No Time to Die
FILM REVIEW Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga Starring: Daniel Craig, Léa Seydoux, Rami Malek, Lashana Lynch
“No Time to Die” is a terrific movie: an up-to-the-minute, down-tothe-wire James Bond thriller with a satisfying neoclassical edge. It’s an unabashedly conventional Bond film that’s been made with high finesse and just the right touch of soul, as well as enough sleek surprise to keep you on edge.
Before I go further, though, let me lay my baccarat cards on the table. I thought “Casino Royale,” the first film in which Daniel Craig portrayed , was the greatest Bond film since the early Sean Connery days, and in many ways the most perfectly realized Bond movie ever. To me, the trio of Bond films that came after “Casino Royale” have added up to one of the most profoundly disappointing follow-throughs of any contemporary film series. “Quantum of Solace” was all trumped-up mechanics, “Spectre” was an elaborate piece of product that went through the motions — and “Skyfall,” though
I realize many Bond watchers think it’s a masterpiece, was, to me, sodden and overstated, with a meta-hammy megalomaniac performance by Javier Bardem and a backstory to Bond that was maudlin with self-pity.
The truth is that so many elements of what the Bond films originally brought to cinema have been incorporated into other film series — the “Mission: Impossible” films, the “Bourne” films, the “Fast & Furious” films — that to create a first-rate Bond adventure, something more is required. You need an ingenious weave of elements. “No Time to Die,” at hours and minutes, is the longest Bond film ever, yet the director, Cary Joji Fukunaga (HBO’S “True Detective”), keeps it all in balance like an ace juggler. He gets the details right — the leaping-off-the-balcony action scenes, the menace of an assassin with a vagrant mechanical eyeball, the persnickety droll fun of Ben Whishaw’s performance as Q.
Beyond that, though, there needs to be a touch of mystery to Bond. That’s the quality “Casino Royale” brought back to the series through its fantastically tricky dramatization of the relationship between Craig’s fast, steely, roughneck Bond and Eva Green’s insinuating Vesper Lynd. And “No Time to Die,” though it’s not the work of art “Casino Royale” was, possesses just enough of that quality. Ideally, there’s a romance to a James Bond movie — I don’t just mean a love story, but a romance to Bond’s presence, a grander motive behind the ruthless execution of his every move. “No Time to Die” has that.
In the introductory sequence, we see Léa Seydoux’s Madeleine as a young girl and the cataclysm she endured at the hands of a man in a white mask who came to her house to kill her father — who was a member of SPECTRE, and had murdered the masked man’s family. So Madeleine, in her way, has emerged from a chain of vengeance. Then we cut to Bond and the adult Madeleine cruising through the mountain roads of Italy in his Aston Martin. When Madeleine tells him to drive faster, he says they’ve got all the time in the world.
But the idyll is short-lived, as SPECTRE agents hunt them down. How did they know Bond was there? In the midst of some razory action, the most riveting moment is one of pure inaction: Bond brings the gizmo-laden car to a stop in the middle of a town square, a dozen gunmen firing right at him, blasting away at his bulletproof windows. Yet Bond does nothing. He’s telling Madeleine, through his silent, passive fury: “I know you betrayed me.” “No Time to Die” is a popcorn riff on the theme of fatal trust.
Craig, his hair chopped into a bristle cut, has mastered the art of making Bond a seemingly invincible force who is also a human being with hidden vulnerabilities.
The main story is set five years after that opening sequence, when Bond and Madeleine have parted ways. They’re reunited through Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), now in a padded cell in London, though he hasn’t lost his ability to control. Madeleine is a psychiatrist who has access to Blofeld, and when she and Bond meet again, it’s so that Bond can have a face-to-face with the villain he put behind bars. In his one major scene, Waltz invests Blofeld with a more exquisite menace than he did in all of “Spectre.”
The film’s main villain is Rami Malek as Lyutsifer Safin, who made his presence felt in the movie before we even knew it. Malek, with mottled skin, an all-seeing leer, and the caressing voice of a depraved monk, makes him a hypnotic creep. Safin has, of course, headquartered himself on a remote island, which is where he’s perfecting his scheme to poison the world with nanobots. The setting, and the chem-lab ickiness, are very “You Only Live Twice,” but what’s good about Malek’s performance is the obscene way he inserts his presence into the drama of Bond, Madeleine and Madeline’s young daughter, Mathilde. Bond is there to save the world; he’s there to save Madeleine and Mathilide; he’s there to save himself. Can he do all three? What happens in the climactic scene feels poetic: Bond, in a strange way, takes on the karma of all the people he has killed. I never thought I’d wipe away a tear at the end of a James Bond movie, but “No Time to Die” fulfills its promise. It finishes off the saga of Craig’s in the most honestly extravagant style.