NO TIME TO DIE review

 Before we begin, I think you should probably revisit the following posts, as they will inform much that follows:

In which I explain why On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the best Bond film ever. (10/10 on a curve)

In which I watch and reevaluate the chaotic mess that is Quantum of Solace. (5/10 on the curve)

In which I give Skyfall more attention than it deserves. (3/10 on the curve)

In which I give Spectre less than half the tongue-lashing it deserves. (0/10 on the curve)

You will note that I've never bothered to do a review of Casino Royale because it's a mishmash of the novel and OHMSS. And if you read the Skyfall and Spectre reviews, you'll note that I got increasingly pissed off at the films' superficial lip service to OHMSS. Given that No Time To Die is a mishmash of OHMSS the movie (surprise?) and You Only Live Twice the book (actual surprise, unless you knew the working title was Shatterhand), you might think I'm done here.

Oh no.

I'm not. 

The short version is this: Okay. Congratulations. After five attempts, you’ve finally made the superlative, quintessential homage/remake of OHMSS. Didn't think you had it in you. 8/10; now please never do this again.

(SPOILERS. SERIOUSLY. GO WATCH THIS MOVIE BEFORE YOU READ THIS REVIEW. IT'S GOOD, HONEST, I KNOW THAT'S HARD TO BELIEVE GIVEN ITS IMMEDIATE PREDECESSORS, BUT YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF TO BE BOGGLED BY THE FACT THAT THEY MADE THIS FILM)

(I will also casually spoil certain terrible Star Trek and Star Wars films. You may be able to guess which two if you've seen NTTD already.)

To put the short version more kindly: the decision to re-use “We Have All The Time In The World” is on the hokey side, but it’s impossible to deny that they’ve earned the right to do it.

No Time To Die is without a doubt one of the most nostalgically and emotionally manipulative entries in the Bond canon ever. It’s also an extremely good film. It drags on, and on, and on, and on (little “Thunderball” lyric reference for you), but that’s okay because for the most part, what’s being ladled (very slowly) onto our screens is eminently enjoyable and worth watching, in contradistinction to, say, its immediate predecessor. 

An Ungodly Amount of Spilled Ink On The Craig Era (skip down to the next bolded section if you just want the No Time To Die review)

Perhaps No Time To Die benefits tremendously from “it could have been worse” syndrome. It did, after all, come after the disaster that is Spectre. And therein lies the main problem with this film. No, not that it makes Sphincter required watching - although that is a violation of the Geneva Conventions on par with launching a bunch of missiles at a disputed island, so we'll punish it to the same extent we punished Voldemort at the end of NTTD, which is to say not at all. No, the main problem with No Time To Die is that it is a culmination of all that has come before, and all that has come before is a) an anemic lie, and b) utter rubbish.

(As an aside, an obvious problem with this retroactive attempt to define the Craig films as a cohesive whole. They weren’t planned from the start, leading to scenarios like Bond conceiving a child in part five despite getting his testicles mashed in part one, or the ineffective lip service to Bond’s mortality in Skyfall and the joke of a torture scene in Spectre undermining the severity of Bond’s injuries and the sudden and dramatic onset of his very real mortality at the climax of No Time To Die.)

What I mean by "an anemic lie" is that, for all the Craig-Bond films' denial of the previous films’ existence, they are wholly dependent on them. To pick the most obvious example, they shelled out the money to hire Hans Zimmer for No Time To Die’s soundtrack, only for his most notable contributions to be regurgitations of John Barry’s score for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. (Pirates soundtracks notwithstanding, Zimmer is... not actually a very memorable composer. I say this as someone who did like Interstellar.) Moreover, a modern franchise starting from scratch wouldn’t have ignored the plot coupons Bond got handed in Quantum of Solace in favor of reheating an amalgamation of all the Brosnans in Skyfall. “No, ha ha, we don’t go in for exploding pens these days,” Q snarks, “now have fun fighting the gay Travelyan clone.” Casino Royale, as previously discussed, is The World Is Not Enough done right; same for Quantum of Solace vis a vis Licence to Kill, a film which loaned Skyfall its handprint-reading gun. Don’t go in for that sort of thing, indeed. Next they’ll pay off McClory and make a big deal about how Spectre and Blofeld are back, but that only means anything to old-school fans who might be rather annoyed by the simultaneous a) jettisoning/badmouthing of all prior continuity and b) overreliance on familiar references. At least it’s not the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, but this annoying attempt to have their cake and eat it too ultimately results in the end credits of No Time To Die all but saying “if you enjoyed watching that film with this character that we have just killed, please consider watching a fifty-year-old film that isn’t part of this continuity.”

