Either it's just a bad performance, or Mendes didn't know what he wanted from the character.įurther evidence of a confused director can be found in the torture scene. He seems uncomfortable in the costume, looking like Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II but without the threat. Having Bond and Blofield as adopted brothers is workable, but Waltz can't decide whether to play it as the Jew Hunter from Inglorious Basterds or as a straight-up pantomime. Christoph Waltz, meanwhile, is completely underwhelming as Blofeld. Sherlock's Andrew Scott waltzes through the whole film like he has "bad guy" tattooed on his forehead, but at least he's fully committed to what he is doing.
#The spectre film series#
Not every woman in Bond's life has to be helpless without him, and the series has been at its best when the women are equal to him - either in a fetishistic way, like Xenia Onatopp or Bambi and Thumper, or something more mature and three-dimensional. Dressing her in stockings is at best a nod back to Teri Hatcher in Tomorrow Never Dies and at worst just lazy fanservice.
Instead, she gets five minutes of screen time to look scared, sleep with Bond and then leave. The film has a great opportunity here, casting an older woman with the promise of a deeper relationship. Even if we put Léa Seydoux to one side, that still leaves us with Monicca Bellucci.
#The spectre film crack#
None of the women in Spectre are given a fair crack of the whip. For all the steps forward that the Daniel Craig era has taken, it still can't resist a damsel in distress. Madeleine Swann is written like two completely different people who have been composited one moment she's being icy cold, compelling and giving Bond a run for his money with a gun, the next she's being captured for the umpteenth time and needing to be rescued. The refusal to even hint at it is too constant a factor for it to be an accident it is as though the whole production threw up their hands, admitted that it was terrible, and then asked us to forget that it ever existed.Ī related problem is that the script for Spectre is deeply conflicted, especially when it comes to the film's female characters. Instead, Quantum of Solace has been practically airbrushed out of history besides the odd mention of Quantum, we get no reference to its plot and Dominic Greene is never seen on camera. You would imagine that any story which seeks to claim that the events of Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall were all an elaborate means to bring us to this point would place an equal weight on each instalment and the events therein. The first such problem is the amount of emphasis given to each of the previous films.
Spectre attempts to tie together the events of its predecessors with a story about chickens coming home to roost - and while there is much to applaud about Sam Mendes' film, it is also riddled with problems. Doctor Who, Sherlock and Star Wars have all shown that this is not an easy thing to pull off, and it's harder still to convince an audience that such an undertaking was always intentional. Since the franchise was effectively rebooted with Casino Royale, an approach more becoming of comic books has been employed: different writers and directors come in and somehow try to stitch all the character's actions together into an overarching narrative.
While this has kept the Bond series as a whole firmly in the realms of fantasy, it has allowed individual entries in the series to push for something more gritty or realistic if it works, it's embraced and carried forward, and if not the series reverts to type with very few tears. Modern audiences are asked to believe that the character has been the same age for more than 50 years, and the series has bent or tinkered with its conventions ever so slightly as the decades have rolled past in order to stay relevant. One of the most obvious characteristics of the Bond series is that each instalment of the franchise can sit on its own.
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