No Time to Die
Director - Cary Joji Fukunaga
Cast - Daniel Craig, Rami Malek, Lea Seydoux, Lashana Lynch, Naomie Harris, Ben Whishaw, Ralph Fiennes, Christoph Waltz
“No Time to Die” is a terrific movie: an up-to-the-minute, down-to-the-wire James Bond thriller with a satisfying neoclassical edge. It’s an unabashedly conventional Bond film that’s been made with high finesse and just the right touch of soul, as well as enough sleek surprise to keep you on edge.
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Before I go further, though, let me lay my baccarat cards on the table. I thought “Casino Royale,” the first film in which Daniel Craig portrayed 007, was the greatest Bond film since the early Sean Connery days, and in many ways the most perfectly realized Bond movie ever. (I’ve seen it countless times, and it’s one of my favorite films of its era.) To me, the trio of Bond films that came after “Casino Royale” have added up to one of the most profoundly disappointing follow-throughs of any contemporary film series. “Quantum of Solace” was all trumped-up mechanics, “Spectre” was an elaborate piece of product that went through the motions — and “Skyfall,” though I realize many Bond watchers think it’s a masterpiece, was, to me, sodden and overstated, with a meta-hammy megalomaniac performance by Javier Bardem and a backstory to Bond that was maudlin with self-pity. The film was trying to be “emotional,” but that poor-little-spy-boy origin story didn’t enlarge Bond — it diminished him.
No Time to Die is almost worth the wait. Overlong and often very silly; visually stunning from start to finish and, in its final act, unexpectedly emotional, director Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film isn’t so much concerned with reinventing Bond as it is with reshaping the world around him. No Time to Die opens with a glorious pre-credits sequence set in Italy and filmed in IMAX. Bond and Madeleine Swann’s romantic getaway is rudely interrupted by a slew of henchmen with connections to the evil organisation Spectre.
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His past, as it were, refuses to let him be. In an early scene, Bond, by force of habit, looks over his shoulder when he's out with Madeleine in quite the fairy-tale environment. She calls him out on it. But that’s the man he is; always on the run — sometimes from grotesque villains, but mostly from himself. Bond is still struggling with the trauma of losing Vesper Lynd all those years ago, and perhaps that is why he has erected an emotional barrier between himself and Madeleine, for fear of not going through the same heartbreak once again. On the two occasions that the carrot of a regular life was dangled in front of him, he swatted it away.
But this implies one very important thing, that James Bond, as played by the now 53-year-old Daniel Craig, has a heart. And reasserting this, in a nutshell, is the sole reason for this film’s existence.
The lines on Craig’s face are more pronounced than they were 16 years ago, when he first earned the license to kill in Casino Royale. He still has that swaggering confidence when he walks into a room — any room — but Fukunaga makes the wise decision to not hide his age, especially in the action scenes. Craig’s Bond has always favoured brute force over mind games — George Smiley he is not — but on so many occasions in No Time to Die, he lets out an ‘oof’ when he is punched. And crucially, he doesn’t immediately spring back up when he is struck down.
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A single-take stairway shootout in the film’s final moments pushes Bond to his absolute limits as a human being made of flesh and bone, and also penetrates his psychology with unusual deftness for a film in which a character kills another by dropping a car on them. This isn’t the same Bond who was motivated by rage in Quantum of Solace, or the man who was driven by duty in Skyfall. Now, with decades of service behind him, James Bond is moved by love.
No Time to Die is almost operatically tragic, and despite hitting more than a few false notes in its meandering second act, it regains its composure so confidently that you’ll be reminded of that shot from Skyfall, when Bond lands feet-first onto a moving train coach and makes sure he’s looking dapper before he continues fighting. If you’ve stuck with the Craig era from the very beginning, No Time to Die might even have the same impact that, say, Logan or Avengers: Endgame did.
Bond hooks up with his old CIA colleague Felix Leiter, played with his usual stalwart gusto by Jeffrey Wright, and with Paloma (Ana de Armas), an agent in a slip of a black cocktail dress who turns out to be less naïve than she says. Here’s a place where the film is downright debonair in its cleverness: The espionage logistics between Bond and Paloma are so impeccably timed that they give off a ripe erotic charge — but in the old days, these two would have dropped right into bed. The fact that they don’t deprives the film of nothing; if anything, it’s all hotter as a flippant flirtation. Billy Magnussen, who is such a sly actor, is also on hand as a grinning stooge of a CIA novice who’s a “fan” of Bond’s, until he isn’t.
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Craig, his hair chopped into a bristle cut, has mastered the art of making Bond a seemingly invincible force who is also a human being with hidden vulnerabilities. There’s another scene that, decades ago, would have been a seduction — but is now a far more nonchalant encounter between Bond and Nomi (Lashana Lynch), an up-and-coming MI6 agent who has been assigned the codename of…007. For a moment, we look at Lashana Lynch, who makes every line sparkle with a kind of dry sauciness, and think: Could this be the new — the next — James Bond? But the interplay between Nomi and Bond tells a story of its own. It is, on some level, about Bond making way for the new world. The trick is, he’s more than ready to go there. And the film, in a kind of bait-and-switch, is both offering up an honestly progressive piece of casting and winking at our heightened awareness of how much the Bond series could use it.
“No Time to Die,” at heart, is a traditional Bond film, and that’s part of its pleasure. But it’s not just the running time that feels more epic than usual. The movie wants to do full justice to the emotional thrust of this being Daniel Craig’s exit from the series. And it does. The main story is set five years after that opening sequence, when Bond and Madeleine have parted ways. They’re reunited through Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), now a in a padded cell in London, where he’s more Hannibal Lecter than jabbering loony; yet he hasn’t lost his ability to control. Madeleine is a psychiatrist who has access to Blofeld, and when she and Bond meet again, it’s so that Bond can have a face-to-face with the villain he put behind bars. In his one major scene, Waltz invests Blofeld with a more exquisite menace than he did in all of “Spectre.” Blofeld is two steps ahead of Bond, even though his bio-weapon is a step ahead of him.
The film’s main villain is Rami Malek as Lyutsifer Safin, who made his presence felt in the movie before we even knew it. Malek, with mottled skin, an all-seeing leer, and the caressing voice of a depraved monk, makes him a hypnotic creep. (He could give Bardem a master class in how to underplay the overstatement.) Safin has, of course, headquartered himself on a remote island, which is where he’s perfecting his poison and everything he plans to do with it. The setting, and the chem-lab ickiness, are very “You Only Live Twice,” but what’s so good about Malek’s performance is the obscene way that he inserts his presence into the drama of Bond, Madeleine, and Madeline’s young daughter, Mathilde. Bond is there to save the world; he’s there to save Madeleine and Mathilide; he’s there to save himself. Can he do all three? What happens in the climactic scene feels poetic: Bond, in a strange way, takes on the karma of all the people he has killed. I never thought I’d wipe away a tear at the end of a James Bond movie, but “No Time to Die” fulfills its promise. It finishes off the saga of Craig’s 007 in the most honestly extravagant of style.
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