Yet Again On Bond, James Bond-Will The Real 007 Please Stand Up- Daniel Craig’s “Spectre” (2015)-A Film Review

By Seth Garth

Spectre, starring Daniel Craig, Lea Seydoux, Christoph Waltz, 2015    

Sometimes you just can’t win, just can make a simple statement without starting a civil war, a verbal civil war any way. Even in a seemingly placid profession like film criticism, hell, maybe this profession is worse than the academy when it comes to “turf wars.” The average reader is probably not aware of the cutthroat nature of the business, the dog eat dog aspect as each film critic tries to outdo the other either with superlatives or catcalls. It was better in the old days believe me when everybody just took whatever copy, press releases they called them, what a joke, the studios sent out and you just rewrote the thing with maybe a few asides. Jesus you didn’t even have to watch the damn things which from reading the press releases half the time you didn’t want to do anyway.

Then Pauline Kael, no, well her and her highbrow pieces and the notion in the film schools that film criticism, cinematic studies is the usual ploy, was the way to fill classrooms for those who were clueless about what to do in the industry but were hungry to learn something about film. You wouldn’t want any one of these kids to get within fifty miles of a camera much less a movie studio but a few witty comments wouldn’t hurt anything since nobody read that stuff anyway-film attendance was all word of mouth among neighbors. Then somehow people started taking them seriously since they were from the academy just like they started taking weathermen seriously once they had Doctor or something behind their name.    

Sorry for going off but I had to get that off my chest because frankly I didn’t really want to review this film, this can you believe it 24^th Jimmy Bond film starring Danny Craig in the 007 role in Spectre. This is where two bad situations occurred, converged, a couple of fellow film critics and a drummed up from fluff “controversy” over who is the real Bond, James Bond. Like my old friend and mentor Sam Lowell, who has probably written about a billion film reviews, said every time something came up from nowhere and hit him in the face-WTF. This one started out innocently enough when I reviewed Timmy Dalton’s The Living Daylights a film I did want to review and mentioned in passing the “controversy” between older film critic Phil Larkin and younger critic Will Bradley.

The controversy was over whether the original 007 ruggedly handsome Sean Connery or pretty boy Pierce Brosnan represented the real James. They have scourged each other in several reviews going back and forth like two wombats some of the stuff thrown pretty funny. My mistake? I happened in one doomed sentence to mention that while I took no sides in the “controversy” between them that those two contestants were the only real contenders.

That simple unembellished declarative sentence set off a fire-storm if you can believe that. Phil used that first part about Sean Connery being ruggedly handsome to mean that he had been entirely correct when championing Sean as the epitome of 1950s and 1960s manhood when eye candy was for loving and leaving after a little bout in the silky sheets (implied then not shown), when brute force was as likely to defeat the bad guys as some techno-gadget dreamed by Q’s crew and when craft and guile were at a premium. Will took the later part of the sentence about the “pretty boy” to mean that Pierce used his charm and good clean looks to do in the bad guys and that part of that was to take full advantage of the techno-world possibilities afforded by Q’s brain works to foil the bad guys. Worse of all both parties, seeking their respective real goals to tarnish my reputation and tout their own, taunted me for being wishy-washy when I took a hands-off approach to their silly dispute. Yeah, WTF. In any case I had to take this foolish assignment just to have a place where I could expose these holy goofs for what they are-holy goofs.                   

So to the film. I won’t even dream of trying to place Danny Craig in whatever position he deserves in the Bond-ian pantheon and just give a summary. Although except for the names of the bad guys and who plays the eye candy all of which could have been photocopied from a film review of the first cinematic Bond film Doctor No. (I will say that the role of eye candy had gotten better with time giving the young women a more professional role as here with Lea Seydoux as a psychiatrist and more decisive part in doing in the bad guys). This time Spectre is back in the total coverage intelligence racket with a front guy who is a high ranking member of MI6  called “C” by Bond looking for the main chance to use the new technology to gain power and profit. The go round this time involves the leader of Spectre Blofeld, played by Christoph Waltz who turned out to have been the kid whose father raised Bond after he had been orphaned. So a scorched earth quasi-sibling rivalry. 

Going through a million escapades Jimmy and that talented shrink fold the bad guys’ plans without much difficulty even though their fire-power was vastly greater than Jimmy’s. Nice cars, nice gal, nice finish where Jimmy walks away rather than waste the bad guy Blofeld although “C” got blasted to kingdom come when Jimmy decided to blow the joint up. Ho-hum this one is for the holy goofs in the film critic business to dissect.