Spectre

The latest and much anticipated Bond movie, Spectre, reunites director Sam Mendes and Daniel Craig together again for what many of us were hoping would capitalize on the success of Skyfall. For the most part, it succeeds in doing this. There are the splendid locations and set pieces, a great choice in actors including protagonist Christolph Waltz, cool action sequences, and an attempt to delve deeper into the origins of James Bond. It's a winning formula that almost wins and the movie is more than long enough to showcase these things. Now let me be clear. Spectre is a great James Bond film and certainly much better than Quantum Of Solace. After nearly a decade, Craig certainly seems much more at ease in the role and with the cast addition of Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris and Ben Whishaw, this latest distillation of Bond is arguably the best yet. While notably giving homage to the past, Spectre also manages to stay relevant to the present with issues of national security, privacy, and intelligence gathering all at the center. It's a very action driven Bond movie that is certainly reminiscent of the early Connery films. However, there are shortcomings and one of them is ironically the length; and I only say this because the story does noticeably lag on in pace at certain points. There's a slow buildup and a certain anti-climactic let down, that speaks to the ambiguity of Craig's return or not in the role. I was also not happy with Mendes' use of the supporting cast, particularly the women. Talented and beautiful Monica Belluci is in like only one or two scenes. Really? Moneypenny (Naoime Harris) could have had a more active role considering the stakes of the story. The lead female character, French actress Lea Seydoux, was not really memorable or convincing in her role and her hookup with Bond felt too contrite. Dave Bautista was certainly a muted and memorable villain, (think an updated Oddjob) but he certainly could have appeared more to bolster the ending. Even the performance of Waltz as the iconic villain mastermind Blofeld, was undercut by the pacing of the film. In fact, Bond's relationship origins with Blofeld were not touched on enough here.  There was not much surprise to actor Andrew Scott's character, C, especially to fans of the tv show Sherlock, but I still have the same misgivings of story pacing and character use. At certain points after the exotic locales were used up and everything was brought back to London to wind down, viewing Spectre seemed like watching an episode of BBC tv show MI-5, which is not necessarily a bad thing but still......  I reiterate that Spectre is a good Bond film, one of the best in fact.  But it's also a daunting task to live up to the expectation that culminated in Skyfall.