No Time to Die is, indeed, a James Bond movie. But mostly it’s a movie about the most recent Bond movies.
Of course, self-consciousness has always been a part of this series. I was surprised, on a recent first-time watch of 1963’s From Russia with Love, to find the franchise already poking fun of itself in its second entry. The level of self-awareness only increased as the decades passed, culminating in the most recent run of Daniel Craig films, which are so acutely aware of the “lightness” of their predecessors that they’ve been gradually dimming the lights on the series with each installment.
At first, with 2006’s Casino Royale, this approach was thrilling—and brilliantly executed. Craig’s Bond was not only psychologically layered in provocative ways, but also the first 007 to scare me. The dark depths of this psyche were explored in three increasingly grim Craig installments (the Roger Deakins-lensed Skyfall, at least, was leavened by bursts of aesthetic brilliance). This brings us to Craig’s final film as Bond, No Time to Die. A movie so burdened not only by Bonds past, but also the increasingly leaden mythos that has been built around this particular 007, No Time to Die has a self-awareness that’s suffocating.
Craig is as compelling as ever, leaving just enough of a twinkle in his eye to remind us that there’s still some Bond in this “blunt instrument” (as he was described in Casino Royale). An early moment in which he and Lea Seydoux’s Madeleine (returning from Spectre) are trapped in Bond’s bulletproof car as henchmen rain down gunfire demonstrates the qualities Craig exemplifies best: a cool, lethal, irrepressible anger. Overall, the movie is handsomely directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and makes ingenious use of the theme music, employing the most familiar riffs as brawny bursts to the action. Among the supporting players, Ana de Armas stands out as a Cuban contact who at first seems like comic relief—nervous, jumpy, something like a wobbly baby deer as 007—before revealing herself to be startlingly capable.
Unfortunately Lashana Lynch, who has literally inherited the title of 007 in the wake of Bond’s retirement, gets little to do even though she’s technically given more screen time than de Armas. (She seems to be waiting around for her 007 Marvel streaming series to start.) As the mysterious villain, whose motivations are still somewhat of a mystery to me long after seeing the movie, Rami Malek also succumbs to self-consciousness. He gives a performance well aware of the Bond baddies who have come before, but doesn’t seem to know what to do with that knowledge.
By its final third, No Time to Die gives itself over to a dour, drawn-out denouement that’s less about the narrative at hand and more about delivering a summation on this five-film cycle. The pieces are there—the movie ends in a vast, villainous lair—but it forgets to be a Bond movie in the process. If the overall project of the Craig pictures was to domesticate 007, No Time to Die accomplishes its mission. But it was a bit of a slog to get there.
(10/6/2021)
