can probably guarantee a killer opening credits sequence? 

I never watched True Detective, but after starting Maniac last night I have some optimism that this thing will at least look cool.

Skyfall (2012)



Leaving behind the wreckage of Quantum of Solace, we have the Big Anniversary Romp^tm of Skyfall. Will it be able to improve on its predecessor? How could it not be?

Pre-Existing Prejudices: Well, it’s the Big Anniversary Romp^tm. That gives it a certain weight of expectation. And of course, I know it’s Dame Judi’s last Bond, so I’m hopeful that the manner of her departure lives up to my memory of it, which is generally very good. To be honest, my general feelings are warm across the board, but that could just be the afterglow of the movie’s warm pretty reception and the sense that the series is finding its feet again. Hopefully that will be borne out…

The Actual Movie:
This movie we start… out of focus! Craig wanders into some 1940’s letterbox lighting, before finding a an agent who’s been shot. A hard drive has been stolen. Computer theft is so exciting! Bond tries to save the agent but M orders him to get on with the chase. And so the chase is on! Bond is picked up by Land Rover by a black woman – who could that turn out to be? – and then there’s some market-stall shenanigans. Bond’s on a motorbike now, which means a big chase across the roof of the Grand Bazaar (so we’re in Istanbul)… and then in it. Bond’s quarry jumps on a train (on top of a train), and Bond follows – JCB action ahoy – while our Land Rover driver follows by road. A bunch of VW Beetles get destroyed as Bond pursues – the train car is uncoupled, but Bond uses the JCB to grapple on and climb over. The train goes into a tunnel, so our Land Rover follower is forced to take another road. Roof-top fight between Bond and the quarry, meanwhile the Land Rover gets into position as the train emerges. She takes up position ready to shoot… pulls the trigger on M’s orders… she hits Bond. He falls. “Agent down”.

Time for some Adelle.

When we return, M sits in an inevitably-rain-pelted office writing Bond’s obituary. Then she meets a member of the government, Mallory – and is told that because of the lost list she’s being pushed aside into forced retirement. And is not happy about it. Someone tries to decrypt the stole hard drive, but tracking it means it’s coming from… M’s own office. There’s a cryptic message, “think on your sins”. As they are stopped, there’s a huge explosion at MI6… so we’re off to a beach. Try to hold back your shock, but Bond survived. He’s been hiding out, but news of the explosion on telly drags him back into action. M stands by coffins draped in the Union Jack before returning home – where Bond is waiting, having been “enjoying death”. He needs to pass tests to be declared fit for duty, then M slings him out. Into some underground tunnels – MI6 has been relocated underground and they discuss the mission while Bond does his physical fitness tests, they don’t go well and he can’t shoot straight either. Bit of self-mutilation – he cuts out some shrapnel – then asks for the bits to be analysed. Bit of flirting with the woman that shot him – come on, we know who it is – then he’s told he passed the tests along with a few jabs about Bond’s age that make little sense. Bond’s sent to Shanghai after the fragments are analysed and a lead is found, but first we get to meet the new Q! They flirt about the same amount as he did with the Land Rover driver, and Q gives Bond a radio and a fingerprint activated gun, before it’s off to Shanghai as promised.

Lots of loving money shots, then Bond finds his mark and follows him to a hotel. Some precarious lift dangling leads to arguably the best cinematography of any fight scene in the Bond series – stunning. The assassin is taken out but not before he takes his shot. Bond can’t get the information of who took the list, but he makes eye contact with someone in the opposite building and finds a poker chip. The first five names are released (on YouTube, which is a quirky terrorist choice) while, once again, the lady driving the Land Rover turns up to deliver some messages and give Bond a shave. Look, are we really meant to not know who this is yet? Fiiiiine…. Casino time, she’s there too, but Bond takes the chip to be cashed in. Bond collects a case’s worth of cash, and makes contact with a mysterious lady, Sévérine. They exchange a few cryptic sentences (time for, “Bond, James Bond and this movie’s martini line) but it’s a generally very good scene – she’ll take Bond to her employer. A fight follows, also excellent and involving a komodo dragon, and Bond meets her at her boat afterwards. There’s a somewhat uncomfortable sex scene. And after that M is to be dragged in front of an enquiry. Back on the boat, they arrive at a deserted island (Bond discreetly triggers his radio), that “he took”. Time for the Big Entrance, to discover who “he” is – amazing, and the whole scene is riveting. Javier Barden’s for-once-intentional camp is blisteringly effective. Outside, Sévérine has a shot of scotch placed on her head. Bond shoots – and misses. Silva simply shoots her. Bond makes his break, captures him, and in swoop the cavalry.

Back in London again and M confronts Silva as he sits in a hexagonal glass chamber and he finally confronts M while giving us a bit of an exposition dump about how his cyanide capsule misfired and burned his insides. Nasty. As M heads for her enquiry Q digs into his computer, plugging it into the network and finding a map of London – while there’s a security breach. Q’s fault. Silva’s on the run and Bond is in pursuit. After a bit of threat with a train Bond is in pursuit again and we’re into Temple tube station. Bond jumps on the Tube – literally – following Silva now disguised as a policeman. Bond realises he’s going for M and asks her to be evacuated. Bond finally catches up with him but Silva responds with… a tube train. While Bond avoids that Silva makes his getaway to the enquiry. M literally defends the Bond series’ reason for existence on camera, which is different, then Silva turns up and Mallory takes a bullet to save her. Bond catches up and joins the firefight. This is all fantastically well done. Foiled, Silva makes his escape while Bond makes off with M. Ditching a Jag, we get… the Aston! Along with the Bond theme. It’s all rather wonderful. Q lays a false trail only Silva can follow and they head to Scotland!

And so we arrive at Skyfall, a lovely old country mansion. And we get to meet Kinkaid, the old groundskeeper. It’s lovely the way he refers to M as “Emma”. Time to booby trap the house – grown up Home Alone. And so the battle begins. Look I’m not describing it all but it’s bloody terrific. The first round are taken out- M is injured (she hides it for no real reason), then as dusk falls in comes Silva by chopper. M and Kinkaid are sent to the chapel via a priest hole while Bond stays back for The Big Confrontation. Bond rigs the place to blow, which it does, taking on the helicopter, which promptly crashes into the house. Sylva (somehow) survives and spies Kinkaid and M making off over the moor towards a church. It’s a nice touch that Silva just wants M – he needs Bond dead but it’s not his purpose. To make up time he runs across a frozen loch, where he’s cornered. A plunge beneath is inevitable. Silva reaches the church to confront M – The Big Scene. One bullet to free them both, but before the trigger can be pulled Bond gets him in the back with a knife. Dench gets her big death scene and dies in Bond’s arms (amazing work from Dench and Craig), as Bond finally founds something to shed a tear over.

