No Time To Die review – Daniel Craig’s Bond epilogue hits a sublime emotional peak
“Life is all about leaving something behind.”
For many reasons, Daniel Craig’s performance in his fifth and final outing as 007 is his most relaxed in the role. Here he stands calmly, as the bullets miss him once again, confident that his legacy as one of the best Bonds since Sean Connery is solidified. While No Time To Die presents to us some of Craig’s most emotional work as James Bond, it also shows us some of his most humorous. It somehow manages to simultaneously repair the narrative damage committed by Spectre (2015) and provide a completely fulfilling, greatest hits Bond experience. In other words, it’s a crowd pleaser, but not one guilty of failing to take a few risks.
And what an opening it has. In the past, opening sequences in the Bond franchise have been more of an excuse to present superficial stunt sequences. No Time To Die undermines this shallow trait by providing a daring and emotional sequence shot in Matera, Italy that stands as a high point for the series. Here we meet a Bond softed in retirement, happily engaged in a relationship with returning partner Madeline (Léa Seydoux).
For the remarkable lack of chemistry they had in Spectre (2015), somehow director Cary Joji Fukunaga manages to repair their story-line by providing at least the semblance of a real relationship. Seydoux, who was cruelly given so little to do previously, is a stand out as the emotional heart of the movie. For how incredibly dull their relationship was in Spectre, it’s now a surprise that No Time to Die manages to connect us to them as a couple. Once the groundwork is done in a few brief scenes, suddenly Craig’s Bond has a reason to live that goes beyond stopping another predictable plot to take over the world.
While No Time To Die presents to us some of Craig’s most emotional work as James Bond, it also shows us some of his most humorous.
Of course I can’t defend the entire plot. The staples of Bond are here, but with a slightly more balanced representation of gender and exceedingly deft direction from Fukunaga, it works much better than expected. It’s a long one at 163 minutes, and yet the indulgence of length isn’t inappropriate for a story that provides a fitting conclusion to this particular variant of Bond. It’s very much an epilogue for Daniel Craig’s portrayal, as much as it is a Bond movie. No Time To Die is a love letter to his work over the last 15 years.
But for a movie of such length, unusually the main villain of the piece only appears thoroughly in the final third. This leaves actor Rami Malek’s portrayal of Lyutsifer Safin undercooked, with little screen time to establish his evil credentials in the same way that Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) did in Skyfall (2012). His motivations for conjuring an evil plot to, ahem, destroy the world, are largely silly and unclear. He even has an evil lair on an isolated island, which makes one think MI6’s time would be better spent just searching small islands for the amount of evil men who want to own them.
Yet for all this, Malek still leaves an impression as the quiet, disturbed type, jealous of Bond’s human relationships, a seething snake in a poisonous garden. Its works because he isn’t really the focus of the movie. He is merely a function of Bond traditions, here to put our characters in jeopardy.
Thankfully it is the characters that surround Bond, his surrogate and real family that keep the impressive set pieces together. It’s the small moments between the action that really sell the stakes, and the filmmakers are smart enough to know how important it is to get these moments right. If anything No Time To Die is a movie obsessed with getting the small details absolutely perfect. There isn’t a single moment that hasn’t been carefully designed to be that way.
He’ll be remembered as the ‘reluctant’ Bond – the Bond who spent most of his tenure as a hero past his best and yearning for retirement.
By now Craig is a master of the small character beat. In so many scenes, it is a fleeting expression, or a moment of movement that tells us his state of mind. Bond may be a relatively simple character, but Craig adds so much depth in so little screen time. In one particular moment, before flying a plane, Craig revels in the act of showing Bond at his most fun – a man almost unsure that he can fly the plane. You couldn’t imagine such a giddy, confident moment in Casino Royale (2006).
In another moment, Bond interrupts the plot to swig a stiff drink, both underlining that he’s a functioning alcoholic and also allowing Craig to embrace the part of Bond that maybe is a little too old for this. It’s a fun side to the character that Craig has always tried to embrace. He’ll be remembered as the ‘reluctant’ Bond – the Bond who spent most of his tenure as a hero past his best and yearning for retirement. It seems the key to writing a good Craig-era Bond story is making sure Bond’s motivation to return to MI6 is compelling. To fulfill this need, the reasons are almost always personal.
So much of Bond in the last 15 years has been about having suspicion in the very authority we work for. In No Time To Die, MI6 is as much the problem as ever. For the times we live in, Craig’s tenure has adapted ably to stay relevant.
