I saw Spectre last night. Before I watched it I wasn’t planning on writing a review. However, the movie was so awful I feel obliged to write a few words on the subject. I don’t usually write reviews that are purely negative because if I didn’t like anything about it, then I feel it’s not worth my time to bother.

However, Bond is something of an institution. Spectre made an awful lot of money. I checked on wiki, it cost 250 million to make and the box office returns were 880 million. Then there’s the advertising, the sponsorship, the DVD, the merchandise etc. it’s a very profitable franchise. I don’t believe that just because Bond is a licence to print money, means it has a free pass to be terrible.

When I was watching it didn’t feel like a Bond film. If it felt like anything, it felt like a parody of a Bond film. The movie was so disjointed, it was like a couple of dozen pieces had just been randomly stitched together. There was no coherency, there was no reason, nothing made sense and it felt hollow and fake.

Now I know Bond films are supposed to be ridiculous, they aren’t supposed to have deep characterization or meaningful plots. However, Spectre didn’t stack up even under those rules. The action scenes weren’t exciting, the car chase was more like a dance on wheels, the “Bond girl” seduction stretched even Bond believability. It was a long movie and I kept thinking it was going to be over, then it wasn’t and those “reveals” and “twists” weren’t worthy of being called that.

I haven’t seen all of the Bond films. Ok, I haven’t even seen most of them. I’ve seen all of the latest ones, from Golden Eye onwards, plus You Only Live Twice (Sean Connery) and that is probably it. Therefore I’m not really qualified to say Spectre was – The Worst James Bond film ever! However, I would say it is by far the worst one I’ve seen. It even beats Quantum of Solace and I’ve seen that a couple of times now and I still don’t understand who the bad guy was or what was going on.

Even leaving aside the fact it was a Bond film, it wasn’t even a decent action film, or thriller or whatever genre Bond is supposed to be. It was an utterly terrible movie and a real disappointment. If I’m thinking about the ‘Daniel Craig’ era of Bond. They said it was like a reboot of the franchise, bringing Bond back to reality.

It began with Casino Royale which was a solid entry. Then Quantum of Solace which was fairly awful and better best forgotten. Then there was Skyfall which started out incredibly strong, the first half of that movie was amazing, the villain was intelligent, it was all good and then it just degenerated into some very artistically shot scenes that didn’t make much sense. However, on the whole Skyfall was pretty good, it just fell a bit flat after the strong beginning.

Spectre just didn’t fit into anything. I didn’t actually buy the DVD, I borrowed it, so I’m grateful that I didn’t spend any money to see that film. It was so bad I considered stopping watching it after I was about 30 minutes in but I was sure it had to get better – it didn’t. I can’t even say I had two hours of “entertainment” out of it. I was just watching it incredulous that it could be that bad, sort of like watching it to see how bad it actually could get.

Definitely not recommended, do not waste your time. Hopefully the next Bond film will be an improvement, it certainly would struggle to do much worse.