A beat – then London. Bond gazes off into the middle distance on a roof top while our Land Rover driver turns up with a box. Minor interplay – she’s taking a desk job. Back inside, and… oh fuck me it’s Moneypenny. What a surprise. Who didn’t see that coming? Mallory, it seems has become the new M. Also not exactly a shock. But it’s all done so terribly well.

Lovely.

In Conclusion:
Skyfall is not the best Bond movie, but it might well be the best archetypal Bond movie. That is to say, rather than being a textual analysis like Goldeneye or a perfectly constructed thriller like From Russia With Love, Skyfall revels in the fact that it’s a Bond movie and it can use all the tricks in the Bond playbook to deliver a stonkingly entertaining movie. That’s wholly appropriate for the Big Anniversary Romp – this was never going to be a movie that calls for innovation, but rather would always be the one that took the opportunity to celebrate what it is that Bond can do. Skyfall embraces the entirety of that very successfully, but it would be a mistake to think that all its capable of doing is replication – there are some quiet innovations going on under the surface, and it’s with them that I want to start.

I’ve broadly avoided using the expression “Bond girl” during the course of these reviews, partly out of personal antipathy towards it and partly because it’s almost always used as a pejorative – a way to slight the female characters and keep them in their place. We’ve seen plenty of examples of this being subverted of course, but none of them have quite subverted the “Bond girl” archetype as effectively as Skyfall. Because far from the usual pneumatic ladies of yore, Skyfall’s Bond girl is… septuagenarian star of stage and screen Dame Judi Dench. Oh, there’s a bit of diversion with Sévérine, but she’s in the movie for about ten minutes before being unceremoniously written out – make no mistake, Dame Judi’s our Bond girl this time out and the movie is so much the better for it. The idea that you could even have a “Bond girl” of Dench’s skill and ability, never mind one that actively works within the movie… well, that’s quite remarkable. But it’s one of those things the movie simply slips in with sleight of hand – here’s the person you think will be the main female protagonist… oh, actually we’re going to do something quite different. The structure of the story works the same way, suggesting one thing, then quietly going away and doing something quite different. After we get all the establishing parts of the movie out of the way – up to Shanghai, more or less – the film looks like it’s following fairly standard Bond plotting. There’s a bog-standard McGuffin of the hard drive set up before the title sequence, the Big Villain Reveal, and Bond off pursuing clues until, we assume, the McGuffin is eventually tracked down and the bad guy stopped. But that’s not what the movie does at all. Most Bond movies expand outward from that kind of set-up – the more Bond discovers the bigger the threat becomes, occasionally even until the entire world is threatened. Skyfall goes in the opposite direction – once the big reveals that are necessary to get the plot going are over the focus of the movie narrows as it goes on rather than widening out, everything coming down until the very personal and brutal war of wills between M and Silva is all that matters. There’s no global conspiracy here, no organisation trying to control everything (tellingly, in a movie that takes pains to reference just about everything Quantum doesn’t even get name-checked), just one person’s revenge mission – the collateral damage Silva causes is, at least for him, entirely beside the point and a means to an end. This closing of focus allows Skyfall to feel like it’s still finding new things to do with the Bond formula, and even while this approach isn’t quite unique to this film (License To Kill attempts the same thing) it’s by far and away the most successful iteration of it within the Bond franchise.

And that’s true of all the parts of the movie that get pulled together here. There have been plenty of fisticuffs in Bond movies, but there’s never been one more striking, more technically proficient and more adeptly delivered than the one in the Shanghai high-rise. Yet even that’s a bit of a feint – though the fight is excellent, in many ways it’s the lead-up to it that’s the superior part of the sequence, as the ghostly, ethereal jellyfish float slowly away in the background while the tension ratchets up. The whole sequence is astounding – the best in the whole movie, I would argue – and so far beyond anything the Bond series has tried before that it actively expands the limits of what the franchise can do while still remaining true to the roots of the series. There’s none of the faux-exoticism of You Only Live Twice and its ilk here – this is a movie that’s capable of using its setting in new and interesting ways. Even the casino scene is lightly subverted, with Bond needing a final rescue from Moneypenny, and the inevitable femme fatale ends up being simply fatal. And as for that villain introduction – well, I mean. Lots of Bond movies give their villains a star entrance, usually doing something nasty just in case we were in any doubt they were the bad guy, but none of them quite get the entrance Javier Bardem is gifted with here. It’s an absolute masterclass of restraint but also of understanding, the character physically coming into focus just as his speech about how to deal with a rat infestation brings the character into focus, the two concluding at the same time as he finally stands next to Bond. It’s another breath-taking sequence from Mendez – very different from the light-show of the Shanghai fight but equally as powerful for its discipline and composure. It’s that striking of a balance between when to hold back and when to bring the big guns that marks this out as one of the most remarkably directed of all Bond movies. Even the big sequences at the end of the film set in Scotland – which could have veered into corny action-movie territory – manage the same degree of restraint. There may be big explosions and a crashing helicopter, but the cinematography and pacing of these sequences given a whole new feel to the standard end-of-movie defeat-the-bad-guy conclusion. Much of this section of the movie looks positively textured, and the umber, smoke-streaked sky looks practically Dutch Old Masters in its composure. It’s not every Bond movie one can draw that kind of comparison with.

But skilful direction, useful though it in a series of movies like Bond, is only going to take us so far. Without a decent script to underpin it, the whole thing risks coming off as all fur coat and no knickers. So does the script hold up its end of the bargain? Well, if you want to find fault with Skyfall then this is probably your best crack, because in truth while the script is good, it’s not quite flawless either. Ok sure, there’s no such thing as a perfect script but there’s just one too many flaws to quite land this at the top of the pile in terms of Bond scripts. Specifically, the McGuffin of the hard drive and the threat it poses simply vanishes after a point, and that’s terribly undermining. Before we find out about Silva’s revenge mission on M, the whole point of the movie – up to and including Bond getting shot and declared dead – has been a hard drive with the name of intelligence operatives that will be leaked. And indeed five names are leaked and we see a news report confirming at least three of them die as a result. Then after that… nothing. It just vanishes as a thread. The film needs to be more explicit about putting this thread aside – if the agents dying are supposed to force M to feel guilty about her past actions we need to hear Silva (or even Bond) explain that – a cryptic message about M’s sins isn’t good enough. And though I stand by the statement that this movie does Bond archetypes better than any previous Bond movie, the full-throated embrace of those archetypes does lead to a few forehead-slapping moments, not least of which is Silva’s attempt at Death By Tube Train. Since this Bond movie is embracing all Bond movies you can put this down to Late-Roger-Moore-vintage, whereby something happens because it might looks exiting rather than because it comes even close to making sense. At that point the film has enough narrative momentum to get away with it, but it’s still patently ridiculous (and contributes nothing, since Bond basically escapes by ducking, which lacks a certain something) and feels like an attempt to just throw in a bit of random peril for no reason – which is exactly what it is. It’s not the only flaw but it’s a very visible one. You could argue – fairly – that there’s one too many scenes which consist of exposition. And since Craig took over the role the series has prided itself in cross-film continuity, so it’s a shame there’s no hint of Silva nor a mention of him in any movie prior to this one (though obviously that’s not Skyfall’s fault). And the whole holding back of the of reveal of Moneypenny is just stupid – there’s no reason for it, it’s not remotely surprising when we find out who she is, and even if it were surprising to you, that surprise only works once. It’s nice that Moneypenny actually gets a bit of characterisation, and though she does shoot Bond, she’s obviously capable prior to that incident and later is seem to be competent again (she grabs a gun and definitely saves lives during the gunfight at M’s hearing). But the reveal is still clunky. So yes, there’s a few flaws here and there, though they’re never too overwhelming.

