Spectre (Sam Mendes, 2015)

The chief virtue for me in the 24th official Bond outing is probably that the director has made a conscious decision to make all the Craig films a continuity, which is rewarding if you've seen all of them and makes sense in that the first of them was already a reboot of the franchise. As it had to be: no series could sustain all that baggage and unevenness of tone, never mind having the face and global political set-up change radically too over the years. Christoph Waltz, needless to say, also makes a superlative villain - albeit very much recycling his jovially psychotic Hans Landa - and the action scenes, of which there are the usual too many, are executed sharply enough to almost make you forget that the hero is quite indestructible. But, for all the attempts to flesh out Bond's psyche and provide a new menace for him to combat (the global commodity under threat here is intelligence), history weighs as heavy on the overall product as the script keeps on underlining that it does on the character's mind, and staging the biggest explosion ever committed to film in turn underlines the dearth of fresh ideas left in the tank.

5/10