2015 in review: spectre

(dir: Sam Mendes) Daniel Craig is the sexiest Bond, no question. He qualifies for that just from the way he looks at Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) when he's charming her into doing something against her better judgment. In fact, he has a way of looking at a woman as if she's the most beautiful he's ever seen, and it's marvellously seductive.

He's also the most intelligent Bond, so when he claims, as he does in this one, a tendency toward unthinking action, it's difficult to swallow it as gospel. We can SEE him introspecting, see it in a way that never would have occurred to Connery or Moore or Brosnan. But Craig gets a pass from the writers, too: he is allowed a dignity that previous Bonds were not. For instance, in the first scene, a Day-of-the-Dead sequence (very impressive, but would not have suffered from some chopping down), Bond slips out of a beauty's hotel room window, promising he won't be gone long. He blows up a building, has a big fight in a helicopter, the usual stuff. But if this were the Pierce Brosnan version, the writers would make him land the copter on the hotel roof and walk back into the girl's room brushing dust off his lapel and saying, "Now, where were we?" Craig never has to do that kind of dirty work, the leering stuff, and good riddance to it.

Still, these movies, the Craig Bonds, have lost something in the gaining of the substance. They're not candy anymore; they're no longer easy to watch, not always even fun. Every time they go back to London, for a start, it's like being sucked into an Orwellian dystopia from which hope and sunlight have been forever exiled. Any escape, even to the desert stronghold of a dastardly foe, seems a relief. And because Bond is fully human now, he has something to lose besides his sex-parts or his life. There is a Mephistophelean moment at the end when the villain (Christoph Waltz) tempts 007 to give up his soul in exchange for one moment of violent satisfaction, and, for a second, I really believed he might.

IN SUMMARY: over-earnest, overlong and pompous. What saves it are the likeable performances (Craig, Waltz, Harris, Lea Seydoux, Ben Whishaw. Ralph Fiennes is bravely commonplace as the deceased M's replacement, a terribly efficient clerk who's risen gradually to a post of importance).

And remember when you could count on a Bond opening credit sequence to be hypnotic, even if you didn't like the movie itself? No longer. The one is overblown, awkward, and the theme song sucks.