Spectre opens in Mexico City — a Day of the Dead festival in full swing — streets crowded with partying skeletons, and director Sam Mendes celebrating the dead in his own way with a nifty Orson Welles tribute: A Touch of Evil-style tracking shot that has no obvious edits for at least five minutes as it follows Bond (Daniel Craig) and a gorgeous brunette (Stephanie Sigman) from the costumed parade route into a hotel, up in a crowded elevator to a well-appointed room where she settles seductively on a bed — only to watch him zip out onto a roof ledge with a quick shirt cuff adjustment, and murder on his mind.
At some point, the director starts cutting as 007 dispatches bad guys, collapses buildings, and wrestles with a villain in a suddenly pilotless, upside-down helicopter. As showoff-y starts go, this one ranks with the best in the series. And if the prize Bond is after — a ring with an octopus-y Spectre symbol — seems kind of minor for all that mayhem, it does lead nicely into the film’s titles, Sam Smith’s melody-challenged, but suitably sultry “Writing’s on the Wall” backed by gorgeous women writhing with octopus tentacles, bullets trailing inky jets. It’s everything a Bond fan could wish, and then some.
Which seems to be the operating aesthetic this time out: everything you could wish, and then some, for an epically overstuffed 2 hours and 28 minutes. Enough time to pack in a whole bunch of bad guys from pencil pushers to bodybuilders to Christoph Waltz, an extravagance of exotic locales, from Moroccan meteor craters to a Rome-the-eternal-city that feels like a racetrack with palazzos, and — of course — a bevy of beauties, who do what Bond beauties do.
Monica Belluci, whom Bond divests of widow’s weeds as he’s introducing himself as “Bond, James Bond,” is easily the most compelling (though she’s accorded the least screen time). Petulant, obstreperous shrink Léa Seydoux may be the least compelling (perhaps because she’s accorded the most screen time).