Shaken, not stirred

Spectre is the 24th film in the Bond franchise, the fourth starring Daniel Craig, the second directed by Sam Mendes, and the first at not much of anything. Nothing new to report, in other words. It probably delivers what the die-hard fans want, but it is not like Casino Royale or Skyfall (no one talks about Quantum of Solace, by the way, because it’s assumed everyone involved was drunk) as it doesn’t deliver to those of us who never liked Bond, but then discovered that we did. Where has Bond’s interior landscape gone? Where is his woundedness? Where is the emotional heft? Who might we actually care about here?

At least we open quietly, with Bond lying back in a meadow, simply watching the clouds float by… I’m kidding, of course. We open with an action sequence set in Mexico City during the Day of the Dead. It’s a set piece that sees our hero blow up a building and loop-the-loop in a helicopter, and it’s filmed by Mendes as a continuous five-minute tracking shot, which other reviewers have gone wild for, but I’m kind of over prolonged tracking shots. (The Player famously opens with an eight-minute tracking shot; Birdman is a single 100-minute tracking shot.) And then it’s to London, to discover that Judi Dench’s M has left a message from beyond the grave and it’s not ‘please look after my cat’ even though that’s a film I’d like to see. I’d like to see Bond looking after M’s cat, or performing everyday tasks generally, such as picking up his dry-cleaning or finally getting through to British Gas. ‘The name’s Bond. James Bond. I do not know my mother’s maiden name as she died when I was very little. How about the first school I attended?’