CRAIG’S SWAN SONG IN ‘NO TIME’ IS BOND AT ITS BEST
If it wasn’t obvious before, it is now. We have been living through a great era for James Bond movies — and that era ends spectacularly with “No Time to Die.” The new movie takes its place among the best of the entire series.
What makes it especially satisfying is that this is a Bond film specifically tailored to Daniel Craig and all that he’s brought to the role. Give the same script to another actor, and you’d still have a good movie. But with Craig, you have a movie informed by 15 years of history, by the other Craig films working the same ideas and emotions, all about the need for love and the difficulty of trusting someone.
These themes would seem too touchy-feely for James Bond, were it not for Craig ’s mask of stoicism and his ability to convey a world of feeling through his eyes. Equally important is that “No Time to Die” never fails to deliver on all the other things audiences expect from a James Bond movie: intricate, imaginative and grand-scale action sequences, exotic locations and an opportunity for him to say two things — “Bond, James Bond” and “shaken, not stirred.”
This time Bond begins the movie the way he usually ends them, in a beautiful place with a beautiful woman and seemingly without a care. He’s retired, and now he and Madeleine (Lea Seydoux), whom he met in “Spectre” (2015), are in a hill town in Italy, living a perpetual vacation as they decide how to move forward with their lives together. Of course, we know this idyll can’t last, but the way the movie explodes into action mode here is particularly satisfying. “No Time to Die” throws us right into things even before the credits roll.
This movie was delayed for 17 months because of the coronavirus pandemic. This time the threat to human civilization involves a man-made pathogen, a poison that can be communicated like a virus, but one that’s targeted
specifically to a person’s DNA. The British have been developing it as a clean way of assassinating people, but a dangerous lunatic named Safin (Rami Malek) figures out a way to steal it and adjust the weapon so that it can kill entire nations in about an hour or so.
“No Time to Die” isn’t the easiest movie to follow, but it’s entertaining enough that you might either be happy to be lost or not notice that you are. The broad outlines are what matters. The British have screwed up, and they’ve put their new Agent 007 (Lashana Lynch) on the case. Meanwhile, the Americans have recruited Bond to save the world, again. Somehow all of this is related to Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), who is locked up Hannibal Lecterstyle in a mental institution, and also with Madeleine.
Director Cary Joji Fukunaga embraces the movie’s scale and matches it in drama. At one point, Bond and Madeleine go to question Blofeld at the maximum-security sanitarium. In the script, it’s probably just a line on a page — Blofeld is wheeled out to see them — but Fukunaga finds a way to build up to Blofeld’s entrance so that the moment lands with real impact.
Fukunaga can also take some credit for the fact that all the performances are strong and vivid. Waltz has a single scene. Ana de Armas, as a fledgling agent, has one big one. Jeffrey Wright, as a CIA veteran, has a couple more. All three make a lingering impression. Ralph Fiennes has several strong moments as M, Bond’s old boss; and Lynch, the new 007, is fun from the beginning.
And, no surprise, Rami Malek takes his place among the long list of achingly polite, soft-spoken Bond villains.
But it’s the performances of Craig and Seydoux that are most memorable. Watching them, we believe in Bond and Madeleine as a couple, in their history and in their possible future. From the start of the Bond movies starring Craig — Eva Green’s Vespa in “Casino Royale” — the series has made the “Bond girl” a historical artifact. These movies have shown that you can actually enhance our perception of Bond by showing him in real relationships with real consequences. But never is that felt more than in “No Time to Die.”
What a way for Craig to go out. Even Sean Connery went out on a diminuendo (“Never Say Never Again”), and most Bond actors — Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan — go out on a banana peel, with a bomb that makes everyone wonder if the franchise is finished. Craig leaves the series in a mammoth, 163-minute extravaganza that audiences will be enjoying for decades. It’s a lovely thing to see.