Review Tuesday: SPECTRE

After getting a message from beyond the grave, James Bond uncovers a crime organization that has its tentacles into everything. 

I have been a fan of James Bond for a while. The books by Ian Fleming were clever and to the point. The movies have been around longer than I have. But I must admit that my appreciation only occurred  fairly recently. It was a good time as they were starting all over with Daniel Craig as 007. While Daniel is physically closer to what Bond should be like, he starts off older then Bond was  while considering retirement, which was also at the time Fleming died.

So now we're up to the 24th film in the franchise, and the fourth with Daniel Craig as James Bond as he is introduced to his classic nemesis, Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) and his crime syndicate SPECTRE (from the books it was an acronym of Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion but wasn't explained that way in this film). I know a lot of men were looking forward to Monica Bellucci being in this film, but she had maybe 2 minutes of screen time. They were lovely, but brief.

The big evil plot was SPECTRE trying to take over databases around the world. He who controls the information controls the world. It just seemed rather too easy for James with the assistance of Madeline Swan (played by Léa Seydoux) to destroy the headquarters and escape. 

The biggest complaints about this movie have been that the evil plot wasn't so impressive, and there were no knock-your-socks-off action scenes. 

I found the movie to be fine. It was straight-forward and entertaining. It came out at a perfect time when there was nothing else to see and capitalized on action deprived audiences.

AMAZON
IMDB

Predictions / Spoilers

• It was previously said that Daniel Craig would not return for "Bond 25" but he has since taken that back. SPECTRE ended with Blofeld being arrested and Bond quitting. He does go back for his Aston Martin and drives off with the lovely Madeline Swan. If the writers wanted to be clever, they could take a page from the books and have Blofeld (who will no doubt escape) kill Madeline in an attempt at revenge against Bond, forcing the agent back into service.