The other thing that doesn’t work here – and we’ll dive into this more in the final review of the series next time out – is the timeline. This is a perennial problem for the Craig movies and even if the final Craig outing manages to be beyond brilliant there’s no way left to square this circle. The first two movies, directly linked together, are the laying down of the Bond legend, everything from the vodka-martini’s to the Aston, from M fretting over promoting too quickly to his heartbreak and hardening into the agent we know. This is the movie that’s meant to split the difference – after Bond gets shot he vanishes for an unspecified but presumably significant length of time, after which we’re told he’s washed up, has alcohol and substance abuse issues, and is no longer physically fit enough to do his job. Nice try, but no. This fails for two reasons. Firstly, Craig still looks like one of the physically fittest men in cinema when he takes his shirt off, which rather undermines the whole “washed up” angle (and a bit of stubble for the first third of the movie isn’t going to convince us otherwise). No other effort is made to show the passing of time – M looks like she hasn’t aged a day over however long Bond is meant to be gone for – and nothing else significant changes. And secondly, we get the continuation of the setting up of the Bond mythos with the last two pieces of the set-up, Moneypenny and Q, both being introduced here (and a nod to Ben Whishaw here, who is inspired casting as Q and really excellent in a pretty small role). In other words, one part of the film is still insisting that this is all still set-up, while another part of the film is insisting that Bond’s older and falling apart. The tension never resolves adequately, and (spoilers, sweetie) never will.

But in almost every other respect, Skyfall is a triumph, and key to that success is a cast that know exactly how to play this material. I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about Dench but she deserves all the credit in the world here, as M finally takes centre stage. It’s not remotely surprising that Dench is up to the task of portraying M as someone both steadfast and capable of admitting fear, but it’s to the movie’s credit that it’s prepared to openly criticise M’s past actions. Generally the “hard-nosed enough to get it done” attitude is seen as being a plus – M has few moral grey areas, and indeed it was her willingness to sacrifice Silva that brought this whole situation about. But the film is prepared to hold her to account for her actions, and what’s more she acknowledges her own failings with the rather noticeable line, “I fucked this up, didn’t I?”, which is not the sort of thing one generally expects from M. Indeed, there’s an incredibly pleasing sense that Bond taking M to Scotland for the last big stand has less to do with protecting her than it does protecting the service. Ultimately, M has become a liability, no longer able to see the human part of the equation in the decisions she makes and as such is no longer capable of doing her job effectively and gets people killed over her failings. Bond obvious wants to try and save her by taking her to the Skyfall estate, but she's also definitely the bait in his trap and it’s very easy to read this as ultimately not his real aim – the service comes first, and that means everyone, even M, is expendable in (heh) service to it. And in fact we see just how true that is in the final act of the film, with Mallory effortlessly slipping into the role that Dench’s M left vacated by her death – the service has continuity and things carry on as they always have. Yet the mere fact that Skyfall is prepared to call out M for her past behaviour is another tick in the box of quiet subversion that’s going on under the hood here – certainly no previous Bond movie would be prepared to question her, or the role, in this way. It takes an actor of Dench’s almost unimaginable talent to be able to occupy the space that makes M both a hard-nosed bastard (her, “you’re not bloody well sleeping here” after Bond returns from the dead is especially effective, and a great delivery from Dench) and a strangely sympathetic character. Every bit her equal this time out, this is Craig’s strongest performance in the role to date as well – he’s always better when playing against a strong actor, as his scenes with Le Chiffre in Casino Royale demonstrate, and he gets oodles of time to spar against Dench in her final outing. But he gets more range here than he has done in the last two movies, and the scenes with M give him space to deliver on other sides of the character beyond basic brutality and/or loyalty. The two make an excellent pair and though it’s obviously not something that’s practical it’s a shame they didn’t get to share more screen-time in their three movies together because they really are fantastic. But with those two powerhouses at the core of the film it’s also critical that the villain this time out is someone who is able to hold his own – step forward, then, Javier Bardem, the best Bond bad guy since… Goldeneye, maybe? He’s outstanding as Silva, a rather pitiable character that, for all his theatrical flourishes, is never less that a genuinely menacing presence. Many actors would fly over the top given this kind of material (hello, Jonathan Pryce) or attempt to play it too soft to try and gouge pity from the audience (hello, Robert Carlyle), but Bardem strikes precisely the right note between camp and threat. Indeed, he’s the first attempt at a properly camp bad guy for a good couple of decades – Carver, and Pryce, are as camp as tits in Tomorrow Never Dies, but one gets the impression it wasn’t especially written that way and that the camp arises more from Pryce’s performance. The camp of Silva is fully intentional and camp (well, good camp) always carries with it the threat of subversion, a perfect fit for Silva. Indeed, there’s a slight missed chance here – it would be an excellent additional subversion of expectations if Silva had been genuinely attracted to Bond, a real chance to do something different and unique with the antagonist. There are hints of it in that opening scenes when Silva is first introduced, though this ultimately resolves into attempts at manipulation rather than anything more. This is an extremely minor criticism though, and for the most part Silva is an excellent creation, fully deserving of Bardem’s talents. That means the three main characters of the film – Bond, M and Silva – are all excellently portrayed and written, and if the mother aspect to M is occasionally heavy-handed, at least we can see a real attempt to continue developing depth and new interpretations layered on top of old characters.

Skyfall is, in the end, about the best 50th anniversary Bond movie we could have hoped for It’s always possible to wish for more, and the few script missteps are frustrating because they should have been squared away fairly easily. Yet lingering on the very minor errors feels… unfair in a way, I guess, because there’s so, so much more that works here than what doesn’t. A strong antagonist is almost always the sign of a good Bond movie, and Silva is easily a top-five bad guy, someone who can genuinely hold his own against both Bond and M. The cinematography here is simply stunning – I didn’t even mention the plunge into the frozen loch near the end of the movie yet, but it’s just one more instance of how downright beautiful this film looks in places. The literal blowing up of Bond’s past with the Skyfall house (and the Aston, rather wonderfully the thing Bond looks most pissed at) works on a metaphorical level as well, the inflexible, uncaring past that M represented being destroyed right alongside it. There’s a depth and understanding to Skyfall that’s all too rare in Bond movies, and if it’s not quite enough to propel it to the very top of the best Bond movies list, it gets much, much closer than we had any right to expect after Quantum of Solace. All the action set-pieces here are, at worst, amazing, and at best genuinely stunning. Even the slower moments feel like they’re contributing to the movie, and in Dench’s departure the film is able to drum up genuine emotion that’s simply miles away from the usual save-the-day endings. We even get the best Bond theme for bloody years too - at least since Tina was last belting it out.  That’s Craig gotten two top-tier movies out of three, and the mistakes of the last film have clearly been learned from and put firmly aside. What could possibly go wrong next time out?