It is again worth mentioning that for all their supposed differentness and rebootitude, the first four Craigs are variations on the four Brosnans, just in a slightly different order: Casino Royale/TWINE: Girl is bad and dies, and a few OHMSS references (suicide by drowning/earlobes and skiing) sprinkled in. Quantum/Tomorrow: The straight action piece, with the least imposing villain and an almost nonexistent romance. Bond needs to rescue the girl from the big firework at the end. Skyfall/GoldenEye: Hackers, hackers everywhere!, the beginning and end of the Dench M, this Bond gets as far as he's ever going to get with this Moneypenny. Spectre/Die Another Day: Overreliance on things past drags the entire project to a juddering halt. Bond is tortured, which has no subsequent effect. Reboot? More like retool.

Was it necessary to reboot the franchise? Perhaps, if only to keep the OHMSS references flowing with a Bond actor who was born around the time Tracy canonically died (whichever year that was; props to Casino Royale for not creating the franchise's dumbest continuity error*). One wonders why they bothered; I love the Australian One, and I’m sick to death of the references to it throughout Craig’s run. Going back to that well over and over again demonstrates a creative bankruptcy far more severe than what plagued them circa 1981-2002, when all they had to worry about creatively was running out of Fleming titles. You’ll note that not one of Craig’s films gets Octopussy’s** score of “harmlessly exists;” the downside to trying to do a multifilm story arc is that the bad ones actively weigh that story arc down.

*I shall explain this joke and this joke only. Normally Bond films are set the year they came out, to the extent that it matters at all. OHMSS uniquely starts in one year and ends in another, covering autumn through New Year's with an epilogue the following spring, prompting the question: is it Christmas 68/spring 69, or Christmas 69/spring 70? Judging by its on-screen evidence in the first act (specifically, a February 1969 issue of Playboy and a September 1969 wall calendar), it's clearly Christmas 1969, with the epilogue in the spring of 1970. The grave in For Your Eyes Only, on the other hand, dates the epilogue, improbably, to 1969 (because OHMSS came out in 1969 and FYEO's director - who worked on OHMSS - apparently didn't know any better). Vesper's grave in NTTD dates Casino Royale to 2006 - the year it came out - and fortunately there's nothing onscreen in Casino Royale to contradict this. (Yes, I'm that much of a nerd.)

**not entirely sure how Octopussy got itself into my head as the most average Bond film when the aforementioned curve gave it a 3/10. Which just goes to show you that the Bond franchise is actually pretty good, my snark notwithstanding, if only 5 of the 25 films got ranked worse than the one I think of as "average." The film that appears exactly halfway down my list is Quantum of Solace, which is in no way "an average Bond film." I'll put the entire list at the bottom and you can tell me why I'm wrong.

Under this reading, Skyfall is the weakest link of the Craig era (not to be confused with the worst film – that’s Spectre and don’t let anyone say otherwise) because it doesn’t tie in with the ongoing Quantum/Spectre arc. It’s just Bond versus a madman, like the old days. With more character introspection.

Which brings us past the superficial and into the real problem with this five-film “arc.” The character at the center of the story isn’t a character. He’s a collection of tropes and pharmacology. Perhaps that's for the best; actual character development would require four films in the mold of Quantum of Solace, which would have turned off the casual popcorn-munchers. ("Vesper, she died, right?") No Time To Die’s valiant (and I do mean valiant) attempts to correct this come too late to matter, unless one attempts to view that film in isolation. (“Okay, now who’s this French chick again?”)

The Craig Bond is a rather unpleasant person, no? He takes two entire films to learn that maybe he shouldn’t be mindlessly killing everyone. When he gets injured on the job in part three, he just walks off and lets everyone else assume he’s dead (and then he does it again in part five). His cunning plan to save his mother-figure gets her killed; it turns out that his entire life sucks (somehow) because his foster brother has daddy issues. Are we meant to mourn this man at the end of No Time To Die? 

