On the Big Screen: SPECTRE (2015)

 

Almost from the beginning, James Bond moviemakers have challenged themselves to top their opening action scenes. For his second consecutive outing as a Bond director, and Daniel Craig's fourth in the star role, Sam Mendes raises the bar very high. Spectre opens with a spectacular sequence set during the Day of the Dead festivities in Mexico City. CGI-enhanced tracking shots follow a skull-masked man who proves to be James Bond 007 through the parading crowds, into an apartment for an apparent romantic tryst, then out and up to the rooftops to make a sniper's nest for an assassination that goes catastrophically wrong. But this is all build-up for the real set piece when Bond chases his quarry into a public square where a helicopter has landed to rescue the quarry. Bond invites himself on board and commences fighting with both the quarry and the pilot as the helicopter careens over the square above panicked multitudes fleeing below.

Mendes can't top it. He isn't helped by the fact that two commercial campaigns have spoiled much of one of the other big scenes, a mountain chase in which Bond must pursue kidnappers downhill in an eventually wingless plane. Nor is he helped by a team of four writers who seem collectively committed to evoking or echoing many franchise highlights -- the Day of the Dead stuff is reminiscent of Live and Let Die and any mountain chase begs comparison to On Her Majesty's Secret Service -- or else to making as generic a James Bond film as possible. They made very little effort to creating truly interesting villains, failing to notice that the most interesting of them is the one who probably ranks third and last with the audience and definitely falls in that slot for writers and director. Even then, this tertiary villain -- I presume people will rank him below the Big Bad and the Oddjob-style enforcer -- is hardly an original concept. Nor is Spectre's main plot. If the previous Mendes-Craig effort, Skyfall, reminded people of Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight with its nihilist villain and his I-want-to-get-caught scheme, Spectre unavoidably echoes the Russo brothers' Captain America: The Winter Soldier with its device of an all-pervasive surveillance system promoted by intelligence agencies but promoting the agenda of a shadowy criminal organization, not to mention an antagonist from the hero's distant past.

Yes, everything has to be personal in modern genre movies, and with that mandate in mind the Spectre writers have succeeded in utterly trivializing a canonical villain. They do this despite an awesomely suspenseful intro at a conspirators' conclave, in which the banal reportage of evil achievements is interrupted by the master's arrival. The master remains in shadowy silence at the head of the table, cocking his head slightly to listen to his advisers as others at the table wait in obvious dread of whatever he may say. But then he reveals himself as Christoph Waltz and the effect is ruined. Increasingly, Waltz seems like another Michael Madsen, capable of magic when touched by Tarantino's wand but otherwise insufferable. He's the second lazy casting choice for a master villain in a row following Skyfall's recruitment of Javier (Anton Chigurh) Bardem. It didn't use to be that you had to prove yourself a master movie villain in order to play a Bond villain; doing the Bond movie actually would punch your ticket. But Mendes and his producers have been as unimaginative in their casting as they have proved cliched in their plotting. If Waltz gives a puerile performance (his catchphrase, for Gad's sake, is "coo-coo") he's only sinking to the writers' level. The motivation his character is given is an insult to the actor, the audience, and to Ian Fleming, but it's just the sort of thing writers today think profound because it's, you know, personal. If anything, the personal is the opposite of the profound in this sort of picture. And it's not as if the Spectre writers can't do impersonal, though that's no credit to them. It's one thing to waste Christoph Waltz because you're not Quentin Tarantino, but making something out of Dave Bautista shouldn't have been so tricky, and yet the writers waste him also. He was cast, if I recall right, shortly after Guardians of the Galaxy opened last year to prove what filmmakers could do by tapping into some of Bautista's amped-up wrestler's charisma. Seeing that, the Spectre team somehow could only think of him as another sort of Oddjob and allowed him a single word of dialogue in the whole picture while playing a character who's named in the credits but not in the actual movie. Bautista does as much as he can to suggest some intelligence, or at least some powers of observation, in this mute brute, but he's not that good an actor yet and, left without the sort of cool gimmick that the original Oddjob got, he ends up an oversized yet empty suit.

