Overdue, overlong and over complex, but Craig’s parting shot hits the target
MATTHEW BOND No Time To Die Cert: 12A, 2hrs 43mins ★★★★★
The last time James Bond was driving his Aston Martin through Europe, with the woman he loved by his side, and uttered the fateful words ‘We have all the time in the world…’ was in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, when George Lazenby was 007 and the late Diana Rigg Bond’s beautiful new wife. And we all know what happened next.
So when exactly the same words are uttered in No Time To Die, with Daniel Craig’s Bond driving the woman he fell in love with in Spectre, Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), we look at each other and think: ‘Uh-oh.’
It’s an important thought, but soon forgotten amid the explosions, machine-gun fights and an extraordinarily timely plot about an evil megalomaniac – played with menace by Rami Malek – planning to unleash a deadly airborne plague on the world.
Yes, the film that had its release postponed three times by Covid19 has something really quite similar at the heart of its storyline. It’s a cruel irony, although ultimately one that may work to its advantage.
The 25th Bond film, however, is not without its faults – at nearly two-and-three-quarter hours, it’s overlong and over-complicated too, particularly in the clumsily constructed first third. We also never quite believe in the love between Bond and Swann as we did in the love between Bond and Vesper Lynd, played so beautifully by Eva Green, in Casino Royale. Fifteen years on, Vesper’s presence – and absence – still has a role to play here. ‘I miss you,’ says Bond quietly at her Italian grave. We all do.
After two long scene-setting flashbacks and an inevitably more politically correct version of the once-iconic Bond opening titles, the story – penned by Bond regulars Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, assisted this time by director Cary Joji Fukunaga and Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge – begins with Bond in quiet retirement in the Caribbean.
It’s not M (a splendidly buttoned-up Ralph Fiennes) who calls him back into action but his old American friend Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright). Seems there’s a Spectre convention in Cuba… which is odd given that its head, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), is still languishing in HMP Belmarsh.
Ana de Armas is terrific – if tragically under-used – as Leiter’s newest recruit in Cuba, while the similarly impressive Lashana
Lynch doesn’t concede a muscular inch as Nomi, who in
Bond’s absence has been given his coveted 007 designation.
‘It’s just a number,’ he sniffs. Yeah, right.
Despite its faults – and I hated David
Dencik’s over-the-top turn as a treacherous
Russian scientist and some half-hearted nonsense about a bionic eye – there’s no doubt that No Time To Die provides a fitting, and suitably epic, finale to Craig’s magnificent 15-year stint as Bond.
I’ve loved almost all of it – Skyfall is a masterpiece and Casino Royale would have been if the poker game hadn’t gone on quite so long. Here he signs off in style, bringing a new emotional sensitivity to the ageing Bond – watch out for one wonderfully touching speech – while retaining his extraordinary ability to kill or maim bad guys by the score.
For anyone who’s grown up with Bond, as I have, or found themselves re-energised by Craig’s muscular turn in the role, this is a big moment, a big film and one you’ll definitely want to see on the big screen.