Not exactly a premium Bond

When you start with the worst Bond song ever as a precursor to the worst title sequence in Bond movie history, the omens are not good. The fact that the song is called ‘The Writing’s on the Wall’ only makes it more ominous.

It would be nice to say that the problems with Spectre stem only from Sam Smith and a misguided credits sequence but my issues with this film go far deeper.

Over the years the Bond series has been a byword for the sort of industrial movie-making that Hollywood can do so well. Yes, I appreciate that these are effectively independent films made by Eon but the argument still applies. A new one comes down the conveyor belt round about this time every two years and there is a massive industry which has become dependent on it making that date.

Even in the best-run industrial operations the production line comes a cropper from time to time and that’s what’s happened here for my money. Spectre has every sign of a film made under pressure to hit a world-wide release date. The process shots in the opening helicopter fight look very dodgy, the plot has holes you could drive an Aston Martin through, and there’s an air of desperation about the whole thing. No one appears to be quite in control of what’s going on.

The result is a film which is at best ordinary and at worst dull and mechanical. That it follows on from Skyfall only makes things more acute. Skyfall is the most successful Bond film ever but I suspect that a lot of that success was down to relief that it wasn’t Quantum of Solace, for my money the worst film ever.

Once you get past Skyfall’s halo effect, it wasn’t actually all that. The plot was simply a succession of increasingly improbable death traps from which Bond escaped with increasing ease, until we get to the end with a bit of emotional heft thrown in with the death of a major character.

Spectre is much the same but without the imagination of Skyfall. Just as Quantum of Solace was a continuation of Casino Royale, this is a continuation of sorts from Skyfall. The problem is there isn’t enough story for two films so it is relentlessly padded with material we have seen before.

Originality is always going to be an issue in a franchise with 20-odd entries but this seems unnecessarily cannibalistic. The problem for me is that it only reminded me of how much better they had been done in the past. The opening fiesta scene comes from Thunderball, the train fight – pointless as it turns out - is from either From Russia with Love or Live and Let Die, the Alpine clinic stuff has been seen in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and so on.

The other, more disturbing, aspect of this is the return of old-fashioned retro sexism to Bond. Of course Fleming created him as a fantasy for 50s and 60s men and, in context, the sexism in the original novels is explainable. It should have been kicked into touch by now but instead, as we saw in Skyfall, we have Bond effectively forcing himself on women and two female characters who are little more than plot points; not very convincing ones either. Lea Seydoux seems to exist simply to be in peril and whoever wrote her scenes should be ashamed.

None of this would be necessary with a decent script in the first place but despite four credited screenwriters Spectre still looks less than camera-ready and a couple more passes wouldn’t have hurt. The notion of making Craig’s four films into an informal quartet doesn’t work. Christopher Waltz is the author of all of Bond’s pain apparently. How does that work then? It’s a decent line but in the absence of a compelling master plan he is not so much evil genius as evil project manager.

Waltz phones it in with a generic evil mastermind performance but to be honest all of the cast look pretty unengaged. Craig’s comments in the round of media interviews to promote the film tend to reinforce that.

On the whole Spectre is humourless, charmless, and unimaginative. It has one good moment when Bond goes all Jack Carter on a security guard to remind him of the inadvisability of taking on a trained killer in hand to hand combat. Moments like these are few and far between unfortunately.

James Bond’s biggest battle is not against any evil genius, it is rather to remain relevant. Fleming’s concept of ‘thrilling cities’, has been successfully appropriated by the Mission: Impossible franchise and Jason Bourne has cornered the market in gritty adventure. So where does 007 go from here?

In Goldeneye, the first of the ‘modern’ Bonds, Judi Dench accused Bond of being a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. She may have been right after all because without an injection of fresh blood and imagination the franchise may be on the road to extinction.

How Netflix shifted the goalposts

Abraham Attah and Idris Elba

Netflix parked its tanks on the lawns of the TV networks with its mini-series House of Cards; with Beasts of No Nation they are now parking their metaphorical tanks in the foyers of multiplexes all over the world.

Netflix makes its first foray into original movies with this occasionally harrowing but also at times plodding story of boy soldiers. It follows a fairly well-trodden path in the wake of Hotel Rwanda, Shooting Dogs, and City of Men as our young hero Agu deals with a childhood torn away by civil war.

Agu and his family live in an unnamed African state which is at the heart of a revolutionary struggle. When his mother is sent to safety Agu is left behind but with his father and brother they join the other men in defending their homes. The fight does not last long; his father and brother are quickly killed and Agu flees into the jungle.

Coming across a ragtag band of child rebels led by Commander (Idris Elba), a warlord with Messianic pretentions, Agu becomes one of Commander’s favourites. After a brutal initiation ceremony he is accepted as a fully-fledged soldier and promoted to Commander’s team.

This is a Lord of the Flies story about a loss of innocence and the battle for the soul of a young boy. It has a number of powerful moments but at 2 hours and 20 minutes it could easily lose half an hour with no loss of impact.

