Spectre AKA, James Bond XXVI.  stars James Bond (Normally I reference another famous role, but this dude really is only James Bond, with all respect to Girl in the Dragon Tattoo and Cowboys and Aliens) in the lead role.  Co-stars include The Red Dragon as M.,  Drax the Destroyer as the bad guy henchman,  Mary Magdalene from The Passion of the Christ as the secondary Bond girl, the French Assassin from Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol as the primary Bond girl and everyone’s new favorite villain from Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained as the bad guy.

Expectations: Moderate.  I have enjoyed this iteration of Bond movies more than the older ones (I’ve seen all of them).  I like that these take themselves more seriously.  I like that they are telling a continuous story instead of individual isolated movies.  However, I was in a bad mood and I wasn’t expecting much.

Reality: It was OK.  I guess that means it met my expectations.  It was satisfactory for a rainy day-off kill a couple of hours afternoon, but I didn’t love it.  I would have loved to love it.  There weren’t enough great action/fighting scenes to make it awesome.  The plot was  little hard to follow, like they are now trying too hard to connect all of them.  I didn’t really buy the Bond girl as a love interest.  I also feel that after some great bad guy performances that he defined for himself, Christoph Waltz tried to be too much of a stereotypical Bond villain.  However, Bautista in his limited role as OddJob 2.0 was really good and it’s a Bond movie with chases and improbable escapes so it was good.  It just wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be.

Appropriateness: It’s a James Bond movie, OK?  He hooks up a couple of times but you don’t really see anything.  There are a few bad words and some violence.  The one torture scene is kinda “Yikes!” but nothing like Casino Royale.

Rating System:

See it in the theater and will definitely own

See it in the theater and might own

See it in the theater and will likely Redbox it again

See it in the theater and be done

See it at the dollar theater

Redbox

Bored in 2 years and  watch it on Netflix

Avoid it.

I rate it a  Redbox. Unless you are a true Bond fan and need to see it in the theater, just get it on Redbox.  It will be fun for a couple of hours and is worth $1.50 or whatever. You spend real money and you might think you wasted it.  Casino Royale was great. Quantum of Solace and Skyfall were good.  This is just OK.