C+Directed by Cary Fukunaga Starring Daniel Craig, Lea Seydoux, and Rami Malek Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Daniel Craig’s five movie arc as James Bond comes to an end with No Time to Die. Craig’s tenure has lasted 15 years, and his Bond has always felt captured and bested by other franchises. He was first imitating the Bourne movies, a darker and more ruthless look at spy tactics and assassins that is all over Casino Royale. Then, as Marvel’s long-running TV series thrived during the 2010’s, someone got it in their head that these movies, previously standalone adventures with a minimal throughline, needed to link together and explain Bond’s backstory, leading to films that alternately contained some of the best filmmaking and worst storytelling in the franchise. Cary Fukunaga’s entry, like Skyfall and Spectre before it, continues this frustrating tradition. No Time to Die provides a fitting end to Craig’s run because it embodies so much of the promise and the frustration that have characterized it.
No Time to Die is always pulled between its continuity impulses and its franchise history of liberal use of the reset button. On the one hand, Bond’s mission to thwart a nanobot-using assassin (Rami Malek) takes him from Italy to the Caribbean to an island fortress, all while utilizing new and familiar characters from Ian Fleming’s novels. On the other, many of those characters are connected to Bond’s past, or the past of his love interest Madeline Swann (Lea Seydoux) who Bond has stayed with from her initial appearance in Spectre. If the connections made the globe-trotting and the mission more compelling or grounded in compelling relationships, they’d be more successful. Instead, the viewer who’s seen a bunch of Bond films can only remember when these movies weren’t bloated to three hours so as to flesh out characters who don’t need fleshing out. A man threatening to kill millions of people is enough justification for a spy agency to thwart him. The same man doesn’t have to have met Swann in harrowing circumstances years earlier and have history with her father’s terrorist organization, which itself is led by Bond’s adoptive brother. It’s no accident that the universally-accepted best sequence in the film is one featuring Ana de Armas as a rookie spy who, in her brief few minutes onscreen, has to help Bond infiltrate and escape from a meeting. She’s not weighted down by all the melodrama that’s crippled Craig’s Bond, so she can focus on making her time as thrilling and fun as anything in the franchise’s long history.
In the same film that contains great scenes and contributions from actors like de Armas and Geoffrey Wright’s reprise of CIA spy Felix Leiter, anything that alludes to the plot developments of the awful Spectre are a total misstep. Neal Purvis and Robert Wade return as screenwriters from Spectre, and are the least likely people to correct from that film’s terrible choices. Cristoph Waltz’s Blofeld returns, conducting Spectre business from jail. With the continued presence of Swann, with whom Craig has none of the chemistry that he had with Casino Royale’s Eva Green, No Time to Die is a direct sequel to a film that, excepting its phenomenal Day of the Dead prologue, would be better off completely forgotten.
What’s new is what elevates No Time to Die. Fukunaga is the king of the muscular one-shot action scene, having started the recent trend with True Detective, and he again utilizes a show-stopping one here. The addition of Phoebe Waller-Bridge to the script punches up the dialogue and allows Craig to occasionally be as loose as he’s ever been. Lashana Lynch is wholly credible as a 00 agent, possessed of all the sleek bearing and lethal competence necessary to do the job. Billy Magnusson’s alpha male sliminess makes him the least surprising turncoat in the history of turncoats, and is therefore perfectly cast for a Bond film. Malek is a hit-or-miss actor who’s largely on target here, creepy and alien as Bond’s latest antagonist. Fukunaga is able to locate feelings of real loss that Bond films have rarely, if ever, been able to evoke, especially when that loss is for background office drones. An early sequence in a lab, where a commando team has clearly been given off-screen orders to kill everyone, communicates the total futility of resistance when powerful people have decided one’s life is meaningless. There’s even some contemporary criticism of the security state, as much as these films are able to cast shade on UK and Western arrogance that dictates that if anyone is going to have monstrous powers, it should be the ‘good’ guys who would certainly never think to abuse it. It’s stunning that actors as talented as Waltz and Seydoux are the weak links, but the script serves them so poorly that there’s little they can do to make their scenes anything other than interminable.
Daniel Craig has talked about the grueling nature of this role and how much he dreads every new film, so good for him for completing his run in relatively satisfying fashion. Perhaps the best actor to portray Bond, the franchise might’ve felt compelled to beef up the role in response to the talent of the person in it. Now that this backstory experiment has ended in a commercially successful but critically panned fashion, maybe the next person tasked to like martinis, baccarat, and luxury product placement will just get to be in standalone missions without side trips to his childhood estate or ongoing relationships that don’t move the needle. Craig has featured in some of the best work in the franchise. His legacy is that it was so often side-by-side with misguided attempts to turn Bond into something it wasn’t. C+
In the same film that contains great scenes and contributions from actors like de Armas and Geoffrey Wright’s reprise of CIA spy Felix Leiter, anything that alludes to the plot developments of the awful Spectre are a total misstep. Neal Purvis and Robert Wade return as screenwriters from Spectre, and are the least likely people to correct from that film’s terrible choices. Cristoph Waltz’s Blofeld returns, conducting Spectre business from jail. With the continued presence of Swann, with whom Craig has none of the chemistry that he had with Casino Royale’s Eva Green, No Time to Die is a direct sequel to a film that, excepting its phenomenal Day of the Dead prologue, would be better off completely forgotten.
What’s new is what elevates No Time to Die. Fukunaga is the king of the muscular one-shot action scene, having started the recent trend with True Detective, and he again utilizes a show-stopping one here. The addition of Phoebe Waller-Bridge to the script punches up the dialogue and allows Craig to occasionally be as loose as he’s ever been. Lashana Lynch is wholly credible as a 00 agent, possessed of all the sleek bearing and lethal competence necessary to do the job. Billy Magnusson’s alpha male sliminess makes him the least surprising turncoat in the history of turncoats, and is therefore perfectly cast for a Bond film. Malek is a hit-or-miss actor who’s largely on target here, creepy and alien as Bond’s latest antagonist. Fukunaga is able to locate feelings of real loss that Bond films have rarely, if ever, been able to evoke, especially when that loss is for background office drones. An early sequence in a lab, where a commando team has clearly been given off-screen orders to kill everyone, communicates the total futility of resistance when powerful people have decided one’s life is meaningless. There’s even some contemporary criticism of the security state, as much as these films are able to cast shade on UK and Western arrogance that dictates that if anyone is going to have monstrous powers, it should be the ‘good’ guys who would certainly never think to abuse it. It’s stunning that actors as talented as Waltz and Seydoux are the weak links, but the script serves them so poorly that there’s little they can do to make their scenes anything other than interminable.
Daniel Craig has talked about the grueling nature of this role and how much he dreads every new film, so good for him for completing his run in relatively satisfying fashion. Perhaps the best actor to portray Bond, the franchise might’ve felt compelled to beef up the role in response to the talent of the person in it. Now that this backstory experiment has ended in a commercially successful but critically panned fashion, maybe the next person tasked to like martinis, baccarat, and luxury product placement will just get to be in standalone missions without side trips to his childhood estate or ongoing relationships that don’t move the needle. Craig has featured in some of the best work in the franchise. His legacy is that it was so often side-by-side with misguided attempts to turn Bond into something it wasn’t. C+
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