‘No Time to Die’ Review (Spoilers)
A lot has been made about No Time to Die being the last Bond movie from Daniel Craig, who reinvented the role from tired, cliché, parody to gritty and modern in Casino Royale in 2006, then almost sent it to the grave again with Quantum of Solace, only to lift the series again while also bringing back some of the series staples (including the sense of isolated storytelling) in Skyfall, then stumbling again (though a lot less so than in Q of S) with the very messy serialized, interconnected story in Spectre. Producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson decided to double down on the interconnected, serialized Bond story with No Time to Die (as Gabe would say, probably the most James Bond title ever). Will 3rd time be the charm, and is it the perfect send-off to Daniel Craig’s tenure as James Bond?
That’s a difficult question to answer for a couple of reasons. As far as the interconnected story is concerned, this one is probably the best of the lot. Cary Joji Fukunaga, who cut his teeth to fame with True Detective, Beast of No Nation, and Maniac, knows how to tell a lot of story in an effective way. He isn’t what I would call a typical TV director – he’s something more than that. He was famous for bringing the extravagant one-take back into people’s minds with his work on True Detective (a trope he not only repeats here but has been copied for almost every recent blockbuster movie) and knows how to execute compelling character moments and intimate scenes. His ability to juggle so many story elements, reintroducing old ones while maintaining the new ones, and giving enough visual information to foreshadow or remind the viewer of things they need to remember – is in full force here. Efficiency of storytelling is also at the forefront – the movie may register at 2 hours and 45 minutes, but it has the pace of a movie that’s much more shallow in run time.
As a final movie for Daniel Craig? It doesn’t lack for epic scope in run time, that’s for sure. There are many epic moments in the movie – expert car chases, multiple shooting galleries, a fair share of lovely ladies, thought provoking elements, and plenty of very good acting. Everyone seems on-board for the story, and everyone performs exceptionally well.
The script itself is… a bit of a mess. It corrals together well enough, but there are a lot of strange elements in play. Spectre is back, a new enemy emerges, call backs to secrets from Bond’s old and new love interests, returning and new allies, and a shit ton of global gallivanting all shaken (not stirred) into a cocktail that needed a final garnish to be palatable. In this reviewer’s eye, Phoebe Waller-Bridge was brought on to add that last cherry (or orange twist for you Casino Royale fans) to bring the movie together, and it mostly works. Her dialogue has just enough zing and zip – especially in the Cuba scenes – and she builds each character well through dialogue – to keep you engaged and keep things tonally on point. It’s almost as if Waller-Bridge and her cowriters were taking the corny elements of Bond and updating them to the 21st Century.
And the tone shifts quite a bit. There are moments that are creepy, high melodrama, sad, slick, and goofy. This is a Bond movie that runs the gamut. Yet it never really strays too far away from being a nice, intimate movie – always focused on Bond even when the fate of the world is at stake, even when it gets a bit ludicrous with
That isn’t to say the movie is droll to look at. The pace is brisk and all the environments are expertly covered. The action set pieces are also pretty neat to look at – what they lack in bombast they make up for in visual details. A personal favorite takes place in a forest with Bond using his surroundings to take down the predators looking for him.
The movie also brings back the last few things that James Bond movies are famous for – the gadgets. To go any further on them would require spoilers (though let’s just say they are simple in nature but fun in execution – literally, in one case).
As much as I absolutely loved the movie, it isn’t without flaws. As a big fan of the films, I’m inclined to give this a high ranking – and I will. However, you’ll have to view after the jump to see what I found crushing. If you don’t want any spoilers, my verdict is a low Shiny and Chrome.
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE AHEAD. PLEASE CLICK AWAY IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO HAVE THE ENTIRE FILM SPOILED FOR YOU.
Unfortunately, the movie is not perfect. In fact, one of the biggest flaws is the main villain. Rami Malek does the best with what he’s given as Lyustifer (Lucifer?) Safin. He has a scarred face, slow speech pattern, diabolical willpower, and does a lot of stuff inadvertently, but somehow lacks that signature moment that the villain needs to exert his dominance. Unfortunately, similar to Spectre, the villain seems to be more sinister in concept than in execution of the movie – though to no fault of Rami Malek. While looking over his list of atrocities, the fact that the confrontation between Bond and Safin comes so late and seems so flaccid – a few scenes of dialogue and a trick play for the win – it would have been better if his thumbprint was over the events of the movie more.
(Also, as Gabe will hate, it looks like Safin’s headquarters are the exact same headquarters that Jared Leto had in Bladerunner 2049 – which probably brought back bad memories for him. Just to driver this further, Malek is dressed in what looks to be a Japanese-inspired outfit, just like Leto!)
There were also a fair number of characters and twists that just felt like duds. Billy Magnussen – an actor that always seems to play the dumbest or worst part of a movie surprisingly well – acts as a double agent that feels like he should be more significant (he causes the death of Felix Leiter in the movie, but fails to really do much else). There is also a goon with a fake eyeball (who has one of the best deaths in the movie). Neither character is developed particularly well, and this makes both of their menace feel lessened in the overall scheme of things. Finding a way to give them more menace or stakes throughout the film would have gone a long way to making both of their deaths feel impactful and necessary.
My final point of contention with the movie is the ending. If the reboot of Bond is seen as similar to Batman Begins, then the ending treads heavily on The Dark Knight Rises. Bond is placed in a situation where he must sacrifice himself to save the word. For one thing, the villain has infected him with nanobots that will give his love interest, Madeline, and her daughter – Mathilde (who is also Bond’s daughter) – smallpox due to it’s hypertargeting nature. Additionally, a bomb doorway that Bond had to open was closed by Sinister villain, and Bond must reopen it. Yet he also had to confront the villain, who crippled Bond with a few too many bullets. So Bond reopens the door and sacrifices himself so that Madeline (his love interest from Spectre and his greatest love, according to the last two movies) can live and tell his story. Missiles explode and Bond dies. There is a small memorial in M’s office and Madeline drives off with Mathilde to build a new life and tell her about how amazing her father is.
For a movie that works as well as No Time to Die works, the ending felt lazy and gross. It felt very un-Bond-like to just die in what basically was Jim Kirk’s father’s death in the beginning of Star Trek – the writers wrote Bond into a situation where he dies an no one else lives, but did it in such a somewhat generic way (to me, at least). Bond has always been about getting out of the tight situations. I understand that part of the drive of the movie was to put Bond in a situation he couldn’t get out of and to provide true closure to Danie Craig’s tenure, but having him just die felt like a cheap way to do it. What would have been harder – and more satisfying – was to find a way to end the movies by giving him a satisfactorily happy ending – one that relied on his character coming full circle – instead of one that felt like feaux poignancy.
Based off my screening, there were some people that this ending really worked for. It felt creatively empty and, for this reviewer, very boring, and left a bad taste in my mouth. It wasn’t enough to discredit the rest of the film, but it was enough to make me really think about my rating.
