FILM REVIEW
NO TIME TO DIE
Dir: Cary Joji Fukunaga
No Time To Die arrives a year shy of the venerable Bond series' 60th anniversary and concludes the tenure of Daniel Craig in the lead role. Though all but Goldfinger of the original six films contained some degree of serialisation, Craig's time in the lead role has been characterised by plots more tightly interwoven with each other than ever before, all concerned with answering the question of who James Bond is, what role he has to play in the modern world, and what, if anything, that means.
If any conclusions can be reached from what No Time To Die has to offer, few feel satisfying and most outright misguided. Nine years ago, Skyfall - then a standalone film, since uncomfortably retconned into the increasingly incoherent Craigiverse continuity - delivered a self-assured and conclusive answer: Bond as the modern Arthur, an eternal defender forged in the best values of old but existing in a cycle of rebirth and evolution to deal with the threats of changing times. No Time To Die's version of Bond also exists somewhat in legend - one character refers to himself as a 'big fan' of the temporarily-retired spy - but looking at how he's characterised this time around, one can only wonder why.
For any readers of the right-wing press, none of this has anything to do with accusations of the movie being 'woke', which it isn't. Any such accusation which might be levelled at this film could be laid just as easily at the feet of numerous other entries in the series. The movie doesn't misunderstand or misrepresent Bond because it's left-wing or identity-obsessed, it misunderstands him because it confuses melodrama for character, and how the values that Bond represents as a pop cultural icon are what give him shape, with the events of individual films adding texture to that rather than the other way around.
I'm getting ahead of myself, however. The representation of Bond as a character might be an interesting debate for dedicated fans, but the first and last question to really matter is whether No Time To Die is a worthwhile film in its own right. The answer to that is that it is, until it very suddenly isn't. The movie's first act features some of the strongest material of any of Craig's films to date. The opening scene is a fine example of the series evolving in an intelligent and beneficial way, adopting a fresh tone (and genre) and using it to set the film off in a manner both exciting and promising mysteries to be solved. From there, events clip along at a healthy pace, with gorgeous scenery, likeable character interactions and several engaging and well-constructed action sequences. If it leans a little too heavily into serialised elements from past movies, the action more than covers its tracks, as it always has in a series where plots more often than not rely on momentum to carry audiences past logical and logistical shortcomings.
The Cuba scenes are a particular highlight, in no small part thanks to a joyful cameo from Ana de Armas, who manages to be adorable and sexy while making her Paloma a memorable character in her own right. Her peppiness bounces off the slightly stuffy Bond to winning effect and brings out the best in both of them. Though de Armas steals the film in her short time, Bond's interactions with Lashana Lynch's Nomi and Jeffrey Wright's returning Felix Leiter in Jamaica are no less enjoyable. Bond has distinct relationships with each, and an all-too rare sense is given of a genuine friendship between Bond and Leiter, only previously glimpsed so vividly in Live And Let Die and Licence To Kill.
That the movie's opening third gets everything so right makes it all the more jarring when it comes to an abrupt halt as soon as events move to London. The immediately preceding twist feels like a mistake made for nothing more than the sake of having a twist - a mistake the writers repeat twice over - but enough goodwill has been built up at that point to gloss over what seems a small bump in the road. Unfortunately, that bump immediately turns into a brick wall. The pace, liveliness and character of the movie's first act come to a crashing halt in a long stretch of excessive talkiness and never recover thereafter. The serialised soap opera elements which sank preceding film SPECTRE take over and never let go, to the extent that the villain and his scheme are relegated to C-story afterthought at best, existing in service of the dreary telenovela which shoves itself to the forefront. One late development, seemingly the real reason for the existence of the villain's macguffin weapon, challenges a scene from The CW's Arrow, wherein a character regains the use of her legs just in time to (literally) walk out on her love interest, for sheer eye-rolling hamminess.
Although the film does not make any individual mistake as aggressively awful as having Bond's arch-nemesis be his de facto brother, it carries over many of its predecessors biggest shortcomings. Where Bond should be a relatively uninteresting man whose job intrudes him into fascinating situations, here as in SPECTRE Bond exists at the very centre of the known universe. Everything revolves around him and his small circle of friends, and the relationship between him, love interest Madeleine and villains Safin and Blofeld is as banal, underdeveloped and confusing as the previous movie's family nonsense. Like SPECTRE, it is also this element which is the movie's real plot. Rami Malek's Safin is not only a non-entity of a character - stranding Malek in a directionless performance much as Christoph Waltz was both last and this time as Blofeld - but if he has a motivation or specific goal for the use of the weapon he co-opts, it's far from clear what it is. His short monologue in the movie's climax is where his intentions should be made clear, but feel like rambling to disguise the absence of any real answers. The most generous reading is that he's a repurposed Thanos from Avengers Endgame, albeit with far less screentime, presence, and with tech borrowed from Hideo Kojima in lieu of an Infinity Gauntlet.
