It’s no secret No Time to Die marks the final installment of Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond, which began 15 years ago. He’s been looking to hang up the tux and brush aside a shaken martini for some time now. No spoiler alert is needed to report Craig’s last hurrah arrives as a valediction, a very self-conscious end of an era. No Time to Die is a 007 movie that marvels in its own tropes while also borrowing some newer ones from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which didn’t even exist when Craig first took the mantle.
As a summation and culmination of a five-picture arc, the 25th Bond entry, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, has more in common with the grandiose, bow-tying Avengers: Endgame than it does the taut, no-nonsense Casino Royale. With a screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Fukunaga, the film is a no-turning-back conclusion to a serialized Bond epic. Diehards will, for sure, shout past each other on social media about this plot twist or that climactic scene, in the same way Star Wars fans savaged or defended the minutiae of The Last Jedi. So it goes with the nerd commentariat.
Though one’s mileage very well may vary, there’s no denying the many visceral and satisfying thrills of this long-delayed fireworks display. The tantric withholding of these pleasures – from April of last year, to the fall of last year, to the spring of this year, up until now – only heightens their intensity. Would the classic gun-barrel sequence, with Bond firing at the camera, have raised the hairs on your forearms back in 2020? Maybe not. But here we are, with the biggest cinematic event since lockdown, notwithstanding Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and a couple of Phase Four MCU movies.
No Time to Die is for better or worse a direct sequel to 2015’s Bond entry Spectre. So much of the previous film is referenced here that, without a refresher on its story beats, on would be frequently confused if not utterly lost. We’re tossed into the fray with little hand-holding. Fukunaga made his name by directing the first season of HBO’s True Detective, which may explain why he expects the audience to pick right back up where the series left off, as if it were another episode of premium television.
The film opens with a truly chilling flashback before cutting to a present where Bond is fully retired and settling into a new life with Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux, reprising her role from Spectre). This bit of domestic bliss literally explodes early into No Time to Die’s nearly three-hour runtime. Our hero is suddenly thrust back into action, first at the behest of Bond’s CIA agent friend Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) and his obsequious colleague Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen), and then the usual suspects back at MI6 (which include the familiar faces of Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris and Ben Whishaw). Thrown into the mix are two new secret agents. There’s Paloma (the luminous Ana de Armas), who briefly graces us with her presence during one of the film’s superb action set-pieces. And, notably, there’s Nomi (the excellent Lashana Lynch), a woman of color (gasp!) who’s been assigned the 007 title (what?!) that Bond freely abandoned.
Spectre’s chief antagonist Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) returns to cause some mischief. But it’s Rami Malek’s ludicrously named Lyutsifer Safin who is the Big Bad. No Time to Die’s stakes are Thanos-esque. We’re talking mass murder, from nanobots and for the greater good. (Don’t ask, it’s complicated.) The final act unfolds more like a level of Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64 than the gigantic spectacle you’d expect, given what’s hanging in the balance. This, mind you, is a minor complaint. No Time to Die is, at its beating heart, a somber farewell studded with plenty of bombast elsewhere. Its finale aims for wet eyes over pumping fists.
Daniel Craig is moving on from Ian Fleming to something like Agatha Christie, from James Bond to Benoit Blanc of the upcoming Knives Out sequels for Netflix. At this point, Blanc is a far more interesting and entertaining character. Still, Craig leaves behind huge shoes to fill. One question remains, now that we’ve witnessed a Black woman, nominally, as 007. Will yet another white man inherit those three digits? One hopes the answer isn’t as obvious as it seems.
Photo courtesy of Metro Goldwyn Mayer
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