Spectre’ Review: James Bond Sequel Has License to Thrill

“The dead are alive” are the very first words printed onscreen in Spectre, the 24th and far-from-last James Bond adventure. It’s a statement that could be viewed as a preemptive spoiler, a sly double-bluff or a swaggering boast from a death-defying franchise that, following the soaring success of Skyfall, couldn’t be in ruder health. Sam Mendes’ second consecutive Bond outing again passes its physical with flying colors: Ricocheting from London to Rome to Morocco across action sequences of deliriously daft extravagance, the pic accumulates a veritable Pompeii of mighty, crumbling structures. What’s missing is the unexpected emotional urgency of Skyfall, as the film sustains its predecessor’s nostalgia kick with a less sentimental bent. A wealth of iconography — both incidental and integral — from the series’ founding chapters is revived here, making Spectre a particular treat for 007 nerds, and a businesslike blast for everyone else. Spectre-cular b.o. awaits, though it remains to be seen whether the Skyfall is the limit.

The series-crowning crossover success of Skyfall three years ago — yielding not just $1 billion worldwide but breathless reviews, two Oscars and even a Best British Film BAFTA — places Spectre in a tricky returning position. The franchise may have been a consistent performer over 53 years, but never before has it been saddled with the prestige-pic expectations that the new film is now notionally expected to meet. With Mendes’ tony cachet once more in place (minus the co-piloting of revered d.p. Roger Deakins), and a hefty (if not entirely justified) runtime of 148 minutes, Spectre outwardly appears to be shooting for equivalently grandiose status.

Yet even before the opening credits (accompanied by Sam Smith’s dreary, melody-averse theme song, thankfully the least propulsive thing here) are cued up, one senses that Mendes and producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli have, somewhat paradoxically, set out to surprise by resetting the status quo — albeit with a few administrative complications. The death of Judi Dench’s M at the climax of Skyfall raised the personal stakes for the usually impermeable Bond in a fashion that can’t be automatically repeated one instalment later.

The indefatigable agent’s solution, and in turn the film’s, is to get stoically back to work almost as if if nothing had happened, and let the baggage emerge where it may. And while Daniel Craig’s reputation as the series’ sternest Bond stands intact when the ride — rumored to be his last — is over, his half-smile count is higher than usual. A handful of wily quips, meanwhile, point to the addition of rough-and-tumble Brit playwright Jez Butterworth to the sturdy Skyfall writing team of John Logan, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.

Consequently, there’s a little more room in Spectre for Bond’s customary hobbies — globe-trotting, red-blooded lady-killing and cold-blooded not-lady-killing — than in the comparatively contemplative Skyfall. The tone is set by an enthrallingly ludicrous and expensively extraneous opening sequence, set in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead, that ranks among the great 007 intros. Weaving through the jubilant masses, Hoyte van Hoytema’s dust-veiled camera alights on Bond in masked skeleton costume, luring a local bombshell (Miss Bala’s Stephanie Sigman) back to his hotel room before the quickest of quick changes finds him suited, booted and planting a hit on venal Italian mafioso Sciarra (Alessandro Cremona) from the rooftop. Cue explosions, architectural carnage and vertigo-inducing physical combat in a helicopter careering perilously over the city’s crowded Zocalo square.

The narrative takeaway from all this eye-popping activity turns out to be rather puny: In winning the fistfight, Bond secures his opponent’s ring, engraved with a telling insignia. It’s a typically circuitous outcome in a film that, certainly in its MacGuffin-stacked opening hour, feels somewhat underplotted: Large expanses of “Spectre” play as diverting but diversionary action travelogue, as one transitory character in an exotic locale leads our hero to another, in pursuit of opponents who don’t really get to bare their teeth until the halfway mark.

Back in London, Bond is grounded for his unauthorized Mexican hijinks by Ralph Fiennes’ exasperated replacement M. The new boss’s crankiness is forgivable, given other professional worries on his plate — most of them involving Brylkreem-slick new MI5 boss Max Denbigh (a splendid Andrew Scott), codenamed C, who is spearheading a reorganization of Britain’s intelligence departments that could see the entire 00 programme shut down. Bond considerately stays out of his hair by flagrantly disregarding his orders, jetting off to Rome and, professional that he is, promptly seducing Sciarra’s not-so-grieving widow (an underused Monica Bellucci). While there, he also gains access to a secret meeting of a shady global cooperative, presided over with calmly lethal authority by the mysterious Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz).