Movie Review: 'No Time To Die' Starring Daniel Craig

No Time to Die is the best James Bond movie of the Daniel Craig era. That’s not particularly high praise coming from me as I have not enjoyed a James Bond movie since the Roger Moore era and that was mostly a so bad it’s good appreciation of A View to a Kill. For me, James Bond went out of fashion when the Cold War ended. Since then, better and more dynamic spy characters, such as Matt Damon’s super-spy Jason Bourne came along and revamped the spy genre.

Since Jason Bourne, Bond has been playing catch up and failing miserably. The outmoded masculinity and sexuality of the Bond franchise has grown dispiritingly stale and despite Daniel Craig being a very good action star, the franchise has largely been trading on nostalgia since Craig inherited the role in 2008’s Quantum of Solace. In the time that Craig has played James Bond, the franchise has existed like a rock n’roll reunion tour, returning every few years to play the hits again with crowds cheering loudly at familiar catchphrases and references to Bond’s past.

All of that said, the hiring of director Cary Joji Fukunaga gave me some hope that No Time to Die might be more than the latest James Bond classic hits record. Fukunaga is a director of strong ideas, as shown in his helming of True Detective and his and his previous feature film work, Sin Nombre, Jane Eyre and Beasts of No Nation. There was hope that Fukunaga might bring some needed flavor to the franchise. Sadly, what Fukunaga mostly provides is a strong competency in directing action scenes.

No Time to Die finds a retired Commander James Bond happily on holiday with his beloved Madeleine Swan (Lea Seydoux). The pair have traveled to Greece where Madeleine has compelled James to confront and let go of his past by saying one final goodbye at the grave of his late former love, Vesper Lynde. This cathartic moment is interrupted when baddies blow up Vesper’s grave in an attempt to kill Bond. He survives and is able to evade death long enough to find Madeleine already checking out of their hotel. Has she betrayed him? It’s not clear, but Bond is convinced. After sending her off on a train Bond vanishes for 5 years.

Living and fishing the beautiful blue waters of Jamaica, Bond is reeled out of retirement by his old friend Felix (Jeffrey Wright). Felix and a state department flunkie named Logan Ash (Billy Magnusson), want to hire James for a mission on behalf of the American government. They want Bond to retrieve a missing scientist from Cuba who developed and helped to steal a dangerous and deadly weapon. This weapon can target specific DNA making it easier to kill someone very specific without harming people around them.

The weapon was actually created under the purview of British Intelligence, a program directly overseen by Bond’s former boss M (Ralph Fiennes). The British government is also after the same scientist and they send the new OO7 (Lashana Lynch) to beat Bond to the capture of the scientist. Two other players are in this game as well as we find the return of Spectre, headed up, even behind bars, by Ernst Stavros Blofeld (Christoph Walz) and an even more secretive baddie named Safin (Rami Malek), who is not only after the scientist but is also pursuing his own agenda against Spectre.

That’s more than enough plot for one movie. I will end the description and just tell you that Q, played by Ben Whishaw, and Moneypenny, played by Naomie Harris, are also back to round out the James Bond greatest hits band while Ana De Armas joins the band as a Cuban operative assigned as Bond’s partner for the Cuba mission. De Armas is the best part of No Time to Die. Her enthusiasm and physicality in a terrific gunfight scene are a welcome relief from the often dour plotting of a modern James Bond movie. I would have liked more of De Armas but any more would have likely dimmed her charm in favor of the typically downbeat modern Bond stories.

The kindest thing I can say about No Time to Die is that it is never boring. Cary Joji Fukunaga is a terrific action director and the pacing of the action of No Time to Die makes the more than 2 hour and 40 minute runtime feel not nearly as long. Fukunaga still has to play the hits like 'Aston Martin,' 'Bond, James Bond,' and 'Shaken Not Stirred,' but Fukunaga’s approach is less mechanical than previous Craig-Bond movies. The James Bond greatest hits don’t feel as stale under his sharp direction.

Kind words out of the way, I wasn’t impressed with all of the action of No Time to Die. If I see another scene of a world class spy killing hundreds of henchmen who stupidly come running through doors without looking or down steps without looking only to line up to be plugged by the indestructible hero, my eyes will painfully roll to the back of my head. It’s become torture to suffer these scenes again and again and again where directors create these impossible odds against a hero who then overcomes those odds as if it were a Sunday drive in the country.

Poor Rami Malek is ill-served by No Time to Die. His villainous Safin is a complete dud. His Thanos-like scheme to trim the world population is intriguing but his revenge plot is unnecessarily convoluted and his silly villain speech is only menacing because he’s threatening to toss a small child in the air to be shot like a human clay pigeon. His back story involving Spectre is given short shrift and indeed Spectre, the big evil conglomerate of the previous Bond movies is put out to pasture rather unceremoniously.

What’s left of No Time to Die is an ending that some find shocking and others find perfunctory. Indeed, there still somehow appears to be wavering among fans as to the fate of James Bond despite some strong visual evidence involved. Regardless of Bond’s fate, Daniel Craig is certainly finished with the franchise. I don’t blame Craig for the faltering of the franchise, as I said, I think he’s a good actor and action hero. Craig sadly has been let down repeatedly by a creative team that is going through the motions of recycling a dated and faltering intellectual property.

MGM and the Broccoli family keep running James Bond back out into the world because there is profit in nostalgia. It’s our fault really, if we keep paying a premium for reheated leftovers of a bygone era, what motivation does this creative team have to serve us anything new? As long as audiences are willing to gobble up warmed over greatest hits and cheer for the Pavlovian repetition of the familiar, that's all that they are going to give us.

No Time to Die arrived in theaters on Friday, October 12th, 2021.