Spectre is the most conventional of the recent Bonds — and the most fun

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When Casino Royale revived the James Bond series, in 2006, with Daniel Craig as the sixth big-screen incarnation of the superspy, the change in tone was so significant, and so exciting, that it briefly seemed 007 would never be the same again. Every fight would be more brutal, every conflict more urgent, every romance more involved. Since then, however, the series has worked its way back toward traditional levels of the usual ingredients, with each new film an increasingly uneasy mix of the Bondian and the personal.

Skyfall, three years ago, was a perfect example of this tension, a breathless espionage narrative derailed by a somber extended face-off in Bond’s childhood home. As our hero tried — and failed — to keep his boss, M (Judi Dench), from being killed by an obsessed former agent, the gloomy downshift in tone suggested The Man With the Golden Gun hijacked by Straw Dogs. You wanted to revel in the spy-game heroics, but the film labored insistently to remind you that it was Too Important and Too Serious for that.

Spectre is, in some senses, the first typical Bond film of the Craig era, though it doesn’t always seem to know it. The movie starts with one of the better, more exciting cold opens of the series, as Bond wreaks havoc on a Day of the Dead parade in Mexico. We later learn that he was acting on his own, as a result of a cryptic assassination order issued beyond the grave (via prerecorded message) by M.

One sexually conquered widow later (Monica Bellucci — let it not be said the Bond women in the Craig era aren’t top-shelf), our hero finds himself disrupting a Rome meeting of a mysterious gathering of baddies. Presiding over them is the sneering Hans Oberhausen (Christoph Waltz), with whom Bond apparently shares some history. Anyway: something something, Information Is Power, something something, Beautiful Young Doctor Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), something something, the End of the Double-0 Program, something something, Bond’s Childhood.

The plot matters as much as that summary suggests. Though devised by four credited screenwriters (the new addition being Edge of Tomorrow‘s Jez Butterworth), Spectre is just a series of scenes designed to lead from one to the next rather than to service a broader story. The first half pursues the great big secret behind the nefarious titular organization, but that seems pretty clear early on. There’s also a chase after a mysterious so-called “Pale King,” with a whole scene built around operatives fighting for the seemingly impossible challenge of trying to kill him — except that in the next scene, the guy is shown just sitting in some cabin in Austria waiting to die of thallium poisoning. Similarly, the sinister history between Oberhausen and Bond is given up early on — in Waltz’s first scene, as a matter of fact — making much of the subsequent narrative hoop-jumping rather pointless.

Well, almost pointless. Spectre‘s globe-hopping action scenes (a car chase through Rome, a nasty beat-down on a Tunisian train, a plane-jeep chase in Austria) are effective and entertaining, and the film, for all the silly dithering of its narrative, is atmospheric and pulls you along. Craig is his usual stony-faced self, but the film knows to play his demeanor up for moments of deadpan humor. (Ralph Fiennes’ M gets the best lines.) Waltz makes for a solid villain, and his scenes are filled with an unpredictable edge of tension — even when nothing’s happening in them, a testament to returning Skyfall director Sam Mendes’ control over mood.

Therein lies the problem: The portent of Mendes’ style works well in individual scenes, but it also presses against the fizzy nonsense of the film’s broader narrative arc (such as it is). The film never cracks a smile, until you realize that it’s all one big joke. On some level, Spectre is a betrayal of the More Serious Bond promised in Casino Royale. But it’s also the first Bond film in a long time that actually lets you have fun with it.