Ba-Ba-Ba-aaaaam!Spectre, the fourth Daniel Craig Bond film, and the second James Bond movie I have ever seen. My first being Skyfall. Now, I'm the type of guy who finds Spy movies to be dull and boring, but with the frenzied year 2015 has had with films such as The Kingsman, Spy, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Rogue Nation, I admit that I was feeling my prejudice to the Spy genre start to crumble. I enjoyed Rogue Nation and Spy, and I loved The Man from UNCLE and Kingsman, so I will admit that this was the first James Bond film where I was actually interested in going to see.
That said, after rewatching the trailer to decide if I wanted to see this in the theater, or wait until rental, my deciding factor to go see this film was the sole fact that Dave Bautista was being a bad guy, not THE bad guy, but A bad guy.
So the film opens with the Dia De Los Muertos festival in Mexico, and everyone is wearing skeleton masks, and you don't really know who the heck your following at the beginning, but because this was shot so beautifully your like "I'm hooked baby!" and then Bond is revealed and we see a really cool chase sequence........and that's where most of my enjoyment stopped. The beginning felt so mysterious and tension filled that by the time Bond has to go incognito and chase the bad guy around the world......it gets kinda boring. The only thing that holds me over from scene to scene is watching Dave Bautista playing Mr. Hinx.
Mr. Hinx is so terrifying as a villain, and he was like a force of nature as the only person able to hurt Bond, or at least smack him silly. And whenever he showed up you knew it was going to be a great action scene. I mean, this guy is like the shark from Jaws. He follows Bond silently, before he rears his ugly head and thrashing Bond to a pulp, but not quite because the good guy has to win. I'm sure everyone's been talking about this, but there is a train scene that is absolutely brutal to watch when Bond and Mr. Hinx are going at it old school. The only problem with this character wast he fact that he was underused.
It didn't help the film that I found Mr. Hinx, classified as a henchman, to be more of a threat to Bond than the actual bad guy. I don't even remember the real villain's name....yeah. He kept gloating and saying to Bond that he's been in his life in the shadows for a long time, but he never really backs up that claim with evidence. With the exception of one scene that really makes me regret my upcoming dentist appointment, I thought that the villain didn't need to be in it.
To make matters worse, this film is following the trend that big budget movies should be two and a half hours long, and unlike Skyfall, whenever Bond was chasing down clues I felt like they could have cut so much out of the film. In fact, I bet they could have cut out a good half hour, or make things shorter. I just didn't feel like there was enough of a hook to make me want to sit through two hours until a very......Hollywood ending.
I enjoyed the beginning of this film, and I loved watching Mr. Hinx at work, but I was drastically bored and felt like I was going through the motions of watching a film when I sat through this. Don't get me wrong, the acting and directing of this film are great....but the story was iffy and it was bringing in so many Spy tropes that I just find boring.
Rating:
Burn in Hell, Bad, Okay, Good, Must Watch
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