They’ve taken a man from the start of his career to its fiery climax, and all they have to tell us about who he is can be summed up as “grouchy assassin in a suit who likes cars, gambling, women, and martinis,” although he doesn't do a lot of gambling past the first one. Nothing we hadn’t learned by the time Die Another Day’s credits rolled. He’s hurt because of Vesper, yes, but that didn't stop him playing "hunt the stationery" with "Strawberry" Fields in Quantum, now did it? He has a strained relationship with his boss, as if M wasn’t sick of Bond by the time he finished dissing the brandy in Goldfinger. It’s big and bold and adventurous of them to kill him off, okay, but we’re all secure in the knowledge that he’ll be back in five years with a new actor.

What was the point?

More saliently, why was this the point?

We were originally sold that Casino Royale was a modern-day origin story, one that could, with some gentle massaging, fit into the Continuity, just ignore the styles and technologies. (They couldn't do an actual origin story set in the 1950s, of course, because any attempt at a period-piece origin story or a modern Bond set in the era actually conducive to his existence (the 1950s-60s) would be overwhelmed by loathsome wokeness an urge to recontextualize Bond and the world in which he is supposed to exist through a modern lens, ugh. And you thought Dench's "a relic of the Cold War" nagging of BrosBond was obnoxiously self-aware.) After all, Book!Bond has loved and lost both Vesper and Tracy, and made a mini-Bond with one of his hookups, so that all could have been folded together, awkwardly and with some time-travel shenanigans*, into one continuity. Wisely, this plan was abandoned; no point asking the casuals (“Haven’t we heard Louis Armstrong before?”) to square the Dench M bemoaning BrosBond as a relic of the Cold War in GoldenEye and then missing the Cold War in Casino Royale. 

*Insert obligatory joke about Timothy Dalton guest-starring on Doctor Who here. 

And make no mistake: it's the casuals these films are made for, not the (oh God) "fans." These films are sure as hell not made for someone who wants to compare Connery's pocket safe-cracker in You Only Live Twice with Lazenby's steamer-trunk-sized one two years later, or when and how Craig!Bond got around to making his DB5 right-hand drive. If you've ever noticed that Bond's interrupted Tokyo anecdote in From Russia With Love contradicts his statement that he's never been to Japan before in You Only Live Twice, congratulations, what you get out of this is an Easter egg hunt for Fleming references. That's what they put in here for you. Everything else, bang bang pow smack vroom kiss kiss and an overdose of bad puns, that's there for the casuals. How do you market a film to someone who's a fan of a franchise broad enough to encompass both Quantum of Solace and Moonraker? How do you make a film targeted at such a cretin? 90 minutes of Bond introducing himself and falling out of a plane without a 'chute? Because that's about about all those two have in common.

No, better to burn it all down, Skyfall-style, and start again. Tell a new series of stories with this character, while paying respectful/excessive homage to What Has Come Before, before blowing him up and starting it all over again with the next guy. Fair enough on paper.

In the execution, painfully obvious that this was not the plan.

With all of that garbage out of the way, slumped over in its cell like the Waltz Crapfeld, so much dead meat and dead weight, on to... 

The actual review of Albert R. Broccoli's EON Productions' Presentation of Daniel Craig as Ian Fleming's James Bond in No Time To Die.

(Of course, Albert R. Broccoli had nothing to do with this film and quite a bit to do with the film this one liberally borrows themes and, yes, themes from. But that one doesn't exist anymore; see the previous section.)

I'm now going to stop giving extremely specific hints and spoil the entire film, so once again, IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE AND WISH TO REMAIN UNSPOILED, TURN BACK NOW.

After a horror-movie opening which doesn't quite square with what we were told in the previous film (shame /sarc) and where Our Heroine conspicuously fails to off the main villain of the film in the 1990s (did your father not teach you to double-tap?), we're treated to a second flashback to "five years ago," although judging by the soundtrack we're back in 1969. A visit to Vesper's grave (Inspired By The Books Counter: 1) goes horribly wrong and leaves Bond thinking he's been betrayed again, so he dumps Madeline and disappears.

The main villain's name, by the way, is "Lucifer" Safin. Subtle.

Finally in the present, Spectre steals a nanobot-based DNA-targeting bioweapon from MI6, along with the Russian scientist who knows how to operate the thing. The camera calls attention to itself at one point during this sequence, which I find obnoxious. Anyway, the Russian scientist is in league with "Lucifer" Safin, so he programs the virus to kill the Spectre honchos instead. Bond and Special Guest Star Ana de Armas abduct the scientist for his old friend (citation needed, but that's other films' fault; see the previous section) Felix Leiter, but "Lucifer" Safin has people working for the CIA and Felix gets killed. For real.

