The penultimate Bond! (for now!)
SPECTRE, which finds Bond (at long last!) reunited with his chief nemesis - Ernst. Stavro. Blofeld. - Head of SPECTRE!
There's no surprise in this movie at all. I mean I suppose there was for people who went into this with no knowledge of the history and early days of the Bond Franchise (I think I can safely say I am no longer one of those people) - but here we are some 45 years after we last saw Blofeld and SPECTRE in the movies, back again. There is a long and complicated behind-the-scenes reason for this having to do with the rights to the Blofeld character and SPECTRE organization which were in limbo or threat-of-lawsuit for literal decades between Ian Fleming (and hence the Eon-Bond film producers) and an early screenwriter who worked with Fleming and staked a claim to the character. So - that's why SPECTRE has been absent from over four decades of Bond on Screen - litigation. Marvelous. But, finally, the rights were won back, and so here we have the return of Blofeld as played marvelously by Christoph Waltz. This guy could act his way out of a paper bag, and I would absolutely tune in to watch. He's marvelous.
The rest of the movie is - well, good, but not as good as Skyfall. Sam Mendes returns to direct and I've decided I do just really like the way he puts a movie together. From the opening almost 5-minute long shot to begin the cold open, to the relative pacing and finely-tuned direction of so many great scenes (the slickest Bond car chase yet in Rome, the nod-to-from-Russia-With-Love epic hand to hand fight inside a train, and the Blofeld-tortures-Bond scene) - there are some real fine moments in this movie. It flips the script a bit on how I seem to have felt about a lot of Bond movies - in this one the first half feels like a bit of a drag, but then we pick up into excitement as soon as Blofeld appears and we are ramping into the last act of the movie. Overall there's just a little too much dragged out suspense and a tighter overall script probably would have served the movie better.
I'm glad Blofeld and SPECTRE are back, my only real complaint is - well, they really kinda felt shoehorned in. There's this whole deal about "Hey Danny Craig, aCtUaLlY the bad guys you've been fighting the last 3 films have all been my minions, I've been behind it all!" The problem is this...feels forced. There's nothing other than Blofeld's word to tie this together, and no real evidence. Based on when the rights for Blofeld/SPECTRE came back, they obviously weren't planning this from the start, but you know what I would have loved, would have been some flashback scenes (even if having to be recreated) from previous movies showing a little more concrete evidence of Blofeld - him behind the curtain in a shot from Casino Royale, or a meeting between the Quantum dude and Blofeld - something like that - versus just a quick shot of previous movie villains "oh yeah they were all my dudes".
It's still a pretty good movie, just not perfect.
Observations -
- I forgot to mention it yesterday but I chuckled that the last act of Skyfall was basically Bond Does Home Alone. And here Mendes brings back the same script structure only this time it's Bond Does a Heist With Friends.
- Ralph Fiennes is a great new M and I'm glad they spent so much time introducing him in Skyfall, so he hits the ground running in this movie.
- Great to see Judi Dench in one last cameo giving Bond a mission from beyond the grave.
- Bonk Count - 2 bonks with 2 women - total is now 64 with 52
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