Spectre

Sam Mendes’s second Bond film, after Skyfall (2012), sets out to tie the whole of Daniel Craig’s run into one story. Every villain since Casino Royale (2006), it turns out, was working for the same organisation, and the organisation has a chairman. Four screenwriters are credited, John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth, and you can feel each of them adding a room to the house. It opens with a shot that follows Craig through a Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City, into a hotel, up in a lift, out of a window and along the rooftops, apparently without a cut. It is the best thing in the film, and it happens in the first five minutes.

Hoyte van Hoytema shoots it beautifully throughout. Mexico is amber and dust and painted faces; London is a cold blue-grey with the rain on the windows; Rome at night is nearly black, lit by headlights and the odd lamp; the Alps are white to the edge of the frame. Dennis Gassner builds the film’s one properly sinister room, a palazzo hall in Rome with a table long enough to seat a board of directors, the man at the head of it kept in shadow so we get only a shape and a voice. Jany Temime puts Craig in a cream dinner jacket on a night train and Léa Seydoux in a silver gown, and for ten minutes the film looks like the Bond it is trying to remember.

That train is where it works. Dave Bautista’s Hinx, an assassin with silver thumbnails and no dialogue to speak of, comes through the dining car and simply starts breaking things. Thomas Newman drops the music altogether. Lee Smith holds the shots long enough that we hear the glass, the panelling and the breath, and the fight has a weight the rest of the film’s action never manages. Seydoux gives Madeleine a stubbornness the script does not always write for her, and Ralph Fiennes and Andrew Scott have a good running argument about whether a drone or a man with a gun is the more honest way to kill someone. Ben Whishaw’s Q is funny in a way the film could have used more of.

Here is the honest account. We were thrilled by Mexico, properly leaning forward, delighted that a series this old could still show us something. By the time the film reached the desert we realised nothing since Rome had frightened us, and that we had spent the last forty minutes admiring hotels. Christoph Waltz arrives with the soft voice and the amused patience he is hired for, and then the script hands him a grievance so small and so personal that the entire architecture of four films is made to rest on it. We will not describe the reveal. We will say that when it came, we laughed, and it was not the reaction the film wanted.

The tying-together is the trouble. Making every death since 2006 one man’s doing does not make this film larger; it makes the earlier ones smaller, and it turns Craig’s Bond from a man with a past into a man whose past needs explaining to him at length. Monica Bellucci is in the film for about two scenes. Jesper Christensen’s Mr. White, back from Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace (2008), gets the one conversation in the middle stretch with any regret in it. The last half hour, back in London, is where we were bored, and then irritated, because it is chase, countdown and a building coming down, and the film had already done all three better in Mexico.

The in-jokes do not help. The dinner jacket, the gadget car with the ejector seat Q has not finished, the henchman who will not die: each is a nod to a film we liked more, and each is a reminder that we are watching an inventory rather than a story. Newman’s score leans on cues from Skyfall whenever it needs to tell us the stakes have risen, and by the second hour it has told us so many times that we stopped believing it.

See it for Mexico, for the train, and for Craig, who is still doing the heavy lifting with his jaw and his shoulders and very little help from the page. It runs 148 minutes with a 12A, and you will notice the first number long before the end.