What Percentage Of This Film Could Be Cut?
2%. There really isn’t anything that disposable here, and the odd mis-steps don’t ever derail the film into making you think that something could be lost. The pacing here isn’t quite perfect – the Shanghai fight that leads to the meeting with Sévérine, which leads to Silva, which leads to his capture is just a fraction too languorous in places, but at least it’s all actually relevant to the movie, and once again the sense that Bond is putting pieces together to help move him towards his ultimate target means that though the pace is a touch sluggish it’s still contributing something to the actual movie. If you wanted to be super harsh, you could have Bond find a clue after the high-rise fight that just took him directly to the island, but then you’d lose the rather pleasing symmetry of Moneypenny coming to a last-minute rescue in the casino, and I’d be loath to cut a character who’s previously been 100% deskbound her moment of actually saving Bond (to say nothing of it acting as a corrective to her early shooting of him, a neat piece of understated symmetry). The 2% mentioned above is for the tube train sequence, and though it could easily go, it’s still kinda fun to watch in the movie. Basically, I’m just not being very harsh this time out.

Quip Level:
Low. I don’t have a lot to say about the quips this time out. What there are work fine. I like Kinkaid’s “Welcome to Scotland!” after blasting a couple of bad guys with a shotgun – it’s not a quip or a pun, I just like the line. There’s some nice flirty banter between Moneypenny and Bond that’s faintly redolent of the old without just being a recreation of it, and Moneypenny saying she’d been put on desk duty because she killed 007, only to be met with Bond’s, “well you gave it your best shot,” isn’t over-emphasised, so the line lands. Yeah, not much to cover here, really.

2018 Cringe Factor:
Well, let’s get Sévérine out of the way. She is, insofar as the script treats her, a very disposable character, and one that clearly only exists to set up the idea that she’s going to be our female protagonist, only for her to be bumped off ten minutes later. There’s something definitely uncomfortable about the way Bond uses her – a former child prostitute being controlled by Silva, who Bond uses to get to him. Still there’s at least a little nuance here – while Bond is clearly using her to get to Silva, there’s also a genuine sense that he wants to try and save her as well. Much of this is down to Craig’s performance during their scene at the casino bar, where he puts extra stress on the lines he’s given around Bond wanting to save her. That’s fine – using her to get to Silva and genuinely wanting to help her aren’t intrinsically contradictory so, in this case, it can be two things. Where the whole thing stumbles is in their shower scene together. Contrary to some rather hysterical interpretations, Bond absolutely doesn’t rape her here. It’s again uncomfortable to see him being intimate with someone who he found out had worked as a child prostitute, but it’s also obviously meant to be uncomfortable, and there’s absolutely no indication that she tries to refuse his advances or that he forces himself on her (compare and contrast with the way Bond treats Pussy Galore back in Goldfinger and the difference is clear, and indeed what’s going to happen in Spectre). This is messy, but the mess is intentional – there’s confusion and contradiction between both his and her motives, both Sévérine and Bond are manipulating each other, while also being genuine with each other (she does want to be free, he does want to help). There could be a bit more clarity here, but the cringe this time out seems quite deliberate. Elsewhere, well, honestly, there’s nothing. The openly gay flirtation between Silva and Bond is handled well (both Craig and Bardem are brilliant during this scene, especially Craig’s rather laconic, “what makes you think this is my first time?”) when it could have been dreadful, and overall I’m pretty comfortable giving this a Fine.

Oh that was a weird mistype - all the other ones I've reviewed this year have been 2018. Amended now - thanks!

Yeah the timeline is a complete bust, and I don't blame anyone for having a hard time with it. As for the scotch line, I'm giving the benefit of the doubt here - he delivers a dry one-liner because that's what Silva will expect him to do, and uses it as a cover to start his attack. I do totally get not reading it that way, but this time I feel just (and I do mean just) enough not-a-sociopath Bond is established prior to that for his line to be a ploy, rather than genuine sociopathy (a real sociopath wouldn't have returned to London when he saw it attacked - he simply wouldn't have cared. But Bond is explicitly shown to care, and not just about London). I still find it hard to read the shower scene as seduction - Severin specifically invited Bond to her boat ("if you survive") is adept at using her physicality to get what she wants (in this case she seems to think fucking Bond will earn her the freedom she desires, and she's in a desperate situation) and so uses the only power at her disposal to get what she desires. As I said in the review, it's very muddy, but this definitely doesn't feel like a typical Bond straight-up seduction. It's very uncomfortable for sure.

As for the problem with him being able to shoot straight - I think the movie answers that.  Bond goes to the firing range, and can't shoot straight. He realises that it's because of the schrapnel still embedded in his shoulder, so we get the scene of him cutting it out, then having it sent to be analysed (this is the start of the thread of clues that leads him to Shanghai). The idea being, presumably, that with the problem schrapnel dug out he can shoot straight again. But significantly, when it comes to taking out Silva at the end of the movie he doesn't use a gun, he throws a knife - no shooting required, and a different skill. It could be clearer, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt again.

Another quick update - Spectre ought to be up this week barring any catastrophes (I watched it last night), then we'll get stuck in to rankings etc At the moment I'm likely to rank:

Bonds (well, that's ongoing anyway)
The Movies
The Movie themes

If you have other suggestions that wont hurt my brain (I'm not gonna go through and start ranking cars, especially since the DB-5 would win anyway and y'all know my feelings on those ugly-ass BMW's Brosnan got stuck with) please feel free to chip in!

Oh villains is a good one for sure! Gadgets seems redundant because it would be 1. Invisible car 2. Everything else

(i jest, I jest)

A bit late to avoid catastrophe then

Ha!

I like graphs. If you aggregate ratings, like percentage to cut or quip level, and graph them over time it's fun. Especially if you overlay with Bond actor!

Spectre (2015)



How do you follow the biggest hit of the Bond series? With this, the return of Connery’s Big Bad, Spectre, after a whopping forty-four years off screen. Will this movie successfully tie Craig era together? And will anyone care about a secret organisation that’s spent nearly half a century in obscurity?

Pre-Existing Prejudices: Obviously at time of writing it’s the most recent Bond movie, at just three years old. That means there’s not a lot of space when it comes to historical context. First impressions were… eh. It’s got its moments, good and bad. I remember appreciating an expanded role for Ben Wishaw’s Q, feeling Christoph Waltz is rather wasted, and that it all gets a bit silly, but I don’t think I’ve seen this since its theatrical release.

