Javy Lopez

Yuck. Daniel Craig is my favorite James Bond; the supporting cast (M, Q, Money Penny) are, as always, excellent, and the scenery is magnificent. Lost, and somehow forgotten, is that little thing called a Plot. Not one second of this near 3 hour film makes a lick of sense; it is one of the stupidest, lamest, incredibly absurd collection of scenes imaginable. I thought the "storyline" for Spectre was absurd; this makes Spectre look like the greatest film ever made. No wonder Daniel Craig was sick of this dreck and refuses to make any more Bond movies. Even when some of the 1970s Bond movies were Bad, they were at least fun, with inside jokes and snarky comments. This movie is uniformly grim and even worse, boring. Just one series of crashes/chases/explosions after another, interrupted by bizarre periods of banal dialogue. I want my $10, and 3 hours of my life, back.

One of those times when the Audience, based on the cumulative review, gets it far more right than the "professional critics". Biggest Lie in the movie, Pike proclaiming "I am a Lioness!"; in reality, she is a Tapeworm, a loathsome parasite deeply embedded in and feeding off a diseased host, a host whose "symptoms" are portrayed by her toadying assistant, corrupt and greedy medical doctors, the self-righteously incompetent Judge, and the snarky, grinning criminal Nursing Home staff. Nothing else in this movie matters; a loathsome creature making a fortune through abusing those who, because of the willing connivance of "others", all Professionals knowingly violating their Trust. runs afoul of an equally odious character, and engages in a power struggle. The fact that society's most vulnerable are being preyed on, not just by the protagonist, but by the very society entrusted to look after them sort of gets dismissed. The ending is deeply troubling; "justice" is served by a victim's relative, who commits murder in order to get "revenge" for a life (his mother's) already lost; giving up his own future in the process. Meanwhile? the Judge, the Health Care staff, the Medical profession, the "grieving assistant" all get away scot free; awaiting, I assume, the arrival of another tapeworm to replace the parasite lost. The movie made me feel unclean; there is something very wrong with whoever wrote this plot. And to those who claim this represents an insightful jab at "Capitalism run amok", they are wrong. The "Capitalist" here is simply taking advantage of a deeply corrupt, but completely untouchable social services network that is unanswerable and unaccountable to anyone. Pike is a good actress; but she should not have made this movie.