“Spectre” is the James Bond movie that fans have been waiting for ever since “Casino Royale” and Daniel Craig rebooted and rejuvenated the series nine years ago. The two films in between were fine, and yet something was missing: “Quantum of Solace” had lots of action, but no introspection; and “Skyfall” was a moody entry, without much in the way of glamour. But “Spectre” has everything anyone could possibly want in a James Bond movie.
It has virtuoso action sequences, imaginatively crafted and meticulously filmed. It has two beautiful Bond women — ever sinceEva Green, there are no Bond girls. It has an international conspiracy that taps into the current paranoia just as the Cold War Bond movies did in the 1960s. And it has a villain who immediately enters the pantheon, both for the way the role is written and for the way it’s played — in the latter case, by the remarkable Christoph Waltz.
The movie’s first sequence puts the audience on notice that Bond is back. In a continuous shot, Bond meets a woman at the Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico City, where everyone is wearing grotesque masks. She invites him up to her room, where she lies on the bed, and he excuses himself for just a minute. He steps out of her window, walks briskly across a ledge — it really does look as if Craig is up there — and arrives at the corner of a rooftop just in time to assassinate three people and blow up a building.
He’s just getting started. I haven’t even mentioned the escape from a collapsing building or the fight he has on a helicopter, trying to kill the pilot without causing a crash. In the course of a year, there are hundreds of movies and countless action sequences. Each one makes it harder to raise an audience’s pulse. But within five minutes, “Spectre” has everyone sitting with their eyes wide and their mouths half open.
As we soon find out, Bond has gone rogue. The Mexico adventure was the result of an order from M (Judi Dench), delivered by way of a video that arrived after her death. Like the hard, unsentimental Mommy figure she is/was, she appears onscreen and gives him the name of some Italian assassin. “Kill him!” she says. Talk about tough. She’s so unworried about the afterlife that she’s ordering hits from the grave.
At the start of “Spectre,” two pressures are converging. The government is considering eliminating the Double-0 spy program, just as Bond has a lead on something really dire, as in really big, as in a threat to life as we know it. After a brief romantic interlude with an Italian widow (Monica Bellucci), he infiltrates a secret meeting in Rome, where we see just who is running the world.
It’s the stuff of everyone’s most paranoid fantasy. At an enormous table in an ornate, church-like hall, the evil, powerful people sit, hearing reports on things like the 160,000 women they’ve forcibly recruited into the “leisure sector” — in other words, sexual slavery. At the head of the table, in the shadows, is the boss, the secret author of untold human misery. Then he turns his head to the light, and we see that the polite yet menacing voice belongs to Christoph Waltz.
Any charismatic, flamboyant actor can play a memorable villain, but Waltz is in a category beyond that. He is fascinating to watch, because his surface is appealing, almost endearing, and yet his character’s inner life, of which we’re never in doubt, is horrible and sick. Everything he says, even when the character is loquacious (as his usually are), seems like just an external manifestation of some vast inner turbulence. At one point, Bond asks him a question, and he answers, “No.” And just that one word is invested with unknowable and unsettling meaning.
As for Craig, he can wear a white tuxedo as well as Roger Moore, and he can fall off a building without ever unbuttoning his suit jacket, and it’s good that we see that side of him here — the imperturbable, self-satisfied Bond. But with Craig, there’s always something serious going on, too, something pained inside that’s in search of remedy. This is why there are no Bond girls, only Bond women, in the Craig installments, because this Bond, despite the suave facade, is not just out for fun. He is actually — though no one would ever quite put it this way — looking for a girlfriend.
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