Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, Ben Whishaw
Have I Seen it Before: Sure.
Did I Like It: Does the plot of a Bond movie really matter? If they do, then this one suffers a bit. It tries to ape the “greatest villain reimagined” motif that The Dark Knight (2008) made de rigueur and movies like Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) drove into the ground. The story of the resurgence of Blofeld (Waltz) feels like it has come too late to the party to be anything other than lame. Bond movies are no stranger to feebly chasing after the current moviegoing trends, with equally shaky results. I refer the jury to Moonraker (1979).
Really, truly, the film is actually too late for two separate parties. The Spectre aspects of the Bond mythology had spent decades tied into endless copyright disputes by the time Roger Moore had taken over the tux and martini. Corporate mergers collided with the death of intransigent rights holders so that every possible atom of the Bond property could once again be wielded by EON Productions. Did they try to bring us a new version of Spectre and Blofeld, re-combining the parts we knew into something new? No, they tried to retcon the man and the organization as the mastermind of every event in the Daniel Craig era. The results, as I have said, are still somewhat awkward.
And yet, I may be beyond complaining about Bond movies at this point. Maybe its that No Time To Die feels further and further away the more it is delayed. Maybe I’m just—like Craig—mellowing in my old age. Maybe its that at its core, all I need from a Bond is some gadgets, a couple of set pieces, and a man at the center of it all that exudes such confidence and swagger forging the fantasy that a human could walk the Earth completely divorced from the notions of angst or klutzyness. It’s an enduring—if admittedly toxic—fantasy in machismo. Each of the actors in the role had that ineffable quality, and Craig has had it in spades throughout his tenure, and in great supply here. It can keep a Bond movie afloat, and this one manages.