Last call for Daniel Craig as Bond. Just about to settle into domestic bliss with Lea Seydoux from Spectre, all it takes is one idiot with a bionic eye attacking him on orders from Blofeld (Christoph Waltz, whose role in this feels both critical and marginal, and doesn't really give him enough to make it feel worthwhile) to put a seed of doubt in Bond's mind.
So he puts her on a train and it's off to a solitary retirement in Jamaica, which remains neither solitary or retired as there's still something going on with SPECTRE and a missing plague scientist. This inevitably brings Bond back into contact with Seydoux, as well as with his replacement in MI-6 (played by Lashana Lynch), plus a mysterious killer (Rami Malek) that's more obsessed with Seydoux and Waltz than Craig.
Alex and I were trying to figure out how Bond afforded the expansive home he was living in for his retirement. It looked really nice. Does Her Majesty's Secret Service have an excellent retirement package, because they so rarely have to pay out? We were also wondering how Ralph Fiennes' M could say with a straight face that Bond dropped so far off the grid they weren't sure if he was alive, when Lynch and the CIA seemed to find him effortlessly.
But Lynch's 007 is very skilled and mostly all business, just a hint of the inexperience we saw with Craig in Casino Royale that allowed him to be outflanked on occasion. She wasn't read for Ana de Armas' character's maneuver with the car, that's for sure. It's nicely done, where Lynch is clearly annoyed at the old-timer expecting to be deferred to when she's got things figured out (a bit like Craig and Judi Dench, albeit that was a boss-employee relationship), and Craig alternates between being impressed and amused, because he knows there's still more to learn. Hopefully her learning curve involves less getting dropkicked through windows and nearly blown up than his did.
I couldn't take Primo - the bionic eye henchman - seriously. Even knowing the gimmick henchman never actually kills Bond, the guy got choked out by a concussed Bond in their first confrontation, 5 minutes into the movie, in what felt like a 20-second fight. That kind of poor showing erased him as even an interesting roadblock from then on. Heck, the fake State Department guy (who Bond nicknames "The Book of Mormon") did slightly better.
The movie's too long. Even as the conclusion to Craig's run as Bond - and I chuckled at Bond becoming literal poison to the people he loves - 140+ minutes is too long. Maybe it's trying to set things up for Lynch to headline the 007 franchise going forward, in some buddy partnership with de Armas' character? Because I think they could have cut Armas' character otherwise and pared down much of the scene in Cuba. That felt like Blofeld's scheme, but he feels so ancillary to the overall proceedings, why are we bothering? He set things in motion, long ago, but now his part is over. He's a spectator.
We don't even see any satisfaction on Malek's part about taking revenge on Blofeld, or taking back what he considers his. Maybe because he's too busy being a man of vision, but it again raises the question of why the movie expends as much time on it as it does. Because Bond allowed Blofeld to get in his head, I suppose.
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