Licence to be sadistic: Yes, he loved it. But our critic admits he's a bit queasy about the way new Bond film Spectre glories in cruelty. Is the money-spinning 007 juggernaut so powerful the censors turn a blind eye?

  • Daniel Craig makes his fourth appearance as James Bond in film, Spectre 
  • 'Spectre is a proper joyride of a film,' wrote Daily Mail film critic, Brian Viner
  • He says that 007 franchise may have become 'too powerful for the censors'
  • A scene in Spectre features a hitman killing someone by gouging his eyes

By Brian Viner, Film Critic for the Daily Mail

Published: 16:56 EST, 22 October 2015 | Updated: 18:52 EST, 22 October 2015

The proper response to a good Bond film is to invert the way 007 likes his vodka martinis. They should leave you stirred, but not shaken.

Spectre, the 24th in the series, which had its public unveiling on Wednesday ahead of a royal premiere on Monday, does both. And that's not necessarily a good thing.

First things first, though, and in many ways Spectre is Bond at its absolute best, with Daniel Craig's 007 back in control of his upper lip after the emotional wobbles of Skyfall.

Nonetheless, Spectre takes up where Skyfall left off, with Judi Dench's M leaving a posthumous message for Bond to dispatch a killer (in Mexico) and then be sure to attend the funeral (in Rome). 

The 24th installment of the James Bond franchise, starring Daniel Craig as the title character (pictured), has some scenes of shocking torture and violence 

The 24th installment of the James Bond franchise, starring Daniel Craig as the title character (pictured), has some scenes of shocking torture and violence 

Daily Mail film critic Brian Viner has described Spectre as 'one of the most thought-provoking Bond films of all time' but he says it is not one for the squeamish

Daily Mail film critic Brian Viner has described Spectre as 'one of the most thought-provoking Bond films of all time' but he says it is not one for the squeamish

As ever, Bond's accumulation of air miles in this film is almost as rampant as his appetite for sex and alcohol.

He duly carries out these instructions to the letter, which leads him to his nemesis, Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), who, it turns out, he knows from his youth.

And speaking of letters, the new M (Ralph Fiennes) is back in London furious as always with 007 for overstepping his remit, but grappling with a bigger problem in the form of another civil service mandarin, the unremittingly smug C (Andrew Scott), who wants to end the 00 programme altogether.

C wants to throw his lot behind drones and satellites, while M wants his agents to tackle Oberhauser, who is masterminding bomb outrages around the world in a dastardly plan to control all the major intelligence agencies.

Give or take the occasional seduction, the odd twist and the faintly shocking glimpse of a man in Miss Moneypenny's bed, that's the essence of the plot. It sounds straightforward, though it's not always an easy narrative to follow. But that scarcely matters with Bond. We expect to flounder just a little.

Besides, as I wrote in later editions of yesterday's Mail, Spectre is a proper joyride of a film, with everything (except a memorable theme song) that a devotee of the world's greatest movie franchise could possibly want, including epic chases, marvellous stunts, fabulous gadgets, sultry women and a sprinkling of cracking one-liners.

James Bond (Daniel Craig, left) fights with hitman Mr. Hinx (Dave Bautista, right) - the same assassin who kills someone by gouging his eyes

James Bond (Daniel Craig, left) fights with hitman Mr. Hinx (Dave Bautista, right) - the same assassin who kills someone by gouging his eyes

Lea Seydoux (pictured) stars as Dr Madeleine Swann in Spectre, which Daily Mail film critic Brian Viner has described as a 'a proper joyride of a film'

Lea Seydoux (pictured) stars as Dr Madeleine Swann in Spectre, which Daily Mail film critic Brian Viner has described as a 'a proper joyride of a film'

The pre-credits sequence, set during the Day of the Dead festival in Mexico City, is alone worth seeing the film for. Whatever you do, don't get to the cinema late. But this picture also has something I'm not sure I do want from Bond, namely two scenes of truly gruesome nastiness.

One comes early on, when 007, by now in Rome, has infiltrated a sinister organisation that turns out to be the dreaded Spectre.

He watches as one bull-necked hitman, effectively auditioning for the job of Spectre's lead assassin, murders another hitman, starting by pressing his thumb's into the man's eyes and squeezing them out of their sockets. I half-expected Bond to mutter 'when in Rome', but he didn't. Maybe he'd had the sang-froid shaken out of him.

Yes, I know there's a precedent in Shakespeare (that gruesome 'out, vile jelly' moment in King Lear), but this is strong stuff.

I took my daughter, Eleanor, with me to see Spectre. And watching this scene alongside me, she shrank in her seat and covered her eyes.

She's 22, by the way. Spectre has a 12A certificate, effectively meaning children of ten and under will easily get in to see it. So could it be that the pusillanimous British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), like Eleanor, preferred to look away?

After all, Skyfall made more than $1 billion (£650 million) around the world, and Spectre seems certain to do great business, too.