Back in London, Bond interrogates Blofeld about the virus and the Spectre deaths, but Safin has gotten Madeline to infect herself with a Blofeld-targeting virus, and then Bond got some of that on him when he touched her, so after Bond strangles Blofeld and tells him to die (Inspired By The Books Counter: 2), Blofeld does precisely that. For real.

It turns out Bond knocked Madeline up (Inspired By The Books Counter: 3, although in a welcome surprise this film does more with Bond-spawn than Fleming ever managed (dying of a heart attack midway through writing the very next book may have contributed to Fleming's failure there)), so "Lucifer" Safin abducts her and the Bond-spawn and takes them to his Garden of Death (Inspired By The Books Counter: 4), which is on a disputed island (for... reasons) where he's cultivating the virus. Before this happens, Bond drops a car on the villain's henchman in a scene that's obviously an homage to For Your Eyes Only (that other film that started with Bond visiting his Lost Lenore's grave before being ambushed by a really crappy Blofeld). Bond tracks him to the island and shoots his way up a stairwell in what looks like a two-minute uncut action scene, at least to everyone who hasn't seen Alfred Hitchcock's Rope or any of its other approximately one billion imitators. (Guys, 1917 did this as well as it's ever going to be done. Please stop.) Bond has M blow the island up, which, you know, should start World War III, but we don't have time for that because Bond gets a Madeline-targeting virus on him (poisoned via a scratch; Inspired By The Books Counter: 5) so he stays behind and gets blown up. The MI6 staff eulogize him with Jack London's "I shall use my time" quote (Inspired By The Books Counter: 6), and the movie ends by borrowing "We Have All The Time In The World" from the Australian One. 

Now if you've seen the film, you'll note that I've skipped over a key bit of marketing, specifically the character played Lashana Lynch, who is here to contribute Representation, snark, and little else. (Political hat on.) A bit like Vice President Kamala Harris. (Political hat off.) You could remove her entirely from the movie and not one beat would be changed, except a) Bond chafing over losing the 007 number, b) the Russian committing suicide by racism, and... no, no, that's it. Bond is shown to be better than her at everything except following orders, and it amuses me that they brought in Phoebe Waller-Bridge for #MeToo protection and still had the Black character be the good little robot. On a similar note, I find it "curious" that in Current Year, in the same film as a Black 007, they took Book!Bond's half-Japanese kid and fully-Japanese babymamma and made them both lily-white. (Political hat... you know what, no, I'll just leave that thought there.)

By now the familiar annoyances of the Craig era are rote: things happen because the plot requires that they happen. The most obvious example is how this film disposes of Blofeld (not that he deserved any better). "Lucifer" Safin (somehow) finds out that Madeline has (somehow) been made Blofeld's psychiatrist (him being responsible for her father's death apparently isn't a conflict of interest, nor did the MI6 background check on her reveal that she's been buying diapers - they're literally useless without Bond, which is a funny thing to show so blatantly in the film that has someone replace him as 007), so he (somehow) persuades her to infect herself with the nanobots, and she (somehow) doesn't alert MI6 about this. The offscreen implication is that he threatened the Bond-spawn, but why she didn't alert MI6 about this threat? We can speculate, of course, but that still seems like an insane security breach. Likewise, Ben Whishaw's Q is Ben Whishaw's Q; it's what you're going to get, although at least this time he's learned not to plug the mysterious hard drive directly into the MI6 mainframe. Though they forgot to give him an extra line of dialogue about how Bond's EMP watch couldn't fry the nanobots, somehow.

Bond gets very little action in this one, which may be Current Year Politics at work but (thankfully) doesn't detract from the story; one of my (very few) criticisms of OHMSS is that Bond starts chasing skirt as soon as he's separated from The One. Honestly, the scene where Nomi seems too eager to get into bed with Bond, only to immediately drop the act and start busting his chops seems like a funny retort to the "I can't find the stationery" nonsense in Quantum.

For that matter, the film does a good job improving over the defects of Bonds Past, particularly the previous two. Bond's age and injuries matter now. Crapfeld is offed after a single scene, in which he's written far better than the entirety of Spectre. Bond's injuries in this one actually matter. (Well, at the very, very end, at least. Undermined slightly by him getting grenaded in the face a couple of times during the aforementioned stairwell fight.) Oh, all right, saying something nice about the "single-take" stairwell fight: Yes, the joins are a little bit too obvious, but I honestly prefer this to trying to do the entire action sequence in a single take. See Revenge of the Sith for what happens when you over-rehearse a fight scene.