Directed, written and shot by True Detective’s Cary Fukunaga the film is firmly in the naturalist tradition with lots of long takes and not much happening. The real wonder is in the visuals. Fukunaga was also responsible for processing and he was inspired by the look of late 20^th century combat photo-journalism. The care and attention he has lavished here means that in places the film has the organic richness of the pictures of Don McCullin.

Fukunaga cast real-life Liberian rebels in the Commander’s band for authenticity but the most honest and authentic performance in the film comes from Abraham Attah as Agu. He is completely compelling in contrast to Elba who gives his usual one-note performance but with a slightly different accent.

After some success in the festival circuit Beasts of No Nation is attracting early Oscar buzz. Not wishing to be harsh, if this is an Oscar contender then we have a fairly barren three months ahead of us. Netflix don’t care really; what they want is the perception of quality around this film.

They spent $12 million to acquire the distribution rights secure in the knowledge of what would happen next. The plan was to release the film theatrically exclusively for a week in a couple of cinemas – thus ensuring Oscar eligibility – and then release it day and date in other cinemas and on Netflix.

As they must have known would happen cinema chains boycotted the film, it played on barely 30 screens in the United States and was a resounding box office flop. None of that matters because the film is being talked about and so is Netflix and when you consider they spent $100 million on House of Cards, a $12 million investment here makes good sense.

Looking to the future what Netflix have done is significant, especially in the week when the release of the new Star Wars trailer almost breaks the internet. The company doesn’t release audience figures but it’s a safe bet that more people will stream this film than would ever go and see it in a cinema. Perhaps I’m wrong but it doesn’t strike me that there is a vast unsatisfied army of Idris Elba fans out there.

But a marker has been put down which must surely end up in a two-tier distribution system. The Star Wars and summer blockbusters of this world will have the cinemas to themselves, but niche films like Beasts of No Nation now surely have a new route to market and that must be a good thing for innovation, diversity, and imagination.

The theatre owners may appear to have won the battle this time but Netflix have deep pockets and my feeling is that they will win the war.

Humdrum, humdrum, Macbeth doth come

Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard

Directors have a tendency to re-invent the wheel when filming Shakespeare by coming up with elaborate new takes on the material. They’ll do it in modern dress, or do it in the actual location, or if you’re really unlucky do it in modern dress, switch it to New York, and have Ethan Hawke offer his usual sub-par emo performance. It’s almost as if they don’t trust themselves to be judged by the material and indulge in smoke and mirrors instead.

Shakespeare himself told us ‘The play’s the thing’ which is why it is something of a disappointment that Justin Kurzel treads a well-worn path in largely ignoring the text in favour of some lavish but essentially redundant visuals in his version of Macbeth.

In cinema action defines character. Pretty much everything you need to know about Macbeth is that he is willing to kill the king to advance his own cause, and his wife is sufficiently driven to support him in his task. You might also add that perhaps it is a reluctance to disappoint Lady M that encourages him to finally screw his courage to the sticking place and do the deed.

Kurzel however offers up the Scottish play for the hard of thinking. We begin with the funeral of a dead Macbeth child which leads us to suggest that their actions are motivated by grief. I heard Kurzel in a radio interview talking about a couple he knew who had lost a child and became high achievers as a consequence of throwing themselves into their work to assuage their grief. For the Macbeths this is regicide as therapy, rather than action born of vaulting ambition.

This kind of heavy handed emotional signposting is mirrored in much of the visuals which are impressive but mostly pointless. We don’t need to see the Battle of Ellon which opens the play and generally happens off-stage. All we need to know is that Macbeth has won against the odds and done the king a huge service. Here we see the battle in full bullet-time, music video porn, complete with great gouts of high-definition blood splashing across the screen.

It’s well enough done if you like that sort of thing but in fact it serves to hold up the action; unlike the play, very little happens at the start of the film of any import and Kurzel takes a long time to get going. There isn’t even the justification of these visuals opening out the text because much of the subsequent action takes place in appropriately claustrophobic settings.

It looks good mind you. Never was a heath so blasted as the one Kurzel presents us with here and there are so many smoke pots belching away that even Ridley Scott might find it a little excessive.

The shining light in the film is Michael Fassbender in the title role. Despite sounding disconcertingly like Andy Murray at times, this is compelling stuff. The murder is the pivotal moment in his performance and there is a genuine sense of liberation for Macbeth as he seizes power. Paddy Considine is fine as the ill-fated Banquo, as is Sean Harris as MacDuff.

And having carped over Kurzel mucking about with the text in places he deserves credit for leaving in Banquo’s son Fleance, a crucial character who is often missed out of screen adaptations of this play. Perhaps he was hoping for a sequel.

The one disappointment for me is Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth. I get the sense that performing Shakespeare in her second language has encouraged such care over diction and dialogue that there is an absence of performance. This Lady Macbeth is curiously colourless as a result and her traditional drive is missing.

There are some fine moments in the film but overall for me it lacked passion and power and any sense of nuance or subtlety. As such you wonder what is the point of another screen Macbeth?

To borrow from the Bard perhaps if it were done, when it was done, then it were well it were done better.