No Time to Die (2021)
dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga
Rated: PG-13
image: ©2021 United Artists Releasing
The five-film arc of Daniel Craig’s stint as Agent 007 comes to a close in the emotionally satisfying, if overstuffed, finale No Time to Die. The movie, the release of which became as dramatic as its plot due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has storytelling stakes and an emotional weight like no Bond film that’s come before it. It also has approximately 1,438 moving parts and, at a whopping 163 minutes, suffers from a bloat which threatens to, but thankfully never succeeds in, sabotaging its best elements.
Following the heavily serialized format of the other films in the Craig Bond era, No Time to Die rests upon the weakest plot point of the preceding entry, Spectre: Bond falling in love with Madeleine Swann, the daughter of Spectre assassin Mr. White. In my review for Spectre, I wrote of the love affair between Bond and Swann:
“Too little screen time is spent showing their relationship grow beyond one passionate moment, which makes the climax between the two shallow and insubstantial.”
It was especially hard for me to buy the rushed romance between the two because of the far superior love story, which was properly developed in Casino Royale, between Bond and Vesper Lynd. Four films later, Lynd’s ghost still looms large in James Bond’s psyche and over the Craig Bond series. It’s Bond’s visit to Vesper’s grave in Rome that gets the ball rolling on NTtD’s plot.
Spectre assassins attempt to take out Bond, first with an explosion rigged in Vesper’s tomb – the result of which triggers one of my favorite action movie tropes, in which a character’s hearing is briefly impaired and is signaled by a high-pitched EEEEEEEEEEE on the soundtrack; it happens twice in NtTD. When the explosion fails, they try to run him down in a thrilling opening action set piece. The movie sidelines Madeleine – to allow for a later surprise plot reveal – when Bond, out of thin air, gets it in his head that she betrayed him to the Spectre assassins. He puts her on a train, meaning to never see her again.
Five years later, Valdo Obruchev, a Russian scientist, is kidnapped from the lab in which he works. Obruchev is working for MI6 on a project so secret that M, the head of the spy agency, has kept its details hidden from his superiors. In a supreme example of on-the-nose character names, the kidnapper, and NTtD’s ultimate Bond villain, is Lyutsifer Safin. In the picture’s flashback introductory sequence, we find out that madman Safin has beef with Madeleine because her father killed Safin’s entire family, and the poison, which was also meant for him, left him disfigured. (There have been several think pieces about how NTtD perpetuates negative stereotypes about people who are disfigured.)
The project that Obruchev has been working on, and which Safin intends to unleash on the world, is codenamed Project Heracles. It’s one of those Bond/spy movie secret weapons so ridiculous that nothing short of total and unquestioning suspension of disbelief will stop it from derailing the entire movie for you. Project Heracles is a bioweapon using nanobots – a term that should never be used outside of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 bit (I know, I know, they’re called Nanites, but you get my point) – which can be programmed to attack a specific person using a DNA signature. Nanorobotics is a real, emerging technology, but in the year of our lord 2021, suggesting it could do anything remotely close to what’s depicted in NTtD is laughable.
I generally hate and try to avoid as much as possible synopsizing large portions of plot in my reviews. It’s a lazy form of film criticism. And, as far as No Time to Die is concerned, it would be a herculean task. (See what I did there?) Over the course of its 3-hour-and-45-minute running time, NTtD definitively concludes the Blofeld story arc left open from Spectre, introduces a villain tied to it and Madeleine Swann, and incorporates CIA agent and Bond ally Felix Leiter. (It’s Leiter who convinces Bond to come out of retirement following the assassination attempt in Rome.) It also adds two other characters brought in by Leiter. One of them, another CIA agent assisting Bond, named Paloma, is played splendidly by actor Ana de Armas. The character is an afterthought, though, and the movie would have lost nothing had she been written out of it. There’s also a new Agent 007, who took the famous number during Bond’s retirement.
That’s an awful lot to cram into one movie, and I didn’t even get to everything. The story reeks of too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen syndrome, as evidenced by four people credited for the screenplay, three of whom also share a story credit. Phoebe Waller-Bridge was brought in to do a polish on the script, and you can see her wit poking through at times. I have to imagine one exchange, in which Nomi, the new 007, asks if Bond has a hypnotic effect on all women (though certainly not on her), is pure Waller-Bridge. The response Nomi gets to her query is, “50/50. It’s unpredictable.” I don’t know who to blame for the laugh-out-loud bit of exposition when a computer voice announces, “Blofeld’s [bionic] eyeball: unlocked.”
Director Cary Joji Fukunaga, who is the first American to ever direct an EON Productions Bond picture, as well as the first Bond director to also receive a writing credit, stages NTtD’s action sequences and quiet moments alike with great skill and effective suspense. For as much as I’ve flogged the film’s bloated running time, NTtD doesn’t feel like it’s almost three hours long. Fukunaga keeps things moving at a brisk pace, and the movie is entertaining throughout.
No Time to Die is also filled with pathos. Without spoiling the movie’s biggest revelations, it’s hard to overstate how much of a radical departure (in a satisfying way!) Daniel Craig’s last appearance as James Bond is from the rest of the franchise. Over the past 15 years, the people behind this latest iteration of film’s most famous secret agent have engaged in an overhaul of the character to reflect society’s changing attitudes and mores. Craig’s Bond has his share of sexual conquests throughout the series, but this iteration of Bond is more fully formed and emotionally developed than most previous versions.
To that end, even though I wasn’t convinced of Bond and Madeleine Swann’s emotional connection in Spectre or in the early going of NTtD, by the final act of this last Craig Bond outing, I was a bit surprised by my own deeply felt emotional response to the movie’s resolution.
Based on the heavily serialized form of this Bond series, I have to imagine the next Bond (whoever that may be) will have to start basically from scratch. It will be hard to say goodbye to Daniel Craig’s James Bond. The same goes for Jeffrey Wright’s Felix Leiter, one of the many stand-out elements – due in no small part to Wright’s extraordinary interpretation of the character – of this Bond series. James Bond will return, as the end credits of No Time to Die – like most other Bond movies – assures us. These last five films set an incredibly high bar for the franchise, and they will be very hard to beat.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- No Time to Die is a fitting conclusion for the Daniel Craig Bond series. It’s over-long and a few of the plot points are a bit tortured, but if you enjoyed the other entries, you’ll likely enjoy this one. My complaints about how long NTtD is makes me wonder how I would have reacted to Lawrence of Arabia, had I been writing reviews when it was released. The world will never know…
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Blofeld’s introduction in NTtD is every bit as creepy and menacing as Hannibal Lecter’s in The Silence of the Lambs.
- NTtD has the weakest Bond opening in the Craig series. The visual design looks good, but Billie Eilish’s theme is forgettable. Of course, I said the same thing about Sam Smith’s Writing’s on the Wall, their theme for Spectre, and that song really grew on me.
- My rankings for the Craig Bond series:
1. Casino Royale
2. Spectre
3. No Time to Die
4. Quantum of Solace
5. Skyfall
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Six of us got together and rented out a theater for a private screening. Have to enjoy that experience while I can; who knows how much longer it will be an affordable option!