SPECTRE (Or, a Love Letter to Casino Royale)

It is entirely likely that Daniel Craig's latest round of declamations that he is "through with Bond" are just a strategy for strengthening his salary-negotiation position before the next film (he claimed he was through before Skyfall made him an obscene gob of money, too).  But I vote that we treat his claims as entirely sincere this time around, and bid him, in all sincerity, a grateful adieu, for it is high time to reboot the series once more.

For the same pattern happened when Pierce Brosnan was Bond, if you recall--strong out the gate with the surprisingly refreshing and rejuvenating Goldeneye, which successfully transitioned Bond into a post-Cold War world, followed by rapidly diminishing returns.

Then Daniel Craig repeated the cycle--strong out the gate with the surprisingly refreshing and rejuvenating Casino Royale, which successfully transitioned Bond into a post-9/11 world...followed yet again with rapidly diminishing returns.  Now, the Craig Bonds never quite plumbed the same absurd depths of campiness as Brosnan, which pushed straight through so-bad-it's-good to just plain bad; nevertheless, there's this distinct feeling of once again scraping the bottom of the barrel and already recycling ideas.

For just as Brosnan twice battled a laser-satellite (the second time as farce, to quote Marx), Craig in SPECTRE has now twice uncovered a dastardly evil organization who's reach goes far wider than any guessed (didn't they just introduce--and promptly drop--Quantum a couple movies ago?), and twice dealt with the hauntings of his childhood past (didn't Skyfall supposedly but the kibitz on that?).  And for the third time in a row he has had to go rogue.  What'll happen next film, will he go rogue yet again to uncover an even bigger evil organization that goes even deeper than Quantum and SPECTRE combined?  A Pentaverate, perhaps, made up of the Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothchilds, and Colonel Sanders?  Will he encounter yet another ghost from his childhood?  A second step-brother, perhaps?  Or a nanny?  A drunk uncle? We are now scraping not just the wood but the splinters at the bottom of the barrel.

What's more is how the last couple Bond flicks have cribbed so shamelessly from other, better movies, rather than forge their own path--SPECTRE's whole new-surveillance-system-turns-out-to-be-secretly-run-by-the-bad-guys plot-twist was already used by Captain America: The Winter Soldier scarcely a summer ago; the rather-pointless revival of SPECTRE and Ernst Stavro Blofield can only remind one how much more vital-feeling the old Sean Connery Bonds were; the evil former agent from Skyfall is just a repeat of 006 from Goldeneye; and the-bad-guy-wanted-to-get-caught trope comes from almost every summer blockbuster of the past 10 years. 

Now, this is not to claim that Skyfall and SPECTRE are exactly awful--they're middlingly, passably alright I guess.  But that's just it, I almost would have preferred them to be flat-out, Brosnan-level terrible, because that at least would have provoked another full Spring-cleaning of the franchise.  But right now MGM has no incentive to break formula, to do anything more than to just keep pedaling along with the same forgettable status quo, all about as exciting as printing money--like, literally, about as fun as running a monotonous printing machine all day.

This mediocrity is so tragic because (and this is difficult for me to overstate) Casino Royale was just such a revelation!  Clearly do I remember Summer '06, my girlfriend at the time dragging me to the Rexburg dollar theater to see Casino Royale--at the time, the whole idea of "rebooting" James Bond (and this even before the whole "gritty reboot" schtick had been worn to death by Hollywood) seemed patently ridiculous to me.  You just get a new actor guys, literally no one was asking for a James Bond origin story!  C'mon.  So I went in skeptical...but came out converted.  It was a breath of fresh air! James Bond had not felt this vital in a decade.  I easily consider it one of the best films of the 2000s.  The acting, pacing, plotting, dialogue, action, chemistry, humor--the film just hit the right balance between all of it, and what's more, made it look easy!

The humor especially--I bring this up because all subsequent directors of the Craig films have learned the exact wrong lessons from Casino Royale, and doubled down on the brooding grimness, failing to recognize that that was only one part of what made the film work, a constellation of factors, rather than the chief element.  And with each new release, as fans and critics have loudly lamented the absence of the suave, good-humored, fun Bond of years of yore, these various directors have defended their plodding darkness with something along the lines of, "Well you see, these films are about how Bond becomes Bond; he must work through his demons until he gets his sense of humor"--all while utterly eliding the fact that Bond's sense of humor was already present in Casino Royale!

Now, Casino Royale's humor was certainly a more muted, gallows humor than that of the Brosnan or Moore, but it was still there.  Remember that fantastic opening scene, wherein after this vicious, extended build-up that involves Bond brutally beating a man to death for the first time in a public bathroom, the villain somberly observes, "Made you feel it, did he? Well, you needn't worry. The second is..." at which Bond promptly shoots him and quips, "Yes, considerably."  Recall Bond being asked if he wants his Martini shaken or stirred, to which he mutters, "Does it look like I give a damn?"  Or when he suffers cardiac arrest in his car, is shocked back to life by Vesper Lynn, and he just glances up to her and says, "You OK?"  He then returns to the poker table and tells Le Chiffre, "That last hand almost killed me."  When Le Chiffre later tortures him for the money, Bond, bloodied and traumatized, just cracks a joke about how Le Chiffre has now scratched his balls.

Now, none of these moments are funny "ha-ha", so to speak, but they did exactly what jokes need to do in an action movie--break up the tension at just the right-timed moments, so that the audience doesn't get overwhelmed, exhausted, and finally bored by the action.  But if you have too many jokes, then the film devolves into a dull parody of itself--as the Brosnan ones ultimately did.  Casino Royale hit that balance just right in a way no Bond film has since.

And then there's that wonderful final scene, wherein the nefarious Mr. White, looking over the calm, bright lake of his Swiss estate,  having apparently gotten away with the money, answers his phone with "Who is this?", only to be immediately shot in the leg.  As he crawls away in the same writhing pain he has inflicted upon others all movie long, Daniel Craig, in an impeccable 3-piece suit, a sniper-rifle held aloft in one hand and cell-phone in the other, struts up casually and says, for the first time all movie, "The name's Bond, James Bond."  It's not a joke per se, but it is such a perfect climax, one that signals that the suave, fun-loving, self-possessed Bond of years gone by has finally arrived!

In terms of perfect endings, I can only compare it to the first Matrix, when Neo flies straight into the sky.  In that moment, anything and everything feels possible; sudden new vistas have opened up; you are filled with the elated feeling that this franchise can now go anywhere!

And like The Matrix, the series went on to utterly squander the promise of that perfect ending.  Rather than follow Bond's progression post-Casino Royale, the series has just reset him, over and over and over.  Each film ends with the implicit promise that Bond has at last arrived, that his transformation is now finally, finally, for-realsy-this-time, complete--only for the gloomy machine to reset itself, yet again, once more, for the next rendition.  In fact, they've done worse than reset--they've actively regressed, because the incipient humor of Casino Royale has vanished, and he has made no moves to recover it since.  Casino Royale was about the redemption of a sociopath; but every subsequent one has been about the same redemption of the same sociopath.  They just keep spinning their wheels, and I fear they've now ran out of traction.

So yes, it's time to start all over again.  Get a new actor, start a new reboot.  I will always be grateful for Casino Royale (just as I once was for Goldeneye), but it is sadly plain now that Daniel Craig's Bond is never going to become the joie de vivre Bond of days past, at least not with the current crop of writers and directors.  So give me a fresh faced Bond, one to breath new life into the series--and then go ahead and give me 3 subsequent disappointments again, til we doubtless start the cycle fresh anew once more, or at least till we learn the right lessons from Casino Royale.