Spectre

Bottom line: This is a quarter of a billion dollars and two-and-a-half hours of real silliness. That’s what they spent making this thing, and that doesn’t even count the publicity. This franchise is now saddled with so much stuff they have to get in … the can-you-top-this opening credits. “Bond. James Bond.” The Bond girls, three this time. The pretty tame sex scenes with the Bond girls. The new gadgets and cars. The by-play with whoever is Q this time around, and many, many other things … that it takes a full half hour just to fill the formula. Then we get the hair-raising special effects, and they quickly go way over the top. I don’t demand actual realism (though plausibility, as in the Bourne films, is a real plus), but there are things just too ludicrous to credit. By the time Bond got in an airplane and chased some bad guys on the ground, touched down on a ski slope, somehow managed to keep it steady as the wings were ripped off, then walked away from the crash without a scratch, I was dozing. Stupid, just plain stupid.

Which is a shame as there as an actual good opening scene, a long, long take following him through a crowd of happy skeletons in the main square of Mexico City on the Day of the Dead. No way of telling exactly many of the thousands and thousands of people in that scene were real and how many CGI, of course. But it must have been fabulously expensive to film. And I think that Daniel Craig is the second-best Bond ever. But this film stinks up the theater.