That leaves the third villain, the new boss of both Bond and M (Ralph Fiennes). Literally third, "C" (Andrew Scott) is the new overlord of British intelligence and a collaborator in the global "Nine Eyes" program. C and M's dialogues play out whatever passes for a theme here, the theme being that granting certain individuals license to kill is ethically superior to automated surveillance and indiscriminate drone deployment. Apparently the personal factor makes the difference, as M explains: a license to kill is a license not to kill. It sounds like an almost Orwellian paradox but James Bond presumably proves the point every time. For what it's worth, Fiennes and the rest of the Bond support team -- Naomie Harris as Moneypenny and Ben Whishaw as Q -- are the clearest pluses this time around, all improving on their Skyfall work. Fiennes in particular follows in Judi Dench's footsteps (she gets a brief video encore here) as a more active M who even gets an important fight scene of his own. They are, in fact, more appealing characters than the lead. It's hard not to read Daniel Craig's now-infamous comments, since partly contradicted, about preferring suicide to continuing in the role into the role as he plays it in Spectre. He breathes life into a few quips but seems indifferent if not contemptuous toward the "personal" storyline linking Bond to Waltz's villain, while his required romances are by-the-numbers stuff. Whether he changes his mind about continuing or not, it may be time for EON Productions to be rid of him, if not the whole creative crew of his series, so we can have a true 21st century Bond who brings the appropriate enjoyment to his 21st century work. The three previous Craig pictures and the writers' dogged insistence on continuity trail and drag Spectre the way that little train of barrels handicaps Bautista's villain at a crucial moment. You can tell that Spectre was meant as some sort of celebration of all the things that make Bond pictures distinctive, but the result looks like an official pastiche if not a self-parody. It's still acceptable as a mindless popcorn movie with some good action scenes, but despite its pretensions it's nothing more than that.

SKYFALL (2012)

Once upon a time James Bond 007 was in Turkey fighting an assassin atop a moving train when his assistant accidentally shot him. Bond fell from a great height into the water, but he did not die. The river goddess grabbed him with her great hand and Bond was pulled through ... I guess we must call it her hole. He saw many strange things and when he emerged miraculously unhurt -- or minimally hurt -- he took to drink. He could afford to drink because he had a bank account unknown to and untrackable by MI6, his employer. While he was drinking he saw on television that someone had set off a bomb at MI6 headquarters. Now he felt bad. He came home and swore to find the bad people who did this thing. The same assistant went with him but didn't shoot him any more. Bond found the very bad man who had the bomb planted on a mysterious island that looked like Inception had been filmed there. This bad man told Bond a story about rats and shot a woman. Then he was captured. The bad man had been an agent like James Bond 007 but had been turned over to the Chinese. This hurt his feelings, and he became a supervillain. He got all Hannibal Lecter on his guards and ran away. Bond tried to catch him but the bad man dropped a subway train on top of him. Bond got away. The bad man tried to shoot the old lady who used to be his boss because she threw him to the Chinese and he had mommy issues. Bond put the old lady in an old car and drove to Scotland. He found a fat old man in his house and they got all Home Alone about the place because the bad man was coming with a lot more bad men and a helicopter....

