Spectre is one of Daniel Craig’s most divisive James Bond movies, but there’s still a lot to love in this bloated, clunky, borderline-incoherent 007 adventure. Craig’s era of the Bond franchise yielded some of the series’ best movies, and some of its worst. Craig kicked off his tenure in style with Casino Royale, a gritty reboot filling in Bond’s origin story, but it was a rocky road from there.
Skyfall and No Time to Die were both widely praised — the former for bringing some levity and escapism back to the franchise, and the latter for its bittersweet sense of finality — but Quantum of Solace and Spectre weren’t so lucky. Quantum of Solace’s critical panning was much-deserved, but Spectre is worth a second look.
Spectre Is A Big Streaming Hit On Netflix
Along with its sequel No Time to Die, Spectre has been a big streaming hit on Netflix. After giving the Bond franchise its first billion-dollar hit with Skyfall, director Sam Mendes was brought back to helm the next one. But, where Skyfall was a resounding success, Spectre was much more divisive.
Skyfall was hailed for finding the perfect middle ground between the gritty realism of Casino Royale and the pure escapism of classic Bond. It’s a bleak portrayal of Bond’s trauma, but it’s also a fun-filled spy caper with ludicrous gadgets and far-fetched action set-pieces. Spectre, on the other hand, was a lot more polarizing.
Along With Quantum Of Solace, Spectre Is One Of Daniel Craig’s Most Polarizing Bond Movies
Out of Craig’s five Bond movies, three of them were well-received and two of them were met with a more mixed reception. Casino Royale was lauded as one of the greatest action movies ever made, Skyfall was lauded as a return to form for the franchise, and No Time to Die was lauded as a fitting conclusion to Craig’s overall arc in the role.
But Quantum of Solace and Spectre were more polarizing. They both have the exact same Rotten Tomatoes score — a just-about-fresh rating of 63% — indicating that almost as many critics gave them a negative review as a positive one. But despite having the exact same ratio of positive-to-negative reviews, one of them is clearly a better movie.
Quantum of Solace is a genuinely bad movie, cobbled together without a finished script during the writers’ strike. It doesn’t have the distinctive feel of a Bond film; it feels more like a generic action thriller, and it’s not even a halfway-decent generic action thriller. But Spectre is more of a mixed bag. Yes, it has plenty of glaring flaws, but it also has a lot of redeeming qualities.
Spectre Abandoned The Winning 007 Formula
One of the biggest criticisms levied at Spectre is that it abandoned the winning Bond movie formula. That formula had kept the franchise going for more than 50 years at that point, but Spectre set out to copy what was working for other franchises at the time. Until Spectre, every Bond movie had been a standalone adventure.
There was some connective tissue between them, but the films focused primarily on their own standalone stories: a new mission, a new villain, a new love interest. This episodic format always worked a charm, but Spectre flipped that format on its head. It retroactively turned the Craig films into a serialized continuity instead of just telling another standalone episodic adventure.
At the time, this kind of serialization and worldbuilding had made the Marvel Cinematic Universe the most formidable force in Hollywood. But it didn’t really work for Bond, especially because the movies hadn’t been planned that way. Spectre went back and made Blofeld the architect behind the last three films, but the last three films weren’t written with that intention.
If Spectre had just told another episodic case-of-the-week story — even if that story involved introducing Blofeld as Craig’s big bad — it would’ve been much more successful than trying to cram the events of the previous films into a retroactive continuity. All that did was drag the movie down with needless retcons and exposition dumps.
Despite Its Flaws, There’s A Lot To Love In Spectre
The flaws in Spectre are obvious. The climactic showdown is the film’s least exciting action sequence when it should be the most exciting. The twist that Blofeld is Bond’s long-lost brother is so ridiculous and contrived that Austin Powers did it a decade earlier. But there’s a lot to love in this movie, too.
Dave Bautista gives one of the most brutal henchman performances in the franchise’s history as the nefarious Mr. Hinx. Christoph Waltz brings the same chilling menace to Blofeld that brought to his Oscar-winning role as S.S. Col. Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, and Ralph Fiennes is about the only actor who could replace Judi Dench as M.
Even in the worst Bond movies, you can usually expect to see some amazing action sequences, and Spectre is no different. From the opening Day of the Dead sequence to the chase sequence in Austria, Spectre is jam-packed with jaw-dropping action scenes that make up for all its retconning and expositing.