The Actual Movie:
At last we get a Craig movie that opens with the gun-barrel sequence! Hurrah! Then it’s off to a Mexican Day of The Dead, and that famous one-take opening with no cuts. Its show-offy and audacious, and a great way to start the film as a skeleton-masked man (Bond, unsurprisingly) takes a beauty back to a hotel room. He calmly slips out of the hotel room (lovely tracking across the rooftops) and it takes five minutes before we get a conventional cut. Bond overhears a conversation about someone making an escape and visiting “The Pale King”. Bond goes for the shot and makes a few kills but there’s an explosion and he has to outrun a collapsing building (some more great work here). Bond spies his target on the ground and pursues on foot while the quarry legs it into a helicopter. Bond boards, there’s some (again very impressive) aerial acrobatics and he steals his target’s signet ring. Pilot and target are kicked out and Bond takes control with a well-earned burst of the Bond theme.

Time for Sam Smith to stink up the joint with a wildly terrible and misjudged song. The title sequence also gives us flashbacks to previous Craig movies. This song sounds like a fan has dubbed some other song over the title sequence in place of the real song that’s meant to accompany these images. We should be so lucky.

M chews out Bond for what happened in Mexico and Bond is grounded while “this merger with MI5 and MI6 goes through” and somewhat unoriginally there’s talk of scrapping the double-o section. And oh look it’s Moriarty Andrew Scott playing Max (or C), the new head of the Joint Intelligence Service. Quick scene with Moneypenny, who brings his effects from Skyfall and the usual talk of Bond being finished. Bond plays Moneypenny a recording of the Dench M who says if she dies he’s to trace down Sciarra, kill him, and go to the funeral – that’s what he was doing in Mexico. This is quite a lot of exposition so early in the movie… Bond asks Moneypenny to do some digging. We get a shot of the old MI6 building, rigged for demolition, and a shiny new building which will be C’s domain and there’s talk of lots of countries sharing intelligence streams – the Nine Eyes project – then we visit Q’s underground lab. Bond is injected with smart blood so he can be traced, then he gets shown an Aston Martin which is no longer for him, and Chekov’s Watch which has a “very loud alarm”. Oh and the DB-5 is being rebuilt. The extended time with Q is well spent, and Craig and Wishaw make a great pairing. Bond nicks the new Aston and we’re off to Rome and the funeral. He meets Sciarra’s widow, Lucia, and we go to her far-from-understated villa at night. She walks out, prepared to die as two assassins raise their gun… and Bond takes them out. During a very awkward seduction scene Lucia tells him that her husband’s replacement in “the organisation” will be chosen later, so Bond is off there. Oh, I wonder what organisation! Bond gains entrance using the ring he got in the pre-credits sequence, and this group (oh who could they be!) couldn’t really make themselves look more evil, as they discuss drugs money and the like. This is extremely well shot, but also ludicrous – the AGM Of Doom on a very large scale. There’s an empty chair at the head of The Worlds Most Evil Conference Table… and in walks a man in shadow. There’s a bit of a kerfuffle as Mr Hinx, a massive assassin, makes his presence known. Bond is pointed out by The Evil Man In Shadow (there’s a lot of The Evil dot dot dot in this) and he makes a break for it. Time for a car chase through Rome! There’s some comedy while Bond tries a few controls (no ammo, “atmosphere” results in Frank Sinatra) and during all this Bond reports in to Moneypenny, telling her a bunch of terrorist events were connected, and asking her to look into Franz Oberhausen. All during the car chase. Oh and Quantum and Mr White – remember him? – is identified as The Pale King. Down onto the banks of the Tiber, and Bond finally escapes his pursuer while the Aston, of course, ends up in the drink.

Meanwhile, in Toyko, C gives a speech in favour of uniting intelligence services and more surveillance. M checks with Q on Bond’s location – Austria – and Q lies to cover for him as Bond tracks down Mr White to a remote cabin. Turns out White’s been poisoned with Thallium for disobeying “him”. White is staying silent to protect his daughter, who knows L’Américan, a clue which can lead to Oberhausen, and Bond promises to keep her alive. Then White kills himself. Back in London, C infodumps us that the new facility is the most sophisticated data gathering facility there is. M’s old ways are contrasted with the brashness of C, who has a recording of the conversation between Bond and Moneypeny – he watches everyone. Time for a trip to an Austrian health clinic to find White’s daughter, working under the name Madeleine Swann. Bond tells her he’s looking for L’Américan, she has him thrown out. Q turns up and Bond asks him to analyse the ring. As he’s being thrown out he spies Madeleine being taken in some Land Rovers. He chases after her in… a plane, which he got from… somewhere. Meanwhile Q gives some guys tailing him the slip. Bond eventually rescues her, but Hinx isn’t out for the count yet. Q gives us some backstory that all the Craig villains are linked, and Madeleine informs us the name of the organisation is… Spectre! Astonishing. She also tells Bond L’Américan is not a person – it’s a place. Specifically, a hotel in…

Tangier. White left some proof that helps Bond get to Oberhausen’s base in the Sahara (there’s some amount of faffing about to get there, and she refuses to sleep with Bond). Back in London Nine Eyes is a go and the double-o section is to be closed down. Time for a train into the desert – Madeleine can look after herself. Another quick London scene – Bond is on his own. Quick tribute to From Russia With Love with a brutal train fight between Bond and Hinx. Madeleine saves the day by shooting Hinx and wounding him enough that Bond can kick him off the train. Then, naturally, they sleep together. Next day they are dropped off at a remote (very remote) station, before being collected and taken to Oberhauser’s complex, a Typical Bond Villain base. After the usual pleasantries, we get to, at last, meet Oberhausen, who gives us a quick speech about his big meteorite. Missus. He describes his base as “information” and they are monitoring everything. C is in Oberhausen’s pocket, and he tips his hand – he’s been “the author of all your pain”, orchestrating all the women in Bond’s life to die, including Vesper and the Dench M, and he plays back Mr White’s suicide to fuck with Madeleine. Bond is taken for torture, strapped into a metal chair, and it turns out Oberhausen is… Bond’s foster brother and... Blofeld! Surprising absolutely nobody. Even the white cat is back! Bond manages to slip his watch to Madeleine, she sets it off and they make a run for it. Bond blows up the base – quite spectacularly – and they head for home.

