Movie Review: Spectre – No License to Kis..!
So there it was. Much awaited post the success of Skyfall, the next 007 movie starring Daniel Craig yet again as the british intelligence agent- James Bond. The expectations were quite high. With M (Judi Dench) dying in the previous installment and the intelligence establishment under uncertainity , much was dependant on how things would lay out next. Hence the script had to be equally good if not better than Skyfall and tighter too. Well this is where exactly, Spectre let’s you down.
What starts off superbly, filming a death parade in Mexico (day of the dead), followed by an amazingly shot hand to hand combat in a revolving chopper, loses its steam midway. Bond, this time around, is after an organization called the Spectre .An organization, which from a long time, has been wanting to rule the world through an intelligence gathering system created by it. And to make the world leaders fall in line, it uses terror and its moles/contacts in high offices. Franz Oberhauser (Christopher Waltz) is the big boss of Spectre. When i heard that he has been cast as the next bond villain, was excited to see him in this one. Given his acting skills and a penchant for playing different characters , one expected probably the best bond villain to come out through Spectre. However throughout the movie, one is left wondering on how an actor of his caliber could be so underutilized. It’s almost criminal. Dave bautista, as the beefed up assassin, gets a solid entry and even a well shot fist fight in the train with Bond but then that’s about it. At the end of it, worse is you remember these scenes and not much of the Franz-Bond interaction, so one can imagine the extent to which the main villain of the film has been underplayed by the script. A side kick gets more time!
A hero is only as good as the villain he destroys and by seriously undermining this basic fact of war, Sam Mendes, the director of this flick, makes bond look ordinary and sometimes even silly. No reason is given as to how and why Franz became the boss of Spectre and then virtually Spectre itself. Looks like the writers were in a mood to take the audiences for a ride and post the success of Skyfall, felt adding a few mysterious elements of Bond’s childhood here and there was enough to strike an emotional chord and rake in the moolah. Well that doesn’t work, if not supported by a gripping storyline and here it looks like most hindi movies of the 80’s and 90’s, where everything revolved around the hero, logic got tossed around at one’s will and all that mattered was a happy ending! Well that is not the stuff bond movies are made of. If the makers wanted to dish this out to us, we can surely send more DVD copies of our Bollywood films to them, of the same genre , next time around. Maybe that will trigger off the required amount of creativity then.
Even the bond girls both Monica Bellucci and Lea Seydoux, get silly, stereotypical lines and are wasted. Especially Bellucci, who thanks to the Indian Censor board, gets a further deep cut in her already short cameo. Pahlaj Nihalani’s ( current chairperson of Indian censor board) scissors moved fast than bond here! So much so that the person next to me sadly remarked during the blink and miss scene saying-“Shit yaar, Kaat diya”! Maybe all his hopes of atleast getting some paisa vasool crashed badly. Ouch!
The 'Writings on the wall’ very clearly for this one. It’s going down because in this installment, bond neither has the logic to kill nor his famous license to Kis..(snap snap)!
What starts off superbly, filming a death parade in Mexico (day of the dead), followed by an amazingly shot hand to hand combat in a revolving chopper, loses its steam midway. Bond, this time around, is after an organization called the Spectre .An organization, which from a long time, has been wanting to rule the world through an intelligence gathering system created by it. And to make the world leaders fall in line, it uses terror and its moles/contacts in high offices. Franz Oberhauser (Christopher Waltz) is the big boss of Spectre. When i heard that he has been cast as the next bond villain, was excited to see him in this one. Given his acting skills and a penchant for playing different characters , one expected probably the best bond villain to come out through Spectre. However throughout the movie, one is left wondering on how an actor of his caliber could be so underutilized. It’s almost criminal. Dave bautista, as the beefed up assassin, gets a solid entry and even a well shot fist fight in the train with Bond but then that’s about it. At the end of it, worse is you remember these scenes and not much of the Franz-Bond interaction, so one can imagine the extent to which the main villain of the film has been underplayed by the script. A side kick gets more time!
A hero is only as good as the villain he destroys and by seriously undermining this basic fact of war, Sam Mendes, the director of this flick, makes bond look ordinary and sometimes even silly. No reason is given as to how and why Franz became the boss of Spectre and then virtually Spectre itself. Looks like the writers were in a mood to take the audiences for a ride and post the success of Skyfall, felt adding a few mysterious elements of Bond’s childhood here and there was enough to strike an emotional chord and rake in the moolah. Well that doesn’t work, if not supported by a gripping storyline and here it looks like most hindi movies of the 80’s and 90’s, where everything revolved around the hero, logic got tossed around at one’s will and all that mattered was a happy ending! Well that is not the stuff bond movies are made of. If the makers wanted to dish this out to us, we can surely send more DVD copies of our Bollywood films to them, of the same genre , next time around. Maybe that will trigger off the required amount of creativity then.
Even the bond girls both Monica Bellucci and Lea Seydoux, get silly, stereotypical lines and are wasted. Especially Bellucci, who thanks to the Indian Censor board, gets a further deep cut in her already short cameo. Pahlaj Nihalani’s ( current chairperson of Indian censor board) scissors moved fast than bond here! So much so that the person next to me sadly remarked during the blink and miss scene saying-“Shit yaar, Kaat diya”! Maybe all his hopes of atleast getting some paisa vasool crashed badly. Ouch!
The 'Writings on the wall’ very clearly for this one. It’s going down because in this installment, bond neither has the logic to kill nor his famous license to Kis..(snap snap)!
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