SPECTRE has all the James Bond things that people insist on pretending to like—the watch that’s really a bomb, the women who are actually just plot devices, the villain who is really supervillain who wants to control/destroy the entire world (through surveillance!). But it also contains the added element of strange little character moments, pace disruptions, little bursts of dialogue that are uncharacteristically actually clever. These microdeconstructions of the Bond mythos (he throws his gun into the Thames, gets his ass kicked, drinks a dirty martini) might be evidence that director Sam Mendes is trying to make a movie that is simultaneously both a good movie and a good Bond movie, despite those things being mathematically and mutually exclusive phenomena. SEAN NELSON

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