[It's been a while, but here's a bust fresh off the digital projection presses.]
Spectre (2015) stars Daniel Craig and Christoph Waltz, and is director Sam Mendes second contribution to the long-running British espionage action movie franchise.
In the end, licensed-to-kill super-spy Daniel Craig spares the life of cornered step-sibling rival and global super-villain Christoph Waltz, before driving off into the sunset with Lea Seydoux, the daughter of a deceased former enemy assassin.
Following secret instructions from his late former boss, Craig causes an international incident at the height of Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico City, while tracking down and spectacularly murdering a notorious Italian criminal plotting a terrorist outrage.
Suspended from duty on his return to London, Craig nevertheless persists with his secret mission, clandestinely travelling to Rome in order to seduce his victim's widow into revealing the location of the latest assembly of the criminal network for which her husband worked.
Using the man's stolen signet ring to gain access to the gathering, Craig witnesses the murderous induction of his victim's replacement, before being exposed by the organisation's head, Christoph Waltz, the grown up son of Craig's childhood guardians, who Craig thought had perished as a youth with his adoptive father.
Craig is chased from the building by the new chief henchman, racing through the streets of Rome, before being forced to crash the one-of-a-kind Aston Martin super-car, stolen from his MI6 quartermaster, into the Tiber.
Piecing together clues, with the unofficial help of his new boss's secretary, Craig tracks down a former adversary, holed up in an isolated alpine lodge, who confirms, on the brink of death, the existence of the overarching organisation of which he was a part, before being poisoned for leaving their criminal employ.
Seeking further clues, Craig inadvertently leads the organisation's henchmen to the man's daughter, Lea Seydoux, and is obliged to rescue her from them, after making a death-bed promise to her father.
Sceptical of his ability to keep her safe, Seydoux is eventually convinced to take Craig to a north African hotel, long frequented by her parents, where, after interrogating a local rat or unclear allegiance, he uncovers a hidden cache of intelligence that points to an unmarked destination deep in the desert.
As the pair travel by train towards the mystery location, Seydoux demonstrates some of her father's skills, helping Craig dispatch the surviving chief henchman, who has caught them up. Their shared exertions lead to a passionate encounter.
Despite alighting unannounced at an abandoned train stop in the middle of nowhere, the couple are collected and chauffeur driven to Waltz's soon-to-be operational global surveillance hub contained in an ancient meteor crater.
Jealous of the attention shown the adopted Craig, Waltz admits responsibility for his own father's death and reveals his ambition for revenge, proceeding to torture Craig in front of Seydoux. But with the help of an exploding wristwatch, the pair escape and destroy the facility.
Returning to London, Craig is in the process of uncovering Waltz's inside man, the head of a new joint intelligence body that has subsumed Craig's new boss's responsibilities, when he is abducted and delivered to the derelict former MI6 Thames-side headquarters.
There, a now badly scared Waltz presents him with a stark choice of saving either himself or Seydoux from the building's demolition explosion which he is about to trigger.
Searching desperately, while Waltz departs by helicopter, Craig only manages to find and flee with Seydoux in the nick of time, while his boss confronts the traitor, who is killed by a fall, after a struggle.
Firing wildly with his revolver as the couple make chase by boat along the river, Craig damages the helicopter's engines, forcing it to crash-land on Westminster Bridge, where Craig, Seydoux and the authorities catch up with an even more badly injured Waltz, who now wants to be known by a name derived from his maternal bloodline.
If Spectre doesn't quite match the achievement of its immediate predecessor, then perhaps that is to be expected from what could only be described as Bond's Greatest Hits: Volume 2. Even so, Mendes second offering stands head and shoulders above all but his first. Maybe if he gets the chance to do a third there'll be a villain motivated by something other than personal revenge :P
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(2015_film)