So maybe, if you'll pardon the Bond-like pun, they prefer to stay blind to a spot of eye-gouging. Has 007 become too powerful for the censors? Have they, unable to stand up to the juggernaut of profit he represents, in effect handed him a licence for sadism?

Further evidence that they have comes later in the film, with another scene not even for sensitive adults, let alone children. It comes when Waltz's chilling villain has 007 in his lair and tortures him by sending a tiny drill whirring into his head.

Now this is one of many images in Spectre with which director Sam Mendes playfully references previous Bond films. The scene with the drill plainly recalls Sean Connery in Goldfinger's clutches, as a laser moved ever closer to his most precious assets.

'Do you expect me to talk?'

Viner asks whether 'the famous 007 franchise, starring Monica Belucci (left), Daniel Craig (centre) and Lea Seydoux (right), has become 'too powerful for the censors'

Viner asks whether 'the famous 007 franchise, starring Monica Belucci (left), Daniel Craig (centre) and Lea Seydoux (right), has become 'too powerful for the censors'

'No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die.' It is one of the great Bond film exchanges and, of course, the deadly ray stopped mercifully short of its target. Not here. And the on-screen scream was almost matched in the third row by my daughter, who again covered her eyes.

In due course, Eleanor and I, like everyone else, exited in a hubbub of appreciation, overwhelmingly delighted with what we'd seen.

But I woke up yesterday morning with a nagging concern that the films I have loved since one Saturday afternoon in January 1970, when my late father took me, aged eight, to see On Her Majesty's Secret Service, are perhaps more responsible than any others for the way in which violence has taken root in mainstream cinema.

Sadism, it is true, looms large in Ian Fleming's novels. Torture and horrible deaths are nothing new in the Bond films, going all the way back to a cyanide-filled cigarette in Dr No (1962).

In fact, we don't even have to move out of the Sixties to see how the films glorified and glamorised violence. The fight on the train in From Russia With Love (1963) is remarkably brutal. My wife admits she still shudders when she thinks of Jill Masterson's horrible end by skin suffocation after being painted gold in Goldfinger (1964).

Then there's my beloved On Her Majesty's Secret Service — which might have had the most wooden Bond in George Lazenby, but a chap never forgets his first love. I've never forgotten the lines, either, like the one when one of the thugs on the mountain skis into a snow-blower that then spews red.

'He had a lot of guts,' murmurs Bond and, of course, we all rejoiced in his drollery. But what he was doing, what he has always done, was trivialising violence, reducing it to a matter of wit and wordplay.

It would be more than a little pious, not to say hypocritical, to moan about this. It's a big part of the reason we all love Bond.

And the wit serves a dual purpose: not only showing us that 007 is so lethal that he can dispatch villains without a tremor of remorse, but also reminding us that we're not expected to take this killing business too seriously.

In Daniel Craig's tenure as Bond, however, the violence has been cranked up and the wit toned down.

Craig is the first 007 to show genuine psychopathic tendencies, murdering people as if he enjoys it, not just to get himself out of a hole or to set up a one-liner. For pretty much the first time in the cinematic history of James Bond, we are expected to take it seriously.

In some ways, this is a positive development. Craig is a fine actor, and in this day and age we need to look at Bond and know that he means it.

For all his qualities, that can't be said of Roger Moore, whose ever-affable 007 was perfectly in tune with the louche Seventies. But the paradox of modern cinema, and TV drama, is that the best escapism looks ever more real.

That's why Bond doesn't only dish out plausibly awful acts of violence but is forced to suffer them, too.

Connery's Bond might have got out of Goldfinger with his testicles intact, but it's a miracle those attached to Craig's version survived Casino Royale (2006), in which they were lashed repeatedly with a heavy rope. Moreover, in our multiplex age, intensified sound effects leave nothing to the imagination.

So what of the future? Mendes has said Spectre, his second Bond film, will be his last, while Craig intimated he wouldn't mind parking up the Aston Martin DB10 for good.

Will the next director, the next Bond, be brave enough to go a little easier on the violence or at least to be a little less graphic? It's probably no more likely than the BBFC being brave enough to slap them with a 15 certificate if they aren't.

Whatever happens, I can't see myself falling out of love with Bond. And on that subject, something else struck me about Spectre: Q, the gadget specialist splendidly played by Ben Whishaw, is also clearly in love with Bond.

Bond needs only to raise an eyebrow for Q, like Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), to oblige him by breaking any rule.

But while she seems to have suppressed her lengthy crush on 007, Q is manifestly smitten.

This raises a new set of questions about the direction of Bond; indeed, I wonder whether all the fuss about Spectre featuring the oldest ever Bond girl in 51-year-old Monica Bellucci (whose character Lucia Sciarra has a tryst with 007 before he moves on to Lea Seydoux's character Dr Madeleine Swann), wasn't just a smokescreen worthy of Q himself?

Whatever, Spectre is certainly one of the most thought-provoking Bond films of all time. And one of the best. But it's most definitely not for the squeamish. 

 

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