Skyfall (that's the house as well as the title) can seem a bit phantasmagorical, thanks in part to Roger Deakins's Oscar-nominated cinematography and a trippy title sequence set to Adele's Oscar-nominated song. It's the first Bond film in 50 years to boast an Oscar-winning director, Sam Mendes of American Beauty fame, who had directed star Daniel Craig previously in Road to Perdition. If that all makes the film more pictorially ambitious than its predecessors, the story remains as much a comic-book affair as others in the series. Bond's resilience and the villain Silva's resources are simply unbelievable. Yet this was supposed to be a more serious Bond film in the way Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy were more serious comic-book films. The creators have cited The Dark Knight in particular as an influence on their project, Nolan's blockbuster enabling them to make Skyfall "darker" and more relevant while remaining essentially a fantasy. There's a convergence at work, since Nolan's most recent films show plenty of Bond influences, from the ski-slope firefights of Inception to Bane as an amalgam of Goldfinger and Oddjob in one person. Both Nolan and the Skyfall team partake of a modern (or postmodern) rejection of the normalization of genre heroism. Nolan's films could not simply be three adventures of Batman, but had to be a sequence of life-changing events culminating in Bruce Wayne's apparently permanent retirement from crimefighting. Likewise, before Mendes came along the first Craig Bond film, Casino Royale, was basically "Bond Begins," a reboot and origin story for the storied franchise, and the first sequel, Quantum of Solace, picked up immediately where Casino Royale left off. It's not enough now, it seems, to show us a hero and what he does, with the understanding that he'll always do it. You might think the scale of production might have something to do with it, but you see the same or related phenomena in other media. Long gone is the lone hero who visits a place, meets some people, does his thing and moves on. That doesn't satisfy in our age of "shipping." We want to see relationships and we expect them to evolve constantly. Obviously you can argue that something is gained but something else is lost. To a certain extent that something is story or, more correctly, plot. 

Plot matters less, and writers need less creative ingenuity, when their stories are basically about the hero(es) and his/their relationships, and this brings us to how hackneyed an affair Skyfall's story is. Mendes has basically invited us to see the disgruntled Silva as Bond's Joker, and in Javier (Anton Chigurh) Bardem he had an actor apparently up for the challenge that entailed. But I found him dull, and Bardem's almost whimsical performance set the wrong tone immediately. Silva is one of those villains who have no real motive except to make a point to the hero, his having something to do with the treachery of their common "mommy," Judi Dench's M, and their own shared identity as cannibalistic rats. I'm not the biggest Bond expert, but have the stakes in a Bond movie ever been lower? The plot of the picture is that Silva has acquired one of those fatally compromising lists of undercover field agents that spy agencies are always compiling and putting into dangerously portable form, and is going to publicize the names on YouTube until M thinks on her sins. So some spies we'll never know are going to get killed, while Silva probably does more collateral damage in his desperate attempts to get M. We're supposed to believe he's a criminal mastermind, the evidence being, as is often the case, that he allows himself to be captured so he can strike from nearer the heart of the enemy. But while I invoked Dr. Lecter above in discussing Silva's escape we never see how he does it -- there must be a deleted scene somewhere having to do with his dentures -- and we never see Silva get into a proper fight scene with Bond. His demise is particularly, pathetically lame, though Bardem does well enacting his character's (and the actor's own?) annoyance at how easily he goes down. Silva's best scene is the most traditionally Bondian, on an urban island he evacuated with a contamination hoax, when he forces a shaky Bond to play William Tell with one of this film's Bond Girls. Apart from that, Bardem is this film' s biggest disappointment.

But if Skyfall doesn't live to its portentous hype, it really isn't that bad a Bond film. It has some extraordinary spectacle, from Silva's island to a sequence in a Shanghai skyscraper to that opening railroad chase. Some of the action on the train might earn the filmmakers a tip of Buster Keaton's porkpie hat. The acting is nothing great, with Craig somewhat more wooden than before -- though some of this is a principled refusal to be as indignant as Silva wants Bond to be -- and Dench no longer plausible as a powerful bureaucrat. Naomie Harris as that hapless field agent who shoots but later saves Bond steals plenty of scenes, and her own final revelation is a cute moment fitting this film's commemorative aspect. In the end, Skyfall has it both ways rather like The Dark Knight did, giving the hero a life-changing event but really leaving the legend in what we might recognize as a timeless default state. A counterpart to The Dark Knight Rises really isn't an option for the franchise, so where Eon Productions goes from here should be interesting. That leaves Skyfall as a Bond film for our cultural moment, and as long as you don't expect too much from the bad guy, a fairly diverting one as well.

