By which I mean the new Bond movie, Spectre, which I finally went to see over the weekend with my best mate. He'd already seen it, but is usually willing to indulge me when I'm late to the game with movies. There honestly can't have been more than a dozen people in the IMAX theatre (as one of the other punters pithily observed "I guess this has been out for a while...") but that at least meant that the only interruptions to my enjoyment of the movie were the - not excessively frequent - coughing fits I've been experiencing lately.
When the movie first came out, I heard some mixed reviews. I work with a hardcore Bond-nut who went to see it on its opening night, and he reckoned it was the best Bond movie ever (I wonder now if his opinion has changed at all in retrospect). I also work with a guy who's ambivalent toward Bond movies, who asked me if Bond ever has a plan when he starts his 'investigations', because it seemed to him that the character was winging it all the way.
I'm more in the latter camp but, having seen all the others (yes, even the George Lazenby one - weirdly, that's actually one of my favourites), I know that Bond does tend to wing it once he's started, so I just sat back and enjoyed the ride.
Spectre has also been described as "a 'Best of Bond' compilation", which seems a little unfair given that everyone knows what to expect from a Bond movie these days, and it must be getting difficult to be truly original within the constraints of the genre of spy movies and, more specifically, Bond movies.
The opening scene, which plays out as one long shot, following Bond through a Day of the Dead celebration, was excellent. It's a trick you rarely see in movies due to the difficulty in getting everything to work in the one take, and one I'm particularly fond of. After that, it dropped into generic Bond territory (action, laughs, more action) quite quickly and then topped off the intro with that terrible song that's just too insipid for a series that has had songs sung by Shirley Bassey. The title sequence is certainly full of tentacles, representing Spectre and it's seven-legged Octopus insignia, but it's basically typical of the worst kind of 'tits not quite out for the lads' title sequence I'd hoped they'd left behind when I sat down to watch Casino Royale.
After that, there is quite a lot of stuff that has happened in older Bond movies, just starting with his suspension from active duty and the inevitable carrying on anyway (License to Kill). There's an awful lot of travel, and an awful lot of wasted actors (Monica Bellucci is in it for about five minutes, then never even referred to again, Dave Bautista's henchman role - very much in the style of Oddjob and Jaws, where he has a unique way of killing folks - is inexplicably silent until he's finally disposed of, when he utters a single word - my mate and I couldn't decide whether he said "shit" or "cheat", but that doesn't really matter... The most baffling part is his introduction, where he's supposedly taking over a seat at the Spectre table from a lieutenant of sorts, when he's clearly just a henchman.
There's a sense that the writers have been following current affairs, to a degree, but also a sense that they've nicked ideas from other movies - Captain America: The Winter Soldier sprang to mind, with its focus on intelligence paranoia. A couple of points really ruined it for me. First and foremost, it's a continuation of what I liked least about Skyfall - that the filmmakers, after fifty years of Bond movies, saw fit to force a backstory onto the character - and it takes the idea much too far, in my opinion. Giving Bond family is one thing, but the guiding force behind Spectre's central villain turns out to little more than an adolescent grudge. It also goes back on the idea that Bond was so traumatised by the loss of Vesper Lind on his first mission that he lost all interest in women beyond using them as tools for his purposes. Somehow, within moments of meeting the daughter of one of his former enemies, he's so taken with her that he later wants to spare her the truth of her father's death. Not only that, but we're expected to believe that she's so taken with him, she actually doesn't mind.
On the upside, while the end reminded me somewhat of the last few minutes of OHMSS (minus a certain critical event... so far as we saw...) that I can't believe they won't bring Daniel Craig back for at least one more... but, if they don't, it's easy enough to consider Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall and Spectre as a self-contained mini-series, quite apart from the main Bond franchise, if only because they cover his development from rough and ready new recruit to seasoned - and refined - master spy... That said, Craig's Bond has retired twice now (before the beginning of Skyfall and, presumably, at the end of Spectre), so I'm not sure where they can go from there.
...But certainly having only just introduced one of the Bond franchise's biggest recurring villains, they can't really close it off entirely.
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