Review: No Time to Die (2021)

 No Time to Die (2021)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, some disturbing images, brief strong language and some suggestive material

Score: 3 out of 5

If there's one thing that nobody can fault No Time to Die for, it's a lack of ambition. It's not only the longest James Bond film at two hours and 43 minutes, it also attempts to do something that no Bond film has done before: give a definitive ending to the character, or at least to Daniel Craig's iteration of him. Craig's growing disillusionment with playing Bond became evident amidst reports of a troubled production on his prior film Spectre, a film that I maintain is the weakest in the Craig era, with the experience making him comment at one point that he'd rather die than play Bond again (a quote that he later insisted, of course, got taken out of context) -- a far cry from the man who originally said that he eagerly took the part because he knew he'd never be able to show his face to his friends at the pub if he told them that he turned down the chance to play James Bond. After all, Craig was approaching the same point that Roger Moore was at when he realized, to his horror, that he was older than the mother of the actress playing the Bond girl in A View to a Kill, the realization that convinced him to hang it up after a series of films that had hit diminishing returns since Moonraker. Even discounting his own frustration, Craig and the people around him were probably afraid of the same thing happening to him. This is a movie where everybody involved, from Craig and his castmates to director Cary Fukunaga to co-writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge (of Fleabag and Killing Eve fame), felt like they brought their A-game as they sought to give the Craig era of Bond a proper sendoff of the sort that Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, and Pierce Brosnan never received.

And they pulled off 75% of it. This is easily a better movie than Spectre, one that does a far better job than that did of combining Craig's more down-to-Earth, Jason Bourne-esque version of Bond with the classic style and world domination plots of the classic movies. It redeems Léa Seydoux's Madeleine Swann, the flat Bond girl of Spectre, by showing a portrait of what life for a Bond girl after her adventure with a globetrotting secret agent would actually be like. It offers a slew of standout action scenes interwoven with tense, nail-biting moments and the series' trademark exotic locales. It exemplifies the strengths of the Craig era, taking all the little quirks about Bond and his world that generations' worth of parodies and jokes have made fun of and, by actually exploring their implications in full, finding new directions in which to take Bond without losing too much of what makes the character iconic.

At the same time, however, it also exemplifies two of the biggest weaknesses of the Craig era, a penchant for bloat and (barring Skyfall's Silva) bland villains who often do not measure up in a franchise that's otherwise iconic for its larger-than-life bad guys. This is a movie that could've easily been twenty minutes shorter, with entire scenes and characters feeling like they could've been cut with little attendant impact on the plot. What's more, despite how the film hypes up its supervillain, he is treated like an afterthought for most of the movie and barely leaves a mark when he does show up in force in the third act. Ultimately, however, this was a film where the highs more than made up for the lows, culminating on a daring high note that felt earned and made the lengthy runtime feel worth it, even if it sags in a lot of places along the way.

The film starts with Bond learning the hard way that, even in retirement and living happily with his lover Madeleine Swann, he cannot outrun his past, as SPECTRE goons catch up with the two of them in Italy under circumstances that leave Bond thinking that Madeleine is working for them. Five years later, Bond is now living the Jimmy Buffett life in a beach house in Jamaica, with a sailboat, a Land Rover, and a gun in his nightstand. There, his old CIA friend Felix Leiter contacts him with news that one Dr. Valdo Obruchev, a scientist working for MI6 on a top-secret weapon called Heracles that uses nanobots coded to the DNA of its targets to assassinate them in an untraceable manner, has been kidnapped by mysterious assailants, and MI6 needs Bond's help to track him down. Reluctantly agreeing to give up his cozy retired life and put his tuxedo back on one last time, Bond's journey takes him to Cuba, London, Norway, and the Kuril Islands and soon crosses paths once more with Madeleine, who not only has her own interest in the situation but also has very conflicted feelings about seeing Bond again.

The interplay between Craig and Seydoux was easily one of the best things about this film. In one movie, Madeleine went from one of the most forgettable Bond girls, the exotic woman of ambiguously European nationality who serves as Bond's love interest for the film, to one of the most memorable, somebody whose personal history with Bond has left her understandably bitter. Not only is her backstory considerably fleshed out, revealing that she has personal history with the new villain Safin, but we also learn that she too has tried to move on with her life, only to find that she's never quite able to forget either her adventure or how Bond's paranoia ultimately soiled everything. It was very fun watching the two of them interact over the course of the film and slowly remember why they loved each other to begin with, slowly defrosting as they reveal to one another multiple bombshells concerning what they've been doing for the last five years (especially one very big one on Madeleine's part). I fully bought into their relationship as one that would actually make Bond, one of the all-time great womanizers of fiction, start to question how he's been living his life and actually want to settle down, very high praise considering Madeleine's lack of presence in the last movie.