And so back to London. Bond meets M, Tanner and Moneypenny and tells M that C is under Blofeld’s influence. Madeleine says she can’t return to this life and walks away from it. Q is trying to stop Nine Eyes going live, hacking away. As M and Bond are driving they’re attacked and Bond is taken. M makes a break for it and meets up with the others. Bond, meanwhile, is taken to the remains of the old MI6 building. M confronts C and swears to bring him in while C rambles on about doing what needs to be done. Inside the old building, Blofeld has thoughtfully provided a nice montage of people who have died because of Bond. They have a face-to-face (Blofeld has acquired the scar thanks to the base explosion) and Blofeld has put Bond in what he thinks is an impossible situation – the building will blow in three minutes and he has Madeleine. Bond can either save himself and live with Madeleine’s death, or die trying to save her. As M tries to walk C out, they fight and C has a slightly hilarious death plummet. Bond meanwhile runs through the ruins of the old building and finds Madeleine while Blofeld escapes by helicopter. They escape by jumping into a safety net then fleeing in a handy speedboat that seems to have been left behind in case your agent needs a quick getaway. Bond follows Blofeld down the course of the Thames and takes potshots at the helicopter, finally hitting it and bringing it down as it crashes on to Westminster bridge. Bond catches up with him, but rather than killing him, he allows Blofeld to be taken captive by M.

Cut to – Q’s base the next morning. Bond comes down, perfectly framed, in an elevator. He picks up the DB5 and drives off into the morning with Madeleine. What a perfect ending for this Bond.

So obviously, he’ll be back.


In Conclusion:
Well, it’s a mess, isn’t it? I mean, that’s the first take almost anybody has on Spectre, and to be fair it’s hardly an unreasonable one. After all, it is a mess. Lots of bits of it are a mess. The Oberhausen/Blofeld reveal is particularly poorly handled. The muddling of the Bond legend being put in place / Bond is already past it reaches its inarticulate zenith (if that’s the right word, and it’s not). The whole script feels very scattershot. The Mr White plot doesn’t even come close to landing – it barely even manages to crash. And of course the inclusion of the titular organisation feels either redundant (because we’ve had Quantum to do the whole “shadow organisation” thing), or fanwank (included, finally, because it could be), or both. So let us begin on this, our final review of the series, with Spectre itself.

Let’s ask two questions straight off the bat. Firstly, beyond “because the rights issues have finally been sorted out” what is the point of including Spectre here? And secondly, does the inclusion work? Though, actually, it’s worth pointing out even before we start that the world-controlling organisation is now Spectre (a noun), not SPECTRE (a somewhat-clumsy acronym for Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion). They have, in such a very 21st century manner, rebranded. But really, what’s the point in having them here? After all other than one fairly forgotten outing, Spectre have always been a Connery-era concern. Their last outing coincided with Connery’s last (“official”) outing, they haven’t – excepting one fairly dreadful pre-credits sequence back in the 70’s – even been alluded to since, and there’s a sense in watching the Bond films in order that they’re part of the franchise that’s been left behind. Sure, Quantum are meant to be more or less the same thing, but Quantum has been sold to us on slightly different terms – a 21st century equivalent to be sure but much more in line with this century’s understanding of conspiracy theories like “shadow government” rather than “evil corporation”. The immediate problem is that the answer to “why have them?” doesn’t have a resolution because there is, creatively, no reason for Spectre to be in this film. Poor old Quantum is fatally holed as a concept by Spectre turning up here, dismissed in a single, off-handed, easy-to-miss line as a “subsidiary”. The idea of Quantum didn’t come together in Quantum of Solace and the muddle of switching to another global terrorist network with tentacles everywhere means this entire part of the Craig era deflates in the most bathetic way imaginable. This film would be substantially improved had the AGM Of Doom in Rome been a gathering of Quantum with Oberhausen as its head and then just have the film carry on. While I don’t want to review what might have been rather than what we have, it would also ditch the stupid Blofeld reveal, and make the idea that Bond’s foster brother was out for revenge seem a bit more credible, instead of “revenge, and also I’m the head of this secret organisation, and I’m your foster brother, really I am!” It’s way too much weight for one character to stand. So you might gather from this that the answer to the second question – “does this work?” – is a resounding no. By switching from Quantum to Spectre any pretence of cohesion simply evaporates. Not that Quantum were ever any good anyway – they were definitely better in concept than in execution, and the concept wasn’t that great – but here they’re forever robbed of relevancy when their inclusion could have at least helped land that part of the Craig era. So yeah – Spectre itself is a bust.

Mr White doesn’t work either.  First a shadow in Casino Royale, then somewhat present in Quantum Of Solace, then absent from Skyfall, then... here. As a character he never remotely coheres, and it’s been seven years since he’s even been in a Bond movie.  Yet we’re supposed to have some investment in what happens to him here, poisoned and passing out cryptic clues before killing himself.  White is, like the Spectre/Quantum reveal, a failure.  He’s not badly acted, and Jesper Christensen is perfectly fine in the role, but until now he’s had exactly zero character development and not a lot more screen time. He's just a grumpy plot device on legs, wheeled out as a representative of the already-dead plot thread that is the threat Quantum are/were supposed to represent. For all that he actually achieves here he might as well be a computer file that Q tracks down. “The Pale King” sounds like an exciting, mysterious thing for Bond to be on the trail of, but when it turns out to be some-guy-you-slightly-remember it can’t help but feel anti-climactic. Mind you, at least he’s given a conclusion of sorts, so that’s something, but he’s still a weak character with little purpose that never attains the significance the series clearly wanted him to have.  He’s just… screen-time.
 
Still, if you are prepared to set aside the huge disappointment of Spectre themselves, the stupid Blofeld reveal, Mr White’s failure as a character, and any sense of logic or purpose, there is some fun to be had here.  The pre-credits sequence is easy to praise, but that’s at least because it deserves to be praised, and indeed might well be the best pre-credits sequence the entire Bond series has (Casino Royale is certainly a contender too). It’s audacious and extremely well shot, perfectly constructed and (a common failure of the pre-credits sequence) just about the right length. This produces its own problem though – it does somewhat unbalance the film since it is by far and away the best sequence Spectre can get together, and everything else here just pales in comparison. Compare that opening sequence with the big assault on Blofeld’s far-from-secret desert lair. Oh right, you can’t, because there is no big assault. Bond just gets free, does a wee bit of shooting, then the whole thing blows up with exceedingly little effort. Maybe that’s a tribute to how easy the base-cum-hotel was to take out in Quantum of Solace? It looks incredibly dumb on screen, like a character in a video game has shot an end-of-level base with the right number of bullets so it just spontaneously explodes. The opening sequence is graceful and nuanced (and even occasionally funny, as with Bond falling on the sofa) whereas the base blowing up is... just a base blowing up.  There is one other scene, though, that deserves real praise, and it’s the AGM Of Doom. Everything about the meeting in Rome is spectacular, from the lighting and direction to the acting, and Waltz is never better than in his big introduction scene. As with Silva in Skyfall, there is real care and attention lavished on how to introduce the movie’s bad guy, and Waltz, cast in eternal shadow throughout, gets a spectacular introduction – much more ostentatious than Silva, but every bit as impactful. Even the car chase that follows it manages to hold some quality and if it goes on too long (and it does – we really don’t need the “comedy” of the old Italian guy being pushed along by the Aston) it does for the most part work very well. The “atmosphere” switch giving us some Sinatra instead of a weapon to help Bond escape is just the right kind of silly, and of course the car flying into the Tiber is both inevitable and satisfying. All this is well directed and, other than the conclusion which we’ll get to, Spectre is overall a well put together film. It may pale next to Skyfall in terms of the overall film, but watching this isn’t not difficult to work out why they wanted Mendes to come back.
 
One of the pleasant surprises of Spectre is Daniel Craig, and by that I mean he gets the chance to do something a bit different with the role here. Because it turns out he’s pretty good at doing the Bond comedy material, and that’s not particularly obvious from his three previous movies.  He and Q make a great double-act in the Austria, and though it is, of course, very pleasing to see Ben Wishaw get more screen time, his interactions with Craig bring out a much lighter side of this version of Bond, and it’s incredibly refreshing.  It never becomes the full-on comedy routines that Moore would sometimes get, but by continuing to broaden out what this Bond can do we get an unexpected glimpse into Craig’s versatility as an actor. And great though he is with Wishaw he gets a few solo moments of comedy that work as well, like Bond drunkenly pointing his gun at a mouse in a hotel room and demanding to know who sent it.  It makes you wish he’d had a bit more of this in the previous films really, instead of all that dour stamping about the place.  Spectre is, as a movie, much more indebted to the Moore-era movies than it is to the Connery ones, despite the return of a Connery-vintage Evil Organisation(tm) and the much lighter touch of this film is next to impossible to imagine in any earlier Craig movie. Spectre’s rambling structure – less a plot than a series of events strung together by exposition – certainly feels Moore-ish (For Your Eyes Only, perhaps) but the comedy comes from the same vein, and Craig’s great at it! Of course we have the return of gadget-filled cars, which always feels like one of Moore’s quintessential elements even while all the other Bonds have had that as well, and the wristwatch which (stupidly) helps Bond escape Blofeld feels incredibly of that vintage as well. But it’s kind of remarkable how good a fit all this is for Craig, and how well his version of the character is able to deal with this side of Bond. If Casino Royale was indebted to vintage Connery, Quantum Of Solace scraped up against Lazenby’s irrelevance and Skyfall embraced all of vintage Bond, then Spectre is definitely late-Moore (or late-Brosnan, to be even-handed) and while the movie this approach is tried in may be lacking, it’s just about good enough to show this isn’t an approach that needs to be abandoned. Give a good actor some great moments and this lighter version of Bond can still flourish – that’s what makes Moore so appealing – and it feels like ages since we’ve had a Bond movie this unclenched. There’s little self-important faux-darkness or attempts at “grittiness” here – for the most part Spectre is content to aim at “entertaining” and shoot for achieving that goal. That makes this a lot more enjoyable than it really has any right to be, and goes a long way to stop this sinking to the bottom of the pile. Sure, Blofeld’s inclusion is dumb, but Bond can be dumb and fun – those things have never been exclusive.

And speaking of Blofeld, I guess we’d better get around to him.  His inclusion here is a mistake, plain and simple.  Waltz is fine in the role – I don’t think I'd describe him as any better than fine, but he pales next to Bardem – but the character is inconsistently written, the foster brother angle is profoundly stupid (I mean, really really stupid) and the idea that he’s been orchestrating all of Bond’s pain since Casino Royale because he’s a bit upset about his dead parents is both banal motivation and vastly improbable. And what’s Waltz meant to do with that? It’s not like he’s given anywhere to go. He has a few effective moments – that introduction, and the walk-through of his desert base while he plays back Mr White’s suicide for the benefit of Madeline – but he’s got a few bad ones as well.  The scene where he tortures Bond? Not good.  Craig acts his socks off and sounds genuinely agonised as Blofeld drills into him, but Waltz is all over the place, flitting from sadism to boredom to detachment without ever landing close to consistent. If his shifting moods are meant to elucidate something about the character – his psychosis maybe? - then it’s punishingly ineffective. I mean, that whole scene is fundamentally flawed even without his all-over-the-place performance – did none of the guards see the watch thing? Why was Madeline allowed to wander over for a little mid-torture chat? Tangentially, why was Hinx sent to kill Bond on the train when Blofeld wanted Bond to reach the base? How handy is it that Bond’s wrist restraints allow him to undo his watch strap conveniently out of sight? To say nothing of the Blofeld reveal “on his mother’s side”, for fuck’s sake.  But unfortunately Waltz is part of the problem here, and he just can’t find a mode that makes Blofeld seem believable. He’s little better while fleeing in the helicopter at the end of the film, playing Blofeld are bored or not particularly interested, when this is meant to be the moment of final revenge his whole life has been building up to. The script does him little favours, but he seems strangely unable to find an angle on the role across the course of the film that makes the character work (except when he plays Oberhausen before the reveal – which makes sense, because Oberhausen is a character, not a cypher). Certainly there’s nothing here to threaten Telly Savalas’s reign as the best Blofeld.
 
Right, we have to deal with that ending now. I’ve been putting it off, because it’s dreadful, but it has to be faced sometime, so here we go.  It’s dreadful.  Wait, I’ve said that already.  Look, the thing is, people criticise the ending of Skyfall, and there’s some justification for that. It’s not perfectly executed, and though M’s death works, there are certainly questions that one can raise. But at least it feels tonally part of the film it concludes, and it’s shot and acted in a way that seems of a piece with the rest of the movie. But this? Everything after the desert base blows up just feels redundant, and the direction makes no attempt to tie together the action at the base and what happens in London. It’s not that it’s badly directed, it just doesn’t connect. The ending is often stupid, frequently baffling, but always pointless. So they get to London, Madeline decides she can’t go back to “that life”, and is allowed to just wander off down some random street. Is anyone remotely fucking surprised that she gets picked up by the bad guys? Q saves the day by... doing a thing, we’re told, but the defeat of the Nine Eyes project is laughably undramatic, and C’s death very offhanded and plot-convenient. Not that the Nine Eyes project even comes close to snapping into place as a Blofeld-controlled threat anyway. We’re just told that Q has fixed that problem, we don’t get to see him do anything. You could argue that the whole scene is more about the confrontation between M and C but then why bother having Q resolve the Nine Eyes crisis at the same time? The idea of Bond being taunted while he’s led by the nose round the shattered remains of the old MI6 building is fine in principal, but what we get on screen... isn’t. He must be Superman to get through a building that size after the countdown’s begun, the leap into the safety net is... well it’s not completely dumb, though it’s not quite dramatic either, and as for the handy speedboat they finally flee on? Please. Do MI6 make a habit of leaving boats under buildings that are about to be demolished? Even if they’d just jumped in the Thames while the building blew up behind them, then been rescued by the river police it would have made more sense (and it’s the second time in this movie alone that Bond has outrun a collapsing building). And how does he defeat the now-stupidly-scarred Blofeld? By taking random pot-shots from a moving boat at a distant helicopter in the vague and remote hope that he might hit something critical. Yet, astonishingly, he does! (I’m not even mentioning the fact that all the helicopter pilot had to do was fly perpendicular to the river to escape, since Bond is on a boat, but doesn’t).  Then the helicopter crashes near some nice tourist shots of London and Blofeld gets to crawl away from the wreckage. Is it nice that Bond doesn’t just kill him? Sure, but this is a very long way round to reach that conclusion. The whole final chunk of the film is completely risible, and as the conclusion to a four-movie story arc it’s a total failure. Blofeld’s survival is, we can presume, meant to indicate the character might return at some point in the future, but unfortunately this film gives us absolutely no reason at all to ever want him to. 
 