There's a fun little reference to the gunbarrel during the climax as well, neat. Aside from the camera spin at the start of the Wuhan lab raid and the "single-take" stairwell fight, the direction is wonderful throughout; even the "single-take" stairwell fight doesn't aggressively call attention to itself. The film is fantastically acted without any horrible miscasts (I had my doubts about Rami Malek as "Lucifer" Safin, which turned out to be unjustified - although they really needed to ADR his last few, excruciatingly plot-relevant, lines), and even Crapfeld seems appropriately-written this time.

And now we need to talk about the ending, because this set the bar for every subsequent Bond actor's curtain call. One of the reasons why I love OHMSS so much is because they chose to make a very un-Bond film as the first post-Connery Bond Film. That's the sort of risk-taking insanity that they never got anywhere near again afterwards... until now. This film marks the first time that both of the following conditions are met: they know it's the actor's last film as Bond, and they're willing to depart far enough from The Formula to kill him off. That it's Craig, the anti-Bond,* in the film that lifts so blatantly from Lazenby, the un-Bond, is some sort of poetic. This film does the sorts of things Your Average Bond Film (let's say Goldfinger) could never dream of. But of course you can only do things like this when you recast, which is something Barbara Broccoli seems inclined to do as rarely as possible.

*Not a criticism, but rather a reference to the Quantum of Solace essay in this collection, which is definitely worth a read in its entirety if you can stand the rampant casual anti-Brosnanism. Caveat that I disagree with most of his post-Moonraker takes. (Key word: "most." He's the only other person I know who actually likes Quantum.) 

What does this presage? Good first and last films for the next Bond, and utter cack in between? Time will tell; I don't want the franchise to turn into "marking time until the next regeneration" the way certain incarnations of Doctors Who seem to be. Like I said at the start, I have no desire to see this film remade, both because once you strip out all the OHMSS and YOLT DNA, there's not much left to remake, and also because I would actually like to see a new Roger Moore-style Bond Film that isn't actually a Kingsman film. We've now plumbed the depths of Bond's character as far as this team is capable of going, and while All The Time In The World (come on; why was this not its title?) was more successful in that regard than Scuffle or Sphincter, there's not much more to do. You've already made him a widower and a grouchy derelict; this one makes him a father and a corpse. Since No Time To Die does a fantastic job addressing my criticisms of the previous two, perhaps Bond 26 will continue this trend and give us Yet Another Bond Film, Thunderball-style, something I've been begging for since Skyfall apparently decided to skip All That. Wouldn't be the worst idea, considering the aforementioned utter cack.

So, yes, this sits comfortably above the more recent Craigs (thank Christ), and beats Quantum by dint of not having jittercam, and (in my opinion) even trumps Casino Royale because it does more with Bond's character than pithily deconstruct it on a train. But there are a couple of other films that are worth comparing it to, for very obvious reasons: Star Trek Generations, and The Last Jedi. Now, this is a bit of a cheat, since the Craig Bond hasn't been around nearly as long as Captain Kirk or Luke Skywalker (oh, sorry, spoilers for those steaming piles of garbage) and we all know that Bond will be back in a few years played by Henry Cavill or whoever. But even so, this film does a much better job bringing an iconic pop-culture hero out of retirement for one last mission, at the end of which he's killed off. Low bar, but very important to clear it.

Total rankings, as of my whimsy today:

1. OHMSS
2. The Spy Who Loved Me
3. From Russia With Love
4. The Living Daylights
5. No Time to Die
6. Thunderball
7. Casino Royale
8. Moonraker
9. You Only Live Twice
10. GoldenEye
11. Dr. No
12. Goldfinger
13. Quantum of Solace
14. Tomorrow Never Dies
15. Live and Let Die
16. For Your Eyes Only
17. Licence to Kill
18. The Work is Not Enough
19. Skyfall
20. Octopussy
21. The Man With the Golden Gun
22. A View to a Kill
23. Die Another Day
24. Diamonds Are Forever
25. Spectre

Three final observations from that list: 1) I'm being far too kind to The Living Daylights and I know it, and probably meaner to Goldfinger than The Most Overrated Bond Film actually deserves, but it's my list so there. 2) I like the idea of Roger Moore's Bond more than I like the bulk of the films he was in. And 3) Daniel Craig is the only Bond actor to date whose last film isn't (arguably) his worst