Since his first appearance in Casino Royale in 2006, Daniel Craig has anchored a Bond era in which his toned buff exterior has masked a conflicted, psychologically troubled interior. This was best explored in Craig’s third outing for the franchise, the 2012 Sam Mendes directed Skyfall, which became the biggest grossing film in Bond history, and which would have marked a fitting swansong to Craig’s tenure.
Instead, the ever hungry franchise rolled Craig out for another performance in 2015’s Spectre, a dull, uneven, shoddy mess of vacuous globe-trotting action and luxury brand product placement that was so disappointing that Craig publicly swore that he was done with Bond and would never put on the tux again.
Producer Barbara Broccoli was having none of it and lured Craig back for one final hurrah in a film that was supposed to be helmed by Danny Boyle, who had directed Craig in Bond’s ultimate moment of British patriotism, the 2012 London Olympic opening ceremony.
Boyle was replaced by True Detective and Beasts of No Nation director Cary Joji Fukunaga who, together with longtime Bond film scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade and Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, produced a script that they promised would do much to remedy the long-standing brutish machismo and rapacious outdated attitudes of 007 for the post-#MeToo era.
That film, No Time to Die, the 25th in the franchise and definitely the last outing for Craig, now arrives after an 18-month pandemic induced delay with all the hopes of big-screen surround-sound blockbuster entertainment riding on it.
Their praise must be taken with a pinch of salt as all you’d really need to excite them at the moment is have Bond drive a lorry from Land’s End to John O’Groats.
British critics, desperate for signs that all is not lost in the Sceptred Isle’s post-Brexit, bumbling Etonian buffoon led moment of chaos and absurdity, have extolled No Time to Die as a franchise highpoint and a gloriously fitting send-off to Craig. Their praise must be taken with a pinch of salt as all you’d really need to excite them at the moment is have Bond drive a lorry from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.
We don’t begin with Bond but rather with a flashback to a traumatic childhood moment from the past of his current paramour Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux). The young Swann and her mother are confronted in their isolated A-frame Norwegian lake house by a creepy looking soft-talker Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), looking for revenge for the murder of his family by Swann’s father.
He chases her across a frozen lake before saving her from drowning beneath the ice and then we jump forward to the adult Madeleine emerging from a dip in the Mediterranean off the coast of Italy, where she and Bond are enjoying some vacation time, trying to make their relationship work and promising to keep no secrets from each other.
When Bond sneaks off the next morning to visit the grave of his first love — Eva Green’s Vesper Lynd — his final goodbye is nastily interrupted by a bomb that sends him off on the first of the film’s many well executed action set pieces. It involves a band of windbreaker-sporting Italian hoods led by a man with a glass eye and a spiralling hail of machine-gun fire unleashed by Bond from under the headlights of his trusty classic Aston Martin. By the time he puts Swann on a train and tells her he’ll never see her again, we are 20 minutes into the film as Billie Eilish mournfully wails her theme song over the surreally executed title sequence that is the hallmark of the franchise.
The plot that will occupy Bond for the next 130 minutes is overly complicated and predictably shallow but in a strange twist of fate its focus on a world-threatening biological weapon that uses DNA to attack specific targets has some resonance with the uncertainty and anxieties of Covid-19.
After that weapon and its creator, the campy Russian scientist stereotype Valdo Obruchev (David Dencik) is kidnapped from a hi-tech storage facility in London. We then cut to the idyllic paradise of Jamaica where we find Bond five years into ruggedly self-sufficient, isolated retirement.
That’s all interrupted by his old friend, CIA agent Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), who twists Bond’s arm into doing some freelance world-saving work in Cuba. Bond heads off on his boat to capture Obruchev with the assistance of the alluring Cuban agent Paloma (Ana de Armas) in a scene that recalls one of those glossy, tropically lit, mid-2000s Bacardi adverts starring Vinnie Jones.
That freelance assignment goes horribly awry though it does introduce Bond to his 007 replacement, Nomi (Lashana Lynch) who, while she hints at a possible new direction for the idea of what Bond could be going forward, quickly disappears into the sidelines.
Bond returns to the MI6 fold and with a little help from Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) and Q (Ben Whishaw) and, to the indignation of M (Ralph Fiennes), sets about restoring order to the world. This time, though, his mission is governed more by a sentimental desire for domestic bliss with Madeleine and her daughter than it is by the call of queen and country.
The beer he drinks is Heineken, the Vodka Smirnoff, the car an Aston Martin — except for a thrilling but thinly disguised off-roading advert that pits Bond in a Toyota Land Cruiser against Land Rover-driving baddies in the forests of Norway — and the magnetic pulse-emitting timepiece is made by Omega.
The final confrontation with Safin — who after his initial introduction then basically disappears for 90 minutes — takes place on a disputed island off the coast of Japan in a modernist concrete compound pulled straight out of the sketchbooks of Louis Kahn and Oscar Niemeyer.
There we pay our goodbyes to Craig after an exhausting two-and-a-half hours (the longest running time in Bond history) in which we have just fallen, once again, into the easy Bond traps of luxury globe-trotting and flashy car advertisements without really getting any closer to the man than we did in Skyfall.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.