Bond is back... in retirement... but not for long. Nefarious organization SPECTRE just won't let him and lover Madeleine Swann (Seydoux) enjoy life, and so it's back in action, until the evil cult is supplanted by something even more sinister, and the overarching story begun with 2006's Casino Royale comes to an end, as all things must.
What a tumultuous tenure Daniel Craig has had in the role. Before his initial outing even graced multiplex screens around the world, the verdict was overwhelmingly negative: too rough, too blond... yet wow us all he did, in his first and best Bond film, one that harkened back to the hard edge Timothy Dalton and CO had tried to infuse the series with in the late 80s. The world was not ready then, but it was now. Then the saga went on and did something unprecedented: it tried to create a multi-film arc. Sometimes, it succeeded (Skyfall), but more often than not, it stumbled, and No Time to Die finally comes after not only middling expectations, but also a long pandemic-induced delay and a massive social media ++++storm.
What does it all come down to?
The Good: when the film allows itself to have fun, it really delivers, especially in a trip to Cuba, where Craig dons the tux and Ana de Armas steals the show. Much has been made of Lashana Lynch's substitute 007, but I for one would gladly watch several films worth of Cuban agent Paloma's adventures. Cary Joji Fukunaga is also a confident hand at the tiller, providing both jaw-dropping vistas and precise action scenes that are always energetic and comprehensible, a rare feat these days. Lashana Lynch's 007 owes much of the hate she received - pre-release, as Craig did - to clumsy marketing, and the character registers as a credible threat to potentially give Bond a run for his money, their rivalry more playful and less grating than trailers and promo materials had implied. The threat is also quite fascinating, verging on horror territory. And lastly, if you had to dust off any old Bond tune, you'd be hard pressed to find a more affecting one than Louis Armstrong's "We Have All the Time in the World".
The Bad: No Time To Die's greatest sin is that of its forebears. It has a bigger story to wrap up, one that often compromises the better one being told within the film itself. It has to make us care about Seydoux's Madeleine (with whom he shares only an inkling of the chemistry he had with Eva Green's Vesper) something SPECTRE had failed at. It has to not just be a story in itself but be a definitive end to the Craig saga, a feeling that weighs heavy over the film. It shows us a more sensitive side to Bond, which is interesting in of itself, but would have worked better if either granted more time or introduced earlier in the 5-film arc. There's too much going on, and while this inflates the running time beyond reason (2.5 hours for a Bond film! With an opening credit number 20 minutes in...) The ending still manages to feel rushed. Hans Zimmer is wasted on music-duty, as he tends to be in most projects these days, only succeeding when evoking John Barry's hits, and the opening song is meh.
For all its faults, it certainly is worth seeing. Daniel Craig didn't have the easy suave charm of Sean Connery in his golden first 3 films, but he was credible and thrilling as a killing machine with human urges and charisma. Hopefully this concludes a narrative experiment and Bond can go back to a less weighty formula.
What a tumultuous tenure Daniel Craig has had in the role. Before his initial outing even graced multiplex screens around the world, the verdict was overwhelmingly negative: too rough, too blond... yet wow us all he did, in his first and best Bond film, one that harkened back to the hard edge Timothy Dalton and CO had tried to infuse the series with in the late 80s. The world was not ready then, but it was now. Then the saga went on and did something unprecedented: it tried to create a multi-film arc. Sometimes, it succeeded (Skyfall), but more often than not, it stumbled, and No Time to Die finally comes after not only middling expectations, but also a long pandemic-induced delay and a massive social media ++++storm.
What does it all come down to?
The Good: when the film allows itself to have fun, it really delivers, especially in a trip to Cuba, where Craig dons the tux and Ana de Armas steals the show. Much has been made of Lashana Lynch's substitute 007, but I for one would gladly watch several films worth of Cuban agent Paloma's adventures. Cary Joji Fukunaga is also a confident hand at the tiller, providing both jaw-dropping vistas and precise action scenes that are always energetic and comprehensible, a rare feat these days. Lashana Lynch's 007 owes much of the hate she received - pre-release, as Craig did - to clumsy marketing, and the character registers as a credible threat to potentially give Bond a run for his money, their rivalry more playful and less grating than trailers and promo materials had implied. The threat is also quite fascinating, verging on horror territory. And lastly, if you had to dust off any old Bond tune, you'd be hard pressed to find a more affecting one than Louis Armstrong's "We Have All the Time in the World".
The Bad: No Time To Die's greatest sin is that of its forebears. It has a bigger story to wrap up, one that often compromises the better one being told within the film itself. It has to make us care about Seydoux's Madeleine (with whom he shares only an inkling of the chemistry he had with Eva Green's Vesper) something SPECTRE had failed at. It has to not just be a story in itself but be a definitive end to the Craig saga, a feeling that weighs heavy over the film. It shows us a more sensitive side to Bond, which is interesting in of itself, but would have worked better if either granted more time or introduced earlier in the 5-film arc. There's too much going on, and while this inflates the running time beyond reason (2.5 hours for a Bond film! With an opening credit number 20 minutes in...) The ending still manages to feel rushed. Hans Zimmer is wasted on music-duty, as he tends to be in most projects these days, only succeeding when evoking John Barry's hits, and the opening song is meh.
For all its faults, it certainly is worth seeing. Daniel Craig didn't have the easy suave charm of Sean Connery in his golden first 3 films, but he was credible and thrilling as a killing machine with human urges and charisma. Hopefully this concludes a narrative experiment and Bond can go back to a less weighty formula.