No Time To Die, the new James Bond film, was for a time in the public imagination referred to as “Bond 25” after its sequential place in the franchise. “Bond 25” actually feels like it might have been the better title, given the fact that one of the central themes of this involving if overlong installment is that the “Double-0” designation is indeed just a number. We are here to say goodbye to Daniel Craig as Bond, and director Cary Joji Fukunaga (working from a script he co-wrote along with Phoebe Waller-Bridge and others) has made a plus-sized epic that in large measure succeeds in delivering action, spy craft, and the sort of rugged vulnerability that Craig brought to the role of Bond. Levels of tolerance for the way the Bond franchise has become serialized may vary, so fair warning: No Time To Die is very much committed to tying up threads from previous Craig-era Bond movies, most importantly Bond’s relationship with Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux). The curtain-raiser here takes place in Italy, with Bond and Madeleine on vacation and each seeming to want to commit to the other permanently. Duty intervenes in the form of an extended set piece that includes both nimble driving and hand-to-hand fighting, and we catch up with the story five years later with Bond retired and living in Jamaica.
Fukunaga has quite a bit of story to work through, and these early scenes have time both for the reappearance of Bond’s friend and American agent Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) and the introduction of a new Double-0 called Nomi (Lashana Lynch, a great addition). Everyone is concerned with a SPECTRE meeting in Cuba and with what Dr. Obruchev (David Dencik), a scientist working with bioweapons, might be doing there. The Cuba scenes are the most fun part of No Time To Die, with Ana de Armas playing an agent who claims to have only had “three weeks training” but who seems to have absorbed a great deal in that time. For a few minutes, No Time To Die is nominally concerned with the overreach of Western intelligence agencies and with the viability of that old model of spying – the long-term outlook is dim – but this movie needs an Evil Genius and it gets just that when Safin (Rami Malek) finally reveals his plans for the world. A movie this existential about its main character’s future needed a villain with a more immediate agenda than what we get here. Safin imagines the world be will be remade out of the destruction he causes, but Malek’s performance is enervated to a point that we have to keep reminding ourselves what he wants and at a couple of moments it doesn’t even seem as though Bond or Madeleine should be scared of him. (There are two sequences involving children being put in danger, a choice made I think in an attempt to humanize Bond but one that feels out of place here.) Where is Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) – who actually pops in for a scene – when you need him?
No Time To Die ends with our hero a Man in Full, a Double-0 when duty calls even as a future of domestic contentment opens up and M (Ralph Fiennes), Q (Ben Whishaw), and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) look on. Craig’s Bond turns out to be a man of his time, harried by work while figuring out how to give the people in his life the necessary time. The next James Bond will go their own way, but while No Time To Die isn’t without flaws it still gives this Bond the ending he deserves.
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