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While working great as a sendoff to Daniel Craig’s era of playing James Bond, a too vaguely-defined threat and a mediocre villain suck the urgency out of this film. (Not to mention the nearly three-hour long runtime.) While I’ve enjoyed the latest era of Bond films, I haven’t revisited any of them since I first watched them, so I was actually pretty lost at the start of this film on who a lot of the main characters were, and presumable anyone trying to watch this without seeing the previous films will feel just as lost. Luckily, the action picks up pretty quickly, and we jump ahead to the main plot. While the plot mostly sticks to the typical Bond formula, it suffers from never really giving the villain any solid motivations or even what his ultimate goal is. (We know he has something extremely dangerous, but it’s never quite spelled out on who will be the target of this doomsday weapon.) While there are some cool action sequences, there’s really none that standout, so the movie is left to fall back on the character arcs. This is where things do shine, as Bond gets some emotional beats to work with, and the main actors deliver with their performances. This allows the film to end on a surprisingly strong note, although I was worried they may try to walk it back and cheapen the moment, but thankfully they didn’t.
**1/2 out of *****