NO TIME TO DIE
Fully Bonded
RELEASED OUT NOW! 12A | 163 minutes
Director Cary Joji Fukunaga
Cast Daniel Craig, Léa Seydoux,
Rami Malek, Lashana Lynch
If 2012’s Skyfall seized the rah-rah, bunting-draped spirit of Olympics Britain, No Time To Die feels like the poster child for a very different age. The first blockbuster to run scared from Covid, it finally arrives as a confident, heartfelt and creatively audacious entry in the Bond canon. Britannia may be crumbling in the title sequence but 007’s sense of duty is intact.
An emotionally impactful curtain call for Daniel Craig, it restores the scale, stakes and outsized imagining of classic Bond adventures. Rami Malek’s reptilian ghoul of a supervillain has a Dr No-style private island
It restores the scale, stakes and outsized imagining of classic Bond adventures
and plots the death of millions, with a lethal horticultural twist lifted directly from Ian Fleming. If the character feels barely more than an archetypal cipher then Malek at least imbues it with an eerie, murmuring half-life.
There’s a striking collision of tones: an early sequence in the picturesque Italian town of Matera has a gloriously romantic sweep, directly after a wintry, horrorinflected home invasion flashback. Elsewhere a Cuba-set party scene brings some Roger Moore-level camp, complete with Ana de Armas as an adorable but kick-ass CIA agent who could have been plucked from Moonraker.
The score and titles nod to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service but this is unequivocally a bookend for Craig, who’s on fire here, by turns impish, murderous and soulful. It’s fitting that the only movie incarnation of Bond with an origin story earns an equally solid conclusion. After 15 years his final big-screen mission doesn’t so much clear the decks as atomise them. The immortal words James Bond Will Return have never seemed so reassuring, nor quite such a provocation. Nick Setchfield
As well as the classic Aston Martin DB5, No Time To Die homages the Aston Martin V8 from 1987’s The Living Daylights.