Against every principle of espionage, James Bond continues to operate as the agent in plain sight. Laconic even under moments of mortal urgency, Bond cuts the perfect figure of an old-world gentlemanly spy: well-tailored suit, a low-slung rifle dangling off his shoulder, and a repository of sexual innuendo that would swiftly earn you a reputation as an unimaginative pervert in polite company. But this is an age in which the imperial fables of MI6 as the shadowed heroes of the free world is vanishing, an era which no longer believes in superheroes unless they come with their existential freight of self-doubt. The Bond of Spectre, all told his fourth excursion in the body-suit of Daniel Craig, no longer holds to this cinematic compact. And so, arrogant and sexually insatiable, Bond sets off a personal quest to avenge the old M’s death (Judi Dench), travelling from snow-whipped Austria to the North African orange-glow of coastal Tangier.
The stakes are artificially high. British intelligence agencies are consolidating, and C. (Andrew Scott), the new man at the top, declares 007 “obsolete”. Indeed, which stealth organisation needs a rogue agent with an uncontrollable libido and a fondness for disobeying orders on their side? Any civilian bystander would be able to finger him immediately in a line-up, recognising the distant, dim-eyed pout, the petulant curl of his duck-lips. The new boss, the latest big brother, is determined to institute a global surveillance programme, the natural successor to having actual agents on the ground. This plays into the hands of legitimate public paranoia about the reach of state surveillance, especially after the season of disclosures made by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. But soon, MI6 is left off the hook, when a grander, more sinister cabal of faceless terrorists called SPECTREarises as the author of these surveillance strategies. This allows the new M. (Ralph Fiennes) to make some passionate monologues about drone warfare and about agents with a moral centre pulling the trigger, but this is a sly form of subterfuge which displaces actual fears into imagined ones. For now that this many-tentacled fictional terrorist organisation exists, one does not have to confront the obvious fact: that modern western democracies are in reality, national security states, surviving on a hidden, subterranean network of surveillance operations, monitoring and overseas espionage campaigns. MI6 saves itself only by positing a worse fate, another big brother, which does not really exist.
And so again, we have a Bond pulsing on the momentum of his career, a Bond who cannot stop to question himself and is nothing more than an engine in endless motion. He performs what can only be described as a “seduction-interrogation” on Monica Belluci, undressing her forcefully whilst hotly whispering questions about her dead husband, a man who met his fate at the hands of Bond’s own indiscriminate bloodlust. Killing the husband and seducing the widow whilst simultaneously siphoning information from her – supposedly all part of Bond’s patriarchal splendour, but from another angle: entitled, aggressive, indescribably male. He does get a few triumphs in for good measure, including a wild car chase slipping and sliding through the empty arteries of Rome, and fist skirmishes in which the gallant brawler sends more than a few sad souls off to the River Styx, emerging without so much as a stray fingerprint on his gold cufflinks.
Spectre collapses under the weight of its ambition, which is effectively to rewrite the preceding trilogy and connect everything in a splendid unity which is all done in the spirit of a slapped-on addendum. The motive is part of the continuity-mania, the universe-building, and the multi-arc dreams of today’s monolithic franchises. But two and a half hours of this, plus a forgettable antagonist (Christoph Waltz) who has nothing on Javier Bardem in Skyfall equates to a dull experience. The only way Bond can survive is by learning the art of self-consciousness, and perhaps coming across in future as less of a belligerent prat.