Spectre

I am a huge fan of the James Bond franchise!  I've seen all of the movies (multiple times) but my very favorite is Skyfall, directed by the brilliant Sam Mendes.  When I heard that the next installment, Spectre, was also being directed by Mendes I got really excited.  It seems like I have been waiting forever for this movie to come out but it finally did this weekend and I got to see it last night.  James Bond (Daniel Craig, in what is rumored to be his last outing as 007) learns of the existence of a global crime syndicate called SPECTRE which is led by someone from his past while M (Ralph Fiennes) must contend with C (Andrew Scott), the new director of the Joint Intelligence Service who wants to shut down the 00 section in favor of a global surveillance system.  The head of SPECTRE, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), turns out to be the son of the man who adopted Bond after his parents died (a story line hinted at in Skyfall) with a grudge against Bond for replacing him in his father's affections.  Blofeld claims to have controlled the villains Le Chiffre (from Casino Royale), Greene (from Quantam of Solace), and Silva (from Skyfall) and to be responsible for the deaths of Vesper Lynd and the previous M.  While this story line connects all of Craig's movies in one arc, I found it to be convoluted and a bit implausible but it really didn't matter!  The action sequences are awesome!  From the fight on an out of control helicopter above a crowded square in Mexico City, to a high speed chase through the streets of Rome, a fight on the fuselage of a plane through the Austrian Alps, and a fight on a train through Morocco, this movie had me on the edge of my seat.  The long tracking shot in the opening sequence where Bond walks through a crowded Day of the Dead parade, through a hotel lobby, onto an elevator, into a hotel room, out a window onto the ledge of the hotel, and across the rooftops of several buildings is nothing short of spectacular!  I enjoyed Craig's performance as the spy and I liked the return of the gadgets, the cars (can we talk about how amazing the Aston Martin DB10 is for a moment?), the women, and the martinis, all of which make the Bond movies so much fun to watch!  I love Fiennes as M, especially when he has a fight scene with C, and Ben Whishaw is absolutely perfect as Q.  Waltz is always a menacing villain but I found Lea Seydoux to be a bit bland as the love interest (I much preferred Monica Bellucci as the widow of an assassin killed by Bond and then seduced by him).  Scott does a good job as the arrogant C (but I kept envisioning him as Moriarty in Sherlock) and, as I mentioned, I loved his confrontation with M!  While I think I still prefer Skyfall, I really enjoyed this movie and I would definitely recommend it to fans of the franchise.

Note: I'm not really a fan of Sam Smith's theme song, "Writing's on the Wall."