James Bond and Daniel Craig return in bigger-is-better Spectre

Spectre, the latest in the James Bond franchise, starts with an impressive bang. Where does it go from there?

Daniel Craig

One of the many challenges facing the producers of Spectre, the 24th entry in the extraordinarily durable James Bond franchise, is continuity. The new film, scripted by John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth, and directed by Sam Mendes, makes a great deal of harking back to earlier Bond movies, ensuring that nerds will have great fun picking up the numerous references (take note of that chinchilla cat).

But Daniel Craig, playing Bond for the fourth and, it’s rumoured, the final time wasn’t born when Sean Connery’s Bond looked on as Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) emerged from the sea in a very fetching bikini in Dr No, the first of the series, and the Bond of 2015 bears little resemblance to the Bond of 1962, apart from his natty dress sense and his way with women.

Since the series started, the Bond films have waxed and waned in quality, though they’ve almost always found a large and enthusiastic worldwide audience. Bond is an old-fashioned hero, pitched somewhere between the super­heroes of the comic strip-inspired movie and the kind of espionage agents found in John le Carre, who are presumably closer to real life.

FASHION: Six lessons for men in James Bond style

The previous film, Skyfall (2012), was one of the best in the series, perhaps because it tapped into a more sober side of the character, into the darker realms of what it means to be a secret agent in the 21st century. Despite that film’s staggering worldwide box-office success, the new film takes a step back, opting instead for a bigger-is-better policy, with uneven results.

Every Bond film has to open with a big sequence, and I imagine the producers spend thousands of hours working out how to top the last opening. With Spectre they’ve succeeded pretty well: the curtain-raiser (following the ominous and, as it turns out, nudgingly essential, title: “The dead are alive”) is a breathtakingly well-staged affair set in the centre of Mexico City on the Day of the Dead and involving Bond’s confrontation with an assassin that results in some vertiginous rooftop chases, an explosion that destroys a building, and a fight on a helicopter lurching about above the massed crowds below.

Personally I wish that the sound level in this and other action scenes hadn’t been so ear-shatteringly deafening and that there had been a lot less of Thomas Newman’s bombastic music score, but despite these reservations this opening constitutes the best action scene in the movie, and after it everything is anticlimactic — even Craig seems bored at times.

Bond, it seems, was on an unauthorised mission to Mexico because of a posthumous message from the previous M (Judi Dench) and without the knowledge of her urbane successor (Ralph Fiennes). The new M has his own problems, though; the government, with its heightened security concerns, has appointed a new MI5 boss, the unctuous Max, alias C (Andrew Scott), and he proposes to shut down the entire 00 operation of on-the-ground agents.

Fortunately, Bond’s friends, including Q (the wonderfully nerdy Ben Whishaw) and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), both of whom have deservedly been given expanded roles, ensure that 007 is able to continue his hunt for the inevitable master-criminal, played in minor key by Christoph Waltz.

In the meantime there are the usual set pieces, some of which are just plain silly — there’s a ludicrous sequence in which Bond pilots a plane that crashes into cars being driven by the villains across Austrian ski slopes, a crash from which he emerges without a hair out of place. After a long North African sequence, and the requisite romancing of beautiful women (Monica Bellucci, Lea Seydoux), the film ends in London with a predictable sequence involving a countdown to a massive explosion.

“Nobody does it better,” went a line from the Carly Simon song that accompanied The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and on the whole that’s true of the franchise as a whole. The Bond films are high quality, well cast, well staged, sometimes wittily scripted, invariably entertaining.

Spectre falls somewhere in the middle; it’s not as routine as some of the Roger Moore films, but it falls short of the high standard set by the earlier Craig films and almost all the Connery films. On the whole it’s too long, too loud and just too ridiculous — and yet there are scenes involving Fiennes and Scott as clandestine authority figures with responsibility for the security of the Western world that indicate just what an interesting James Bond could be made from contemporary events. Maybe that will have to wait for Bond No 25.

About the only thing Nancy, the central character in the very engaging comedy Man Up has in common with Craig’s superspy is that both are British — and even that’s deceptive because Nancy is portrayed, with pinpoint accuracy, by American actress Lake Bell. It’s a smart and accurate performance, and Bell completely convinces as a Londoner who, at the age of 34 and just getting over a bad relationship, is convinced she’s been left on the shelf. She’s so depressed about her life that, while attending a wedding in a fancy hotel where other guests are pairing up with one another, she stays in her room watching The Silence of the Lambs.

The next day, while travelling by train to celebrate her parents’ 40th wedding anniversary, she finds herself sitting opposite Jessica (Ophelia Lovibond), a ferociously perky 20-something businesswoman on her way to a blind date; and, in the best tradition of screwball comedy, Nancy finds herself mistaken by the date in question, Jack (Simon Pegg), for Jessica.

That’s the starting point for a scatty screwball comedy that, despite a familiar narrative structure, provides its full quota of laughs and romance.

Bell and Pegg give delicious performances, and there’s strong support by an ensemble cast that includes Rory Kinnear (also in Spectre) as one of Nancy’s former school friends and Olivia Williams as Jack’s ex-wife. Ben Palmer’s direction is polished and pacy, and about the only cause for complaint is the film’s strangely unappealing title.

Several current films are receiving very limited, staggered release and, as a result, run the risk of passing under the radar. These include Roy Andersson’s strangely beguiling A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence and the delightful Australian film Tanna, which directors Bentley Dean and Martin Butler filmed on one of the smaller islands belonging to Vanuatu.

The film’s simple story — a Romeo and Juliet affair with the star-crossed lovers members of rival tribes — is beautifully told and the local people, who had never even seen a film before, play their roles with unforced naturalism. Young Marceline Rofit is particularly beguiling as a cheeky little girl.

With an active volcano as its backdrop, Tanna is, at times, as suspenseful as anything in Spectre, and was, of course, made for a tiny fraction of that film’s budget. Seek it out.

Spectre (M)

3 stars

Wide national release from Thursday

Man Up (M)

3.5 stars

National release

Tanna (M)

4 stars

Limited release