Other characters fare little better, even if they are helped by less mannered performances. Craig puts in more effort than his last three films combined, but his Bond's post-Cuba mopiness and emotional petulance completely miss the character's mark (it's hard to imagine any man wanting to be him, let alone any woman wanting to be with him unless she has a kink for neediness) and soon make him a drag to spend time with. His chemistry with Léa Seydoux is more palpable, but mostly because they spend more time and have more romantic scenes together, even if she's as thinly drawn as she ever was. Lashana Lynch gives her MI-6 agent, Nomi, some understated charm, but as a character she spends most of her time as Bond's driver. For all the sensationalist fuss the character has created - evoked both by unhelpful interviews from Lynch and ludicrous reactions from certain corners of the press - she could easily be removed from the plot altogether, depriving the film of little more than a handful of methods of transport for Bond. Naomie Harris and Ben Whishaw are charming as Moneypenny and Q despite having little to do - although pity poor Q for having his dinner date interrupted - but Ralph Fiennes' M is undermined by characterisation contradicting his 'boots on the ground' ethos in the previous film. A confrontational scene between him and Bond would be more effective had Bond not already behaved disrespectfully towards him in SPECTRE. What should have been a shocking break in Bond's relationship with the
authority figure he respects most instead feels like an ongoing failure to
understand how the characters relate.
It is here that we circle back around to that original problem, that nobody involved seems to understand the material that they are working with. For all the promises of the movie evolving the series' supposedly outdated values and presentation, it is instead replete with half-measures and changes for changes' sake that not only regress some beloved elements into lesser states for no discernable reason - the gunbarrel sequence is more of a mess than it ever has been - but shortchanges how expertly the series has always evolved with the times (albeit with some undeniable hiccups along the way). Bond has shown an emotional inner life before - in the books and films - without the stroppy volatility of an angsty teenager. The women of the Bond series are iconic because of how often they are memorable and self-sufficient characters in their own right - a pantheon to which Ana de Armas' Paloma is a worthy addition, and Lashana Lynch deserved better - and do not deserve to be denigrated with the arrival of every new film out of a misconceived attempt at bigging up the latest characters.
For all the unconvincing promises about moving into modernity, the movie exists in fief - as M would say - to the series' past in a way which is if anything even more detrimental. In both storyline and Hans Zimmer's score, which repurposes John Barry for its only evocative tracks, No Time To Die presents itself as an inversion of one of the most beloved early Bond films. In fundamentally misunderstanding Bond, it also misunderstands why that film was the way it was and why it wasn't inverted in the first place. Similarly, the movie evokes two of the most fascinating unused concepts from Fleming's novels, one a location and the other a plot development, yet strips the former of all its strangeness and flavour and tension, and uses the latter in such a way that contradicts the point that Fleming was making about his character, an error which resonates through to the movie's ending.
Looking at No Time To Die purely as an action movie in its own terms, it delivers about forty-five minutes of outstanding material followed by two hours packed with exhausting exposition, inane melodrama and uninspired action. A one-take sequence where Bond battles his way up a staircase has been compared to Atomic Blonde, yet where the latter film had its protagonist wounded, mostly unarmed and using every prop and geographical advantage she could muster to fight for her life, No Time To Die's version has Bond gunning his way through mooks until killing the sequence's mini-boss and delivering a dead-on-arrival one-liner. As a Bond film, it is barely that in anything but name. Much like modern Star Trek, it understands the facts of the series' history but has no sense of what makes any of it work or why it is beloved or has endured as it has. It tells where it should show. It meanders where it should run. It tries to make more real everything that was far more fun as fantasy. Craig's tenure as Bond has not been my favourite, but nevertheless delivered two classics of the series in Casino Royale and Skyfall, movies which respected Bond as an icon and his need to change with the times. What a shame, then, that his final two films in particular have made those successes feel like exceptions rather than the rule. [ 4 ]
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