![]() ![]() (The ones who aren't dead are long retired, but you know what I mean.) But because Mendes is a fancy-pants artiste with an Oscar on his mantle (for the loathsome American Beauty), he feels obligated to proffer a sluggish metacommentary on the iconography of classic Bond. Any of the journeymen directors responsible for the majority of the 23 previous Eon Productions Bond pictures could've handled this. Hey, it had to happen sometime.Īnyway, now would've been a fine time to drop all that baggage and back story and just send Craig's definitive Bond on a fabulous globetrotting adventure. So potent was the nostalgia high it induced that not only did it become the series' all-time top earner, with $1.1 billion in receipts, but no one seemed especially troubled by the fact that in it, the bad guy won. He did a great job with Skyfall, juggling modernity and sentiment in a manner befitting the franchise's 50th-anniversary installment. ![]() That friction between topicality and nostalgia makes for a gorgeous and dreamlike but ultimately frustrating Bond film. There are also at least two too many callbacks to Casino Royale, the excellent 2006 reboot wherein newly minted 007 Daniel Craig gave the character a vulnerability and dimension he'd never had before - and, on the evidence of his granite-faced performance in Spectre, will probably never have again. As with any aging rock band, the set list overwhelmingly favors the enterprise's first decade: There are echoes of Bond's train fight with a hulking Robert Shaw in From Russia with Love, his combat-optimized Aston Martin (and white dinner jacket) from Goldfinger, the spectacularly designed villain's lair from You Only Live Twice, and the stunning Swiss alpine outpost from On Her Majesty's Secret Service. His new movie pleads the case for the hard-drinking spy's relevance in the era of drone assassinations and WikiLeaks even more loudly than Skyfall did (and with far less eloquence), while being paradoxically determined to reprise all of Bond's Greatest Hits. But in the hands of director Sam Mendes, who made 2012's Skyfall and the new Spectre, there's a troubling new mission requirement: Each 007 adventure must be progressively more nostalgic and reverential, too. ![]() Daniel Craig returns as James Bond in Spectre.Ī million years ago in the 1960s, the only mandate for each new James Bond film was that it be grander, stranger and more exotic than the last. ![]()
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