You might have noticed I have used the word “stupid” a lot during this review.  There’s a reason for this. Spectre isn’t an especially difficult film to watch, and if you turn your brain off (or, ideally, remove it altogether) then it’s just about feasible to see this as a passable runaround. But for anyone who’s been paying even the slightest bit of attention over the previous three films or has any investment in the ongoing series this can’t help but seem like a disappointment.  Instead of cohering into a meaningful sequence of films the whole Craig era farts its way to a close with a rush of continuity that nobody seems to have bothered to check and characters, motivations (and organisations!) that spring from nowhere and go there as well. Ah but, of course, this isn’t actually the end of the Craig era at all, since he’s still got one more film to go.  Whatever that movie is, and no matter how good it is, there is simply no chance of getting this era to come together in the way it’s always threatened to do. It’s best bet at this point is to simply be a standalone.  This is a unique problem to Craig’s time in the role since, the odd recurring character aside, no other incumbent has had these attempts to bridge plots across more than one movie. The actual attempt at introducing serialisation into Bond isn’t necessarily unwelcome, and at times over his four movies it’s occasionally even managed ambitious, but in the end it simply hasn’t worked.  That’s disappointing in the extreme, and Spectre bears the bulk of the responsibility as to why it hasn’t worked, because the conclusion is completely blown.  By rushing to get Spectre back on screen, rather than holding them back for a time when they might more usefully be deployed (when Helen Mirren someone new takes over the role, for example), they fatally compromise the work that’s been done over the preceding three films, and no amount of retconning, continuity or workarounds can correct that. Ultimately Spectre isn’t all bad, but for what’s required of this film it’s not even close to being good enough.

What Percentage Of This Film Could Be Cut?
All of the finale can go. It’s so frustrating to watch because there’s a germ of a good idea in there. Using the destroyed MI6 building as a symbolic representation of Bond’s self-doubt and a physical manifestation of what his work has cost him is a pretty good idea, and the shooting gallery with his face on the targets, or the alcoves with black-and-white images of the dead of the past three movies provides some striking imagery. If the journey through the building acted as a kind of mirror through Bond’s psyche then that could be a really interesting approach, it could give the film something very different to work with and perhaps provide an effective conclusion. Needless to say that’s not what we get. Instead it’s just Bond working his way through a damaged building, Blofeld returning to the long-absent just-kill-him-already approach to not being able to kill Bond, and as for that escape… it’s woeful. The conveniently left-behind speedboat, the almost lethargic helicopter chase, the helicopter being shot down basically at random. None of it works. M arresting Blofeld on the bridge after Bond refuses to be goaded in killing him is comparatively effective, but it’s far too little to justify the whole sequence. As for the rest… I mean, Mr White’s inclusion is pretty pointless but since at least the film bothers to conclude his story – however redundant the character is – I wouldn’t want to lose that. So I’m going to say around 15%

Quip Level:
Higher than the last few outings and in line with Spectre’s rather lighter tone, but just about restrained enough that they’re able to introduce that tone without becoming too distracting. But definitely the highest of the four Craig films, that’s for certain, though as with the comedy he’s remarkably adept at delivering them without simply sounding cheesy or embarrassed. Blofeld also gets one pun – “well that’s the thing with brothers – they always know which buttons to press” as he triggers the destruction of the old MI6 building, that thread’s lone attempt at not being terrible. For a lot of the film though the lines are less puns than responses drawled out – M telling C that he now knows what C stands for…. * long pause * “Careless”, for example. It’s not bad, though not massively inspired either, so let’s award a Medium for our last Bond outing.

2018 Cringe Factor:
The scenes with Lucia and Bond sleeping together after he’s taken out a couple of assassins sent to kill her are deeply uncomfortable. In Skyfall I was maybe, just about, possibly able to make what happened between Bond and Sévérine seem passable but this is substantially more problematic. There’s no question that Bond is explicitly and clearly taking advantage of a traumatised woman who doesn’t know how to react for the sole purpose of gaining information. Not only is it a terrible way to treat a female character – one who’s apparently aware of what her husband does, but otherwise not complicit in what’s going on – but it’s also tonally completely at odds with the lighter, more relaxed atmosphere that Spectre generally aims for. It’s an ugly, unpleasant scene that contributes nothing. Elsewhere things are relatively calm, if not always great – Madeline is perfectly OK but never quite rises above functional as a character. Though she’s introduced as a bit of a peril monkey she’s given some agency and competency as the film progresses…. Only for her to be returned to peril monkey status as soon as the film needs to provide someone for Bond to rescue. It’s not as bad as sometimes but it’s not exactly elegant either. I think Oh Dear... strikes a fair balance.

The Bonds, Ranked

1. Connery
2. Craig
3. Brosnan
4. Dalton
5. Moore
6. Lazenby 

The Craig Movies, Ranked (So Far!)

1. Casino Royale - Bond finds its feet again after wandering almost entirely off the reservation with a down-to-earth, well-written and engaging script that reinvigorates what a Bond movie can be.
2. Skyfall - Hugely entertaining, the best villain of the Craig era and a greatly increased role for Dench's M makes this a thoroughly enjoyable movie. And that theme!
3. Spectre - A return to the lighter, sillier side of Bond. Not awful, but deeply flawed logistics and an over-burdensome plot means this never comes together, despite a few good performances.
4. Quantum Of Solace - A total deflation of all the good work done by Casino Royale. Muddled, incoherent, a dreadful bad guy in Green, and though there's one or two good scenes nothing here really works. Less a sequel to Casino Royale, more of an afterthought.

The Blofeld reveal being the same reveal as the one in Goldmember took me out of the movie so hard I could never get back into it. I think I could have forgiven a Swedish Penis Enlarger Pump bit more easily. At least that would have been from a better Austin Powers movie.

DO I HAVE TO POST THE SOMETHING OF BORIS VIDEO AGAIN? BECAUSE I WILL!

Erm, of course - amended! "Now we know what the C stands for... careless"

Having watched this one on DVD with subtitles on, the Blofeld reveal is even worse, because the subtitles indicate that Waltz is Blofeld from the very first time he speaks.  (Of course, I already knew that even before the movie began, but really, subtitlers, you could have done better).