In Brief: QUANTUM OF SOLACE (2008)

Upon its release, Marc Forster's film was accused of sins of commission and omission. Some said it was too much like the Jason Bourne movies in its frantic pacing, and that it virtually plagiarized the Bournes in some scenes. I can't judge. The fact is, I haven't seen any of those films. What can I say? I'd always understood that Robert Ludlum's novels were crap, so why should I see films based on them? Even the mighty Paul Greenglass's participation in two of them hasn't swayed me. So I know them only by reputation and from the clips I've seen in advertising. But anyway, I wasn't aware that someone had patented fast-paced action or chase scenes. I'll grant that the chases in Quantum of Solace are almost too fast-paced, or at least too briskly edited. The film as a whole gallops along that way, coming in at well under two hours. Whether that's in imitation of Bourne I can't say.

But I suppose some critics also indict the attitude of the new James Bond film. They may feel that by going rogue as he seems to for most of the film Bond is imitating Bourne's adversarial relationship to his employers, but I don't know if this is really a new approach for Bond. If there's an attitude problem, this may have something to do with the perceived sin of omission, the film's alleged failure to be like a James Bond movie. That was the feeling of some reviewers, Roger Ebert most notably, and it's as if they were willing to give Martin Campbell's Casino Royale a pass as an interesting experiment or one-time-only variation on the usual theme, but expected Daniel Craig to be a proper Bond thereafter. I understand what these critics were looking for, but I don't know if the producers could give them the sort of film they seem to want without it looking like a great piece of camp to the rest of us. They wanted suaveness and more witticisms from Bond, and a villain larger than life, or at least larger than Mathieu Amalric's quite plausible corporate menace and the shadowy Quantum organization behind him. For all I know they wanted Dr. Evil, but for my part I tire quickly of the taunting and charismatic master villain who gets the good lines. And it should be clear now that Eon Productions isn't interested, for now, in doing that kind of Bond film.

But without any memory of the Bourne films to judge the new Bond against, I was impressed by the continuities with past episodes. This picture trots the globe as ardently as any, serving up plenty of pure touristy spectacle from the Palio race in Siena to an eccentric staging of Tosca. Quantum of Solace looks as lavish as you could want unless you're looking for Amalric's Dominic Greene to have a super-cool headquarters and a private army to match. Meanwhile, Craig can wear formal clothes as well as any Bond, though he still isn't the conoisseur of booze that he ought to be. In one scene he doesn't even know what he's drinking. Maybe he doesn't bed enough Bond girls by traditional standards, but there are still plenty for us to ogle. The introduction of Quantum as the modern equivalent of SPECTRE speaks for itself as a continuation of tradition.

Nevertheless, there's clearly a new attitude, a hard-boiledness, that's going to stick around a while. Perhaps this shows the influence of Paul Haggis, Clint Eastwood's protege and partner in purveying cinematic darkness, who co-wrote the script here as he did with Casino Royale. But the producers run the show on Bond, so this is what they want above all. You could not ask for a stronger visual statement of the new approach than the death of Strawberry Fields, the only character in the picture with one of those allegedly cute names, in darkest parody of a famous moment from Goldfinger.

It's the kiss of death from Mr. Oilfinger!

For some reason, the production seemed to be in a hurry this time, the studio crowing about getting Quantum into theaters a month earlier than previously planned. The film does look rushed, and is perhaps shorter than it should be. If people left asking why they should care about the Bolivian water supply, it was up to the filmmakers to take more time to make the stakes more meaningful for the casual viewer. Some cartoonish exaggeration might have been helpful here; I'm fairly certain an old school Bond film would have ended with that dam in the desert bursting and everyone imperiled by the flood that followed. Not that the actual climax was sedate or anything -- but I'm just saying.

Quantum of Solace shows the growing pains of the Bond series as the producers and their creative talent grope toward redefining their franchise for our time. For all that I think it was a good try and a solid action film. I don't watch the Bond films in a nostalgic mood unless I'm looking at old ones, so I didn't miss certain things that others did. I look forward to seeing the series continue to evolve, unless word of mouth frightens the bosses into chickening out.