The Dumbest Things In Spectre

The jury's still out on whether or not 2015's Spectre will mark the fourth and final film to star Daniel Craig as James Bond. One thing is clear, though: while it's definitely not the worst of his turns as the British superspy, it's certainly far from his best. Don't get us wrong: Spectre is a pretty competent action flick with lots of great set pieces. But there are even more moments that made us feel worse than Jaws making a visit to the orthodontist. Spoilers ahead...

Throughout Spectre, Bond runs, jumps, shoots, and romances his way across the globe, fighting bad guys, escaping danger, and enjoying the company of some very beautiful ladies. But at no point in the film do you ever fear for any characters' lives, nor the fate of the world. The evil organization Spectre has a big plan to take advantage of the world's unified surveillance tech and, what, read people's emails? Download a bunch of music off of iTunes? Meanwhile, Bond never looks particularly worried while bantering with villains. He mostly just seems bored and checked out. We were, too.

There's a big revelation that comes about two-thirds into the movie. The leader of Spectre turns out to be none other than Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the old Bond villain from the 1960s who was famously parodied by Mike Myers in the form of Dr. Evil. So what pushes Blofeld to orchestrate four movies' worth of evil machinations to ruin the life of James Bond? Well, in his youth, young James' parents die, and so he hangs out with Blofeld and his dad on ski trips. That's it. He's just a jealous teenager. Is being forced to go on ski trips with an orphan really enough to make you the number one villain in the world? Is that how the Joker got those scars?

There's a reason Myers' Dr. Evil was so on-point when the original Austin Powers hit: these Bond villains can be pretty friggin' dumb. It seems that the producers of Spectre decided that stupidity was what was truly missing from its current crop of Bond flicks. At one point, Blofeld has Bond strapped to a chair, with a teeny drill being strategically applied to his skull. But Bond escapes through the help of his in-movie lady-friend, Dr. Madeleine Swann, who isn't restrained throughout Bond's torture. You know what could've prevented Bond's escape? Shooting him with one of the hundreds of guns at your disposal. For a guy who has access to the world's intelligence networks, Blofeld is unbelievably stupid.

Towards the end of the movie, there's a scene where Q has to hack his way into Spectre's evil surveillance network, which is minutes away from going live. In the process, Q types furiously at his keyboard, saying, "c'mon, c'mon!" And then after more typing, he hacks the whatever, and the day is saved. Bleh.

In one of Spectre's more thrilling scenes, Bond, Swann, and Hinx—an assassin who uses his metal-capped thumbnails to squeeze people's eyes into paste—fight on a train. The three cause all kinds of mayhem and destruction. When it's all over, Swann turns to Bond and asks, "What do we do now?" Cut to: sweet, sweet love-making back in their cabin. Look, we know this is just a movie, but come on...there's no kind of follow-up to a fight witnessed by dozens of people? The conductor throwing Bond and Swann off for being violent psychos? Are all trains like this? Can we book an Amtrak trip, break a bunch of stuff, and then head off to our cabins for a romantic interlude?

After their whirlwind affair and their ability to beat the odds against the forces of evil, Bond and Swann make it back to London for the final showdown. Only, just before 007 heads off to finish the adventure, Swann stops him to break up with him. Apparently, despite her declarations of love in the previous scene, she's just not putting up with anymore of his crap. Alright, maybe it's a wise move to get as far away from Bond as possible (since his love interests have a shorter life expectancy than most). But her timing sucks. Why not wait until after he gets back from the super important action mission to dump him?

At the end of the day, Spectre is a return to form for the Bond franchise—and that's a bad thing. Part of what made 2006's Casino Royale and Daniel Craig's follow-ups as 007 so great was that they kept the franchise's coolness and mythology intact while striking a serious tone. Gone were the cartoonish gadgets, replaced by a living weapon who could disarm any bad guy with the right glare or grimace. Spectre, however, brings back the silly torture machines, the exploding watches, and sports car ejector seats. It might as well have had sharks with laser beams. Let's hope that whatever direction the Bond franchise takes next veers as sharply away from Spectre's example as possible.