No Time to Die

The best Bond films have always been more than what we associate with 007 - the theme, the women, the gadgets, the villains, the song, etc. Which is why No Time to Die may go down as one of the best of the franchise. It stands alongside Casino Royale, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (keep an eye out for echoes of this film) and From Russia With Love as a high water mark, mainly due to what's going on behind the veneer of glitz and cool. This fifth film of Daniel Craig's tenure wraps up a lot of the threads that began with Casino Royale and continued on and off through the subsequent films. It acts as a pretty perfect bookend to that first film.

Running over the plot seems irrelevant. On paper, it's as you were with 007 films - uber-villain has nefarious plans for world domination or, at least, some sort of large-scale crime; Bond is called in to stop him; there are great action set-pieces; Bond cheeks it up with M, Moneypenny and Q; the CIA get involved; and of course, there are gorgeous women floating about. But in this case, the women are, for the most part, integral to the story. Lashana Lynch, as another double-O agent, Nomi, is excellent, perhaps poised to strike out on her own in the future. Her early entrapment of Bond, and henceforth continual annoyance with him, are superbly done, not over-played but showing them as begrudging equals. Léa Seydoux, as returning Madeleine Swann, has some of the toughest emotional lifting to do, and is terrific too. Only Ana de Armas seems slightly under-used here, for all the poster/trailer work she does for the film, you'd think she'd be in it for a tad longer. 

Rami Malek's baddie, Safin, is creepy and recalls a few past Bond villains, as does his volcanic lair, complete with moving parts. And I'm almost certain that his main henchman also plays second keeper for Spurs (check the pics, it's uncanny). It's the motivation for Safin's master plan that was a bit wooly. There are weaponised nanobots and DNA involved but his ultimate goal eluded me. Just the classic Bond film nutter excuse might be acceptable, I'm willing to overlook that script vagary. The cinematography is lush, especially the action sequence in a misty Norwegian wood, and the Raid-inflected staircase rumbles near the end. DOP Linus Sandgren has pulled out all the stops here. 

Where No Time to Die elevates itself is in the writing, specifically of the humanising of James Bond, though this process admittedly began at the start of Craig's arc of five films. The script was done by old Bond hands, Robert Wade and Neal Purvis, with extra polish added by the director, Cary Joji Fukunaga and Fleabag's Phoebe Waller-Bridge. If you are old-school 007, and you want your man to be granite, with absolutely no sign of human frailty, then best you dig back into the Connery or Moore films. Here, Craig portrays Bond as a vulnerable, desperate man who has been burned many times and is angry, yet searching for a semblance of happiness. This even stretches to weeping on occasion, though he can still dispatch dudes with a flourish. Needless to say, Craig is excellent, his delivery of "You can imagine why I've come back to play" is one of the great lines of recent times. A suitably fitting end to the Daniel Craig Bond-era, and one of the best 007 films to date. 

No Time to Die opens on Nov 11th almost everywhere.

See also:

I'd once again recommend Casino Royale (2006), directed by Martin Campbell, and let's stick with Bond and take a look at On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), directed by Peter R. Hunt.

BEWARE!! QUITE A NUMBER OF SPOILERS IN POD!!

(Film stills and trailer ©Universal, 2021)