No Time to Die

After a high-profile and expensive false start with a big name director and several scrapped releases due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Daniel Craig’s final outing as Ian Fleming’s iconic British secret service agent James Bond finally arrived in theaters in October of 2021. No Time to Die is a somewhat satisfying finale to the exciting but uneven years Craig has embodied Fleming’s much loved 007. But rather than simply delivering a great James Bond adventure for Craig’s swan song, the filmmakers focus on a multitude of conceptual and extrinsic requirements that hinder the movie’s success as a story.

The stakes in No Time to Die seem far more concerned with the external needs of a franchise than the life-and-death situations depicted on screen. No Time to Die has to feel like a worthy last chapter for the longest-serving James Bond actor (and many people’s favorite). It must humanize Craig’s “blunt instrument” version of Bond while remaining true to this interpretation of the iconic character. It’s obligated to bring its female characters to the forefront in ways that feel more authentic than the many clumsy previous attempts. And it needs to pay off disparate narrative threads, some set up over fifteen years back, while still telling a fresh, original story. The filmmakers are to be commended for how well they are able to pull off these self-imposed stipulations. No Time to Die certainly succeeds as the first satisfying blockbuster event picture of the post-COVID-19-lockdown period, but I doubt it’s going to end up among anyone’s favorite James Bond movies.

For one thing, the relatively straightforward plot feels overly complicated and confusing. The previous six-year gap between 007 instalments in the 1990s—when legal disputes and studio shake-ups temporarily halted the productions—was a benefit in that the series came back in a near-complete rebooting with a new cast by a new creative team for a new decade. Whereas No Time to Die is a direct continuation of the previous entry Spectre, as well as the final chapter in a five-film run that began fifteen years earlier with the terrific series reboot Casino Royale. 

Casual fans who saw Spectre once when it was in theaters six and half years ago may have a hard time tracking the storyline of No Time to Die. Indeed, many of us who rewatched Spectre right before seeing this new picture might still have a little trouble following along. Many James Bond fans claim that the plots in these movies are secondary to the characters, action sequences, and general milieu of the series, but I’m not in that camp. The best Bond movies have fanciful but well-crafted narratives on which to hang all the signature stylish accoutrements. And the meta aspects that exist to delight die-hard fans support the narratives rather than dominate them.

The Craig years saw a shift in 007 pictures from stand-alone adventures, with little to no continuity from film to film, into contemporary franchise entertainments with each of the five movies succeeding each other linearly in a contiguous narrative web. The second of Craig’s Bonds Quantum of Solace was released just two years after his first Casino Royale, with a storyline that picks up literally minutes after the ending of that first picture. The drop in quality between Casino and Quantum was palpable, but the next film Skyfall seemed to dispense with the ongoing narrative in favor of a brilliant mid-course reset that was also an effective 50th anniversary retrospective of the series. By the end of Skyfall, it looked as if we might get a few stand-alone adventures with a potentially more lighthearted version of Daniel Craig’s severe James Bond. But the producers opted to use Spectre to tie all the threads of Craig’s prior pictures together into a cohesive narrative through-line. They were successful in that task, but the resulting film was one of the worst in the series twenty-five-year history. It once again saw Craig’s tortured and traumatized 007 walk away from his job as an MI-6 agent. 

I’m writing a lot about the story behind this movie rather than the actual story of No Time to Die itself. But this focus on the background seems in line with what fans of this series now go to these movies for: not to see what James Bond will do in his latest adventure but to see what the James Bond filmmakers will do with him. It’s an unfortunate shift in how so much popular filmed entertainment is now consumed. Nearly all contemporary Hollywood releases are based on pre-existing intellectual property, and they reflect the growing need for movies to interconnect with each other, like serialized television shows. As a consequence, it gets harder and harder to judge a film, or even watch one, as a stand-alone work, free of all the extratextual elements that went into its creation. But there is a decent story told in this film. 

No Time to Die picks up with Bond, having retired his license to kill, living a peaceful life with Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), the daughter of the assassin known as Mr. White, whom Craig's Bond chased through most of his previous pictures. Of course, the couple’s happily-ever-after life together comes to a premature end. But their separation doesn’t occur in the expected way the filmmakers seem to set up via their many overt allusions to one of the greatest of all the Bond films, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969).

Five years later we catch up with the still-retired Bond now escaped into a tranquil, solitary life in Jamaica, where he gets invited to join in a CIA mission by his old pal Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright). Bond and Leiter attempt to rescue a kidnapped scientist (David Dencik) and discover that the man is part of a bioweapons program called “Project Heracles." The covert program involves the use of nanobots that infect humans like a virus, but are coded to specific DNA strains rendering them lethal to targeted individuals but completely harmless to anyone else except blood relatives of the targets.

