A BOND TO DIE FOR
ABOUT TIME... CRAIG IS MAGNIFICENT IN EXPLOSIVE RETURN
IT’S been the longest goodbye ever. After four release date changes and director Danny Boyle dropping out – not to mention a prolonged twisting of Daniel Craig’s arm to return – the latter’s fifth and final outing as James Bond finally arrives.
The added weight of expectation – it must now single-handedly ‘save’ the global cinema industry – makes it a mission that even 007 would quake at.
Yet No Time To Die unflappably delivers all you’d expect and want from a Bond movie – and more. Brace yourself for some sensational surprises.
As befits Craig’s mould-breaking tenure, this is a Bond movie that sometimes doesn’t feel like one.
Our hero doesn’t even appear in a horror-film type opener that flashes us back to the childhood trauma of Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux). She’s Bond’s girlfriend – they got together in the previous instalment, Spectre (I advise re-watching that first) – and her ‘secrets’ are at the centre of this unusually tender, genre-blending plot (no spoilers!).
Every 007 movie has a lot of boxes to tick, and director Cary Fukunaga has dutifully crammed this with wall-towall explosions, guns, gadgets and car chases. At times it feels formulaic: a fun set piece in Cuba, more akin to the Brosnan era, gets plonked in to allow Craig (inset) to knock back a couple of martinis and a quip alongside Ana De Armas’s ditzy yet deadly CIA operative before she disappears for the rest of the film.
Yet, for all the bittiness, there’s rarely a dull moment.
There are not one but two proper old-school villains. Christoph Waltz returns as Blofeld in a Hannibal Lecter-style prison scene, and Rami Malek is a disfigured megalomaniac whose bio-chemical ideology is a bit confusing – but he has an absolutely super lair. M (Ralph Fiennes), Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) are all back, with Ben Whishaw’s Q a particular delight.
And it’s huge testament to Fukunaga that, despite the bladder-challenging run time of two hours and 43 minutes, practically the entire audience at my world premiere screening remained glued to their seats.
Much was promised about No Time To Die viewing women through a more modern lens, and Lashana Lynch is a breath of fresh air as a rising 00, though she’s a little underserved (we’d have loved more bantz with Bond).
It’s tricky to spot co-writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s input – although a couple of LOL one-liners could only come from her.
However, this is very much the Daniel Craig show – and quite rightly.
He’s simply magnificent as a tortured, soulful and impressively ripped agent (no complaints here about the entirely gratuitous shower scene), who poignantly declares, in a lovely nod to a previous 007 movie, that ‘we have all the time in the world’, even as his hourglass is running out. His Bond will be a seriously tough act to top.