Couple of disclaimers:
1) I’ve only ever all-the-way liked one James Bond, and one James Bond film: the first one with Daniel Craig, Casino Royale. It was exciting, tactile, and had what is almost certainly the best genital torture scene in recent memory. It also had a legitimately creepy villain in Mads Mikkelsen. All previous Bond films were lazy, bloated, and dumb, coasting on gimmicks and reputation and fueled by an especially pungent tang of testosterone that has been obsolete for a long time.
2) I always thought Sam Mendes was a crappy filmmaker. It wasn’t surprising that American Beauty tapped the vein of suburban anomie since the suburban America the film dealt with hadn’t yet realized in 1999 that it was already past its sell-by date. But it was still just hyperaestheticized middlebrow phoniness, the exact kind of work the word “pretentious” was invented to describe. Likewise with all his subsequent work: The Road to Perdition, Jarhead, Away We Go, and Revolutionary Road. The design of all these films bustled with ingenuity and invention. The themes were heavy and important. And they didn’t have a brain between them. So when Mendes took over the Bond franchise, it seemed like a perfect marriage. But the weird thing is, it actually kind of is.
SPECTRE has all the James Bond things that people insist on pretending to like—the watch that’s really a bomb, the car that’s really a supercar, the women who are actually just plot devices, the villain who is really supervillain who wants to control/destroy the entire world—through surveillance! But it also contains the added element of strange little character moments, pace disruptions, little bursts of dialogue that are uncharacteristically actually clever. These microdeconstructions of the Bond mythos (he throws his gun into the Thames, gets his ass kicked, drinks a dirty martini) might be evidence that Mendes is trying to make a movie that is simultaneously both a good movie and a good Bond movie, despite those things being mathematically and mutually exclusive phenomena.
It does compensate somewhat for the undeniable reality that the version of cool buried in the DNA of this series is not only outmoded, but a referendum on the last 50 years of jingoistic sexism (or is it sexist jingoism) in international cinema and marketing. Does it have the reverse effect of making Bond actually cool? No. Nor does it entirely compensate for the ending you can see from space, the transparency of the baddies (though Christoph Waltz is very good in understated mode). What it does do is spare a little dignity for Daniel Craig, a very good actor trapped in a lucrative part that almost doesn’t even exist, despite appearing in almost every frame.
The constraints of the Bond form appear to push Mendes to become more than just a masterful tableau maker. The action scequences are staged with brilliant economy and momentum, but the silences are, too. In the negative space, and especially in the acting—moments between Craig, Ralph Fiennes, and Ben Whishaw in particular, but also the single, unremarked-upon tear that slides down Monica Belluci’s face when she and Bond are about to do it—you start to wonder if there isn’t a bit of a counternarrative going on. Mendes is doing a blockbuster, and convincingly (the Brian DePalma single take opening into the helicopter fight sequence is fantastic). But he’s also trying to wring a drop of humanity out of the most pre-determined, carboard film hero of the 20th century. Which, unlike Bond, had the good taste to end 15 years ago.