Several organizations and individuals bear responsibility for developing Project Heracles, including Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), a terrorist leader on a revenge mission against the secret criminal enterprise Spectre. Members of the CIA and MI-6 are also involved, as is Spectre leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), Bond’s arch-nemesis who was captured at the end of the movie Spectre. There are so many characters in this film that none of them gets adequately developed and therefore don’t carry the weight they each need for this film to fully succeed. Nearly all the time Bond and Madeline spend falling in love occurs off-screen between the end of Spectre and the beginning of No Time to Die. So their connection doesn’t feel fully credible. Also, the ins-and-out of what draws them together then breaks them apart, is too shallow a copy of what happened between Bond and Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) in Casino Royale.  Though Lyutsifer Safin gets a sizable buildup and backstory, he doesn’t live up to his name—Lucifer Satan?—and ends up as one of the least impressive Bond villains. And Blofeld, who was much ado about nothing in Spectre, comes off as little more than a poor man’s Hannibal Lector in this picture. 

In addition to the many villains and the return of Madeline into his life, Bond must contend with his former boss M (Ralph Fiennes) and the female “00” agent (Lashana Lynch) who replaced Bond at MI-6.  Bond also teams up with Q (Ben Whishaw) and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), who assist him both when he is working outside of British Intelligence and when he is reinstated. The combination of all these characters working together in the field to foil the plot of the multiple bad guys, along with all the double-crosses and false double-crosses witnessed and alluded to by various characters, comes off at best like a Mission Impossible movie and at worst like a Scooby-Doo episode.

Director Cary Joji Fukunaga (Sin nombre, Jane Eyre, Beasts of No Nation, and HBO’s True Detective) is a talented stylist and a solid screenwriter. He was in talks with Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli to become the first American to helm a Bond picture before the producers jumped at the chance to work with Oscar-winner Danny Boyle after the release of Spectre. After half a year in development, the Bond team came to a creative impasse with Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge, so Fukunaga returned to take on the picture. He penned the screenplay with Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (the long-time keepers of the quasi James Bond writing room) with a polish by Phoebe Waller-Bridge (writer of the BBC shows Fleabag and Killing Eve). Like most of the Bond films since the Pierce Brosnan era, the script has a Frankenstein quality to it, as if parts are pulled from multiple drafts and fused together in a way that may only be fully coherent to the writers who’ve lived with this material for years.

Much of what we love about Bond movies—the gadgets, action sequences, glamorous locations, and sometimes-witty, sometimes-cheesy banter (Craig even drops a one-liner in this film)—are on full display. The filmmakers also make a few bold choices for Craig’s final picture. More than a couple of major characters are killed off, but their deaths only resonate in the meta way everything else in this movie operates. We know we’ll see these characters again, just not played by these specific actors. So our emotional investment in everything we’re meant to care deeply about can only go so far. This inability to genuinely raise emotional stakes is another downside to a franchised film industry that reboots and re-launches its popular series before the previous incarnation has faded even slightly from the cultural collective conscious. 

Fukunaga opens No Time to Die with a visually stunning extended sequence that provides backstory for both Madeleine and Lyutsifer Safin, but it feels more like it belongs in a Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie than a Bond picture. It continues the series’ twenty-year fixation with dwelling on the traumatic events that shaped its characters. The influence of Christopher Nolan’s somber, pseudo-psychological Dark Knight Trilogy infected the 007 films throughout the Craig years. And whereas the Craig Bond movies started out chasing the popular Jason Bourne series, they now appear to be trying to catch up with the lighthearted Mission Impossible pictures—which in 2011 concentrated on giving audiences the kind of playful, not-too-serious spy-thriller entertainments the Bond films had consciously shifted away from. The brooding self-loathing (and self-importance) that characterized the Craig years gets lifted a bit in No Time to Die, but the series feels like it’s following trends set by its imitators rather than breaking new ground. At one point, Bond teams up with a young CIA agent named Paloma (played by Craig’s Knives Out co-star Ana de Armas). This sequence is one of the best parts of the movie, but it feels more in the vein of Tom Cruise and Rebecca Ferguson in the recent Mission Impossible entries.

While Craig has been a terrific James Bond, the five films he made as the character are wildly uneven—two great pictures, two weak movies, and this middle of the road attempt at fan service that rises above that derogatory term. At two hours and forty-three minutes, the longest film in the Bond canon, this sendoff is certainly epic, but it’s far less than spectacular.