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Throughout Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, and Skyfall, Bond faced off against the usual villains while slowly tracking the overarching criminal organization that bears this film’s title. This wowser of an opener is followed by a credits sequence that boasts Sam Smith’s overwrought Writing’s On The Wall – which falls well short of Adele’s title tune in Skyfall – though things are livened up by a bizarre tentacle porn-laced arrangement that features Bond girl silhouettes with octopuses and glimpses from the previous features. That's an unfortunately irresponsible blockbuster mentality, but the surrounding action sequence – culminating with Bond attempting to do battle aboard a helicopter while dangling from its open doors – is first-rate action movie stuff. Bond wipes out a solid city block in the midst of shoulder-to-shoulder street traffic – costing what must amount to thousands of innocent lives, worse than anything the villains do in this movie – and gets a snarky headline in The Guardian and stern talking-to from Ralph Fiennes’ M. There, he assassinates a group of people before toppling (accidentally?) an entire building complex, which crumbles to the ground in familiar 9/11/ Man of Steel type imagery. Spectre begins in Mexico with a minutes-long tracking shot through a Day of the Dead procession (shades of similar sequences in Moonraker and Live and Let Die) that follows Daniel Craig’s Bond through the streets, into a hotel, and onto the rooftops as he tracks a target. I’m shocked the producers didn’t force their director to punch things up a bit. Kudos.īut did it have to be so tedious? Lengthy sequences in this 148-minute feature – the longest Bond movie to date – simply flatline, sitting up on the screen devoid of tension or suspense. Mendes was seemingly given free rein – and the second-highest budget of any film, ever – to take this pop icon and craft a no-shit art film. There’s a lot to like in Spectre, including four standout (albeit all-too-brief) action sequences that represent some of the most memorable Bond set pieces of the Brosnan-Craig era, and a lot of nods to earlier films in the series and classic Bond lore.Īnd there’s a real sense of directorial vision in the work of Sam Mendes, the first Bond director to make back-to-back features since John Glen in the 1980s (though Martin Campbell made the two best films since then, a decade apart, in Goldeneye and Casino Royale).
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It’s also the dullest James Bond movie ever made. It’s the classiest $300 million blockbuster you’ll ever see.