Though it was hugely hyped up, especially following on the heels of Skyfall, one of the most financially and critically successful James Bond movies ever, Spectre wasn’t quite as great as everyone hoped. It simply left a lot of people flat and didn’t bring anything new to the table for the franchise that’s been going for more than 50 years. Given the less than optimal results, you probably knew this was coming, but Spectre got its very own Honest Trailer today.
The latest offering from Screen Junkies picks Spectre apart in typically brutal fashion. I actually enjoyed the movie well enough—it’s likely the worst of the Daniel Craig-era, and it’s little more than paint-by-numbers Bond, but that’s still more entertaining than most movies out there. Still, even with that, a lot of the points in this video are spot on and warranted.
Spectre does have one of the best openings to a James Bond adventure in some time. It’s the kind of scene that if I randomly run across on cable, even years from now, I’ll stop what I’m doing to watch. The problem is, the rest of the movie fails to live up to that promise. After three-minutes of "tentacle porn," and Sam Smith’s much-maligned theme song, Spectre is really just a rehash of the most obvious tropes and cliché’s associated with the super spy.
You’ve got the sweet car, the awesome spy gadgets we all wish we were cool enough to have but would probably hurt ourselves with, the catch phrases we all know well, the attractive women without much characterization beyond what they look like, and more. Spectre really just runs emptily through the steps without doing anything different than its predecessors.
Spectre often gets compared to the goofy Roger Moore James Bond films ("if Roger Moore was a mopey dick trying to get fired from his own movie), and the fun, exciting feel doesn’t ever quite mesh with the grittier portrayal of the character that has been the hallmark of Daniel Craig’s tenure in the suit.
Perhaps the most complained about element of the entire movie is how Spectre went to great lengths to conceal the identity of the villain, despite how obvious it was to fans. Christoph Waltz and everyone else swore up and down, time and time again, that he was most definitely not playing supervillain Ersnst Stavro Blofeld. Well, we all know how that turned out, it was another, "Benedict Cumberbatch is not Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness" moment.
Again, I understand all these issues, but, all in all, I still enjoyed Spectre well enough. How about you?