The supporting cast, too, was one of this film's strong suits. As always, M, Q, and Moneypenny, played by Ralph Fiennes, Ben Whishaw, and Naomie Harris, serve as great support for Bond on his missions, and despite getting way too little screen time, Ana de Armas' CIA agent Paloma was easily a standout who proved right away that she could play a credible action heroine, without feeling like either a stereotypical hardass or seductress. She's introduced as a rookie operative, and she gives off an image of a secret agent version of an overeager theater kid in the best way possible. Lashana Lynch's Nomi, Bond's replacement as Agent 007 after he retired, was also a fun and badass presence in her interactions with Bond, initially playing the young gun as smug and cocky while the old veteran rolls his eyes at her, at least before the two of them start to become genuine friends on account of their respective badassery. I also loved the meta joke, unstated but heavily implied, built around Nomi being a Black woman, which felt like the film commenting on the countless rumors that the next Bond movie will cast Idris Elba, Dev Patel, or Regé-Jean Page in the part. The way it played out, with Craig's Bond actually interacting with her and making that tension central to their relationship, managed to walk a fine line in being funny and smart without being disrespectful in either direction. In such a jam-packed film, I actually would've liked to see them get one more scene together.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same about a pretty important character in the film, the weak link who ultimately holds it back from greatness, the villain. Rami Malek's Lyutsifer Safin is kept in the shadows for most of the movie, but he is hyped up as the ultimate Bond villain, from a name that sounds like "Lucifer Satan" to the fact that he stomps right over Ernst Stavro Blofeld and the remains of SPECTRE in two devastating hammer blows to establish that he means business. Unfortunately, when we actually get to meet him, he does not live up to the hype. A former contractor who sold weapons to SPECTRE until they betrayed him and now wants revenge against the entire world, Safin is an extremely thinly-sketched villain who may have a plan to destroy the world, but doesn't have much of a "why?", not even the basic reasons of money, madness, or megalomania. While he has a memorable look with his disfigured face and the Noh mask he wears to cover it up, Safin felt extremely one-dimensional, not helped by Malek underplaying his performance and trying to go for a "silent and crafty" type even when, given how Safin was a mess of conflicting motivations (he hates SPECTRE because they disfigured him and killed his family, but he also has a God complex and wants to make the world "a little tidier"?), this was a part that really called out for a larger-than-life performance to pull it all together. I thought that the no-nonsense manner in which Safin approaches his evil plan had the seed of a good idea, and I didn't actively dislike him the way I did Spectre's take on Blofeld, but as a whole, I didn't really buy him as a credible threat to the world.

This movie also didn't quite make its length blow right by. It meanders a lot, as the characters journey around the world and back, and was absurdly overstuffed. As much as I liked Paloma and the action she got into in the Cuba scene, she ultimately had no real purpose in the film beyond her one scene serving as a demo reel for Ana de Armas potentially returning in a sequel (and, of course, another glamorous lady to put on the posters). This was just the most egregious of such moments, but there were a lot of points throughout the film where it felt like it was lazily lagging along, as though the editor was told to cut as little as possible because people who watch movies on streaming don't care about length. It didn't feel epic like Titanic or Avengers: Endgame, it just felt long. It's a shame, because when this movie did get moving, the action was punchy and stylish, with clear love put into the fights, the shootouts, and the car chases alike that managed to effortlessly fuse the more grounded look with the larger-than-life style that has always been Bond's cinematic trademark. I've noticed lately that having a background in making thrillers and horror movies seems to be much better preparation for making exciting, visually cohesive action movies than the music video background that was en vogue in the '90s and '00s, and now, I can add Cary Joji Fukunaga, maker of the It remake and True Detective, to a list that includes John Carpenter, Sam Raimi, James Wan, and David Sandberg. The pacing as a whole may be stop-and-go, but when it's going, the action on display is easily up to the Bond standard.

The Bottom Line

Not the best finale that Daniel Craig could've gotten, but it's easily middle-of-the-pack as far as his Bond movies go, and its high points are enough to outshine its sluggish pacing and forgettable villain. At last, a Bond actor's final movie is actually pretty damn good.