What better way to open a James Bond movie than at Dia de Muertos, the Day of the Dead, in Mexico City? Bond sallies through the frolicking, macabre masquerade costumed as Death, with a beautiful senorita on his arm. Wasting not a second, they ascend to a hotel room; she is eager but he has work to do first. Stripping off his costume to reveal an immaculately pressed blue suit, and unpacking an automatic weapon, Bond strides through the open window and onto the ledge, jauntily hopping across rooftops until reaching his target—a cabal of miscreants plotting an act of terror. He dispatches most of them in a brief firefight but touches off an explosion in their building, resulting in a catastrophic avalanche of masonry. Bond tumbles to certain doom—but lands instead on a conveniently placed sofa, unscathed.
All the Bond elements are accounted for: Exotic locale, sex, killing, pyrotechnics, humor and, yes, in the moments that follow, a chase. Spectre, the 24th canonical Bond film, is off to the races. The only thing missing from scene one is a gadget, but then, the sequence of Bonds starring Daniel Craig has been deliberately light on gadgets. The focus is on 007 with no invisible cars to get in the way.
In any normal series, Spectre would look like the final chapter, but the character Ian Fleming invented during the Cold War is more vigorous at the box office than ever. Bond is too big to fail, so Spectre is evidently only the end of the latest cycle in a saga that keeps reinventing itself with new actors and funhouse reflections of the changing world around it. Craig is the leanest toughest Bond since Sean Connery. He’s no fop with gizmos, but conveys the hard-eyed determination of a man with a chip on his shoulder as well as a license to kill. In Spectre, the Bond franchise invokes an origin story, ties up loose ends, confronts a new world order with a sneer.
Like a character from Hitchcock, Bond is caught between law and disorder, the authorities and the criminals. There’s a new C (Andrew Scott), a managerial little jerk whose scheme involves shutting down the 00 program, replacing human agents with killer drones and tying all the world’s spy agencies together into one vast apparatus of data and surveillance. C is an arrogant technophile, the Steve Jobs of intelligence, and tells the faltering M (Ralph Fiennes) “It’s not personal. It’s the future—and you’re not.”
And on the other side, Bond is searching for Spectre, a global crime syndicate whose directors meet in a dimly lit palazzo around a vast polished table, presided over by a vaguely Teutonic figure seen at first only in shadow, disappearing for much of the film like a specter before 007 tracks him to his lair (a good Bond villain must have a lair). The arch criminal has a name familiar to Bond fans, Blofeld, and is played by Christoph Waltz with a childlike delight in the horror of it all while subjecting his victims to the sophistry of evil.
Spectre plays nicely with expectations. Bond gets to pronounce those words, “Bond—James Bond,” as he seduces the fatalistic wife of a dead assassin (Monica Bellucci). His “shaken, not stirred” line falls on uncomprehending ears at a bar serving only health drinks. And he has the assistance of the loyal and resourceful Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and the computer genius nerd Q (Ben Whishaw). And yet, the unflappable Bond occasionally breaks a sweat as he pilots planes, helicopters and automobiles through impossible situations. He knows pain. As 007 races from Rome to the Austrian Alps and the parched desert of Morocco, fighting off a heinous and hard-to-kill henchman, he falls in love with the distrustful daughter of a rueful Spectre agent, Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux).
Where will it end? Not with Spectre, to be sure. Check back in a couple of years for the next, already rumored installment of a saga that refuses to stand still or die.
Spectre
3 stars out of 4
Starting Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz
Directed by Sam Mendes
Rated PG-13
