Though I would not call myself a huge James Bond fan, I have seen and enjoyed most of the movies. There are one or two with Pierce Brosnan I have somehow missed, but I’ve seen the rest, many of the multiple times, but I wouldn’t call myself a diehard fan. That said, Daniel Craig’s take on the character and the movies he made certainly caught my attention. This was a Bond that actually had something resembling some human emotions beyond the unflappable charisma that typically goes with the character. This was the first Bond since the earliest movies with Sean Connery who looked like he actually had to work to get things done, took serious injuries, and could actually look like the world beat the crap out of him sometimes to save the day. It was striking when, sometime after Craig took the role, my ex-wife and I were visiting her parents. Her father, a big Bond fan, was watching one of Brosnan’s movies, and I was struck by the fact that no matter what he was doing or where he was, this James Bond still looked like he just walked off the set of a GQ shoot without so much as a single hair out of place.
However, Bond can be a demanding role, and even if it helped make Craig what he is today, that doesn’t mean he would keep the role forever, so it is perhaps fitting that his final one is also the 25th movie in the series, namely No Time to Die.
One of the things that set the Craig years apart from other Bonds holds true from the opening moments here. Prior Bond films had little in the way of continuity. True, there was Bond’s brief marriage at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but beyond that, there really wasn’t much of anything. That was changed with Craig’s Bond whose emotional trauma from his first film appearance in Casino Royale continued in later movies, many of which delved into Bond’s pre-Service life or even his life outside the Service. That trend continues in the opening scenes in this movie before the opening credits, one of which is a tense opener involving two characters that are not James Bond, and then we see Bond on a vacation with Spectre love interest Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux). Swann has some secrets of her own, and they appear to come out at a bad time, leading to an action sequence against some Spectre goons, Bond breaking it off with Swann, and then retiring from the spy game.
Five years later, Bond is recruited by his CIA pal Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) for a quick freelance mission to retrieve a Russian scientist from Cuba. Bond has some competition there in the form of Nomi (Lashana Lynch), the new 007 because it seems M (Ralph Fiennes) has some knowledge on what the scientist was working on, but then there’s the mysterious Lyutsifer Safin (Rumi Malek), the sort of ruthless man that Bond has often tangled with in the past who has plans that won’t be good for much of anyone. Bond may have been retired, but he’s far from completely rusty, and there’s a huge mess out there that only a man like Bond can clean up. That’s pretty much what we all knew was coming, and that is what anyone going to see this movie is going to get. And that’s just fine.
Now, as much as Craig’s Bond has had a lot of character growth and change over time, he’s still James Bond. Given the movie is a milestone, the film is packed with Easter Eggs and references to movies from Bond’s past. There are no action sequences to equal, say, the parkour chase from Casino Royale, and Malek makes a rather generic villain. If anything, this movie is very much a testament to Craig’s version of Bond. Even in the weaker entries of Craig’s Bond run, he always turned in a good turn as Bond himself, a wounded man who was looking for something to fill an emotional void in his life. Given the devil-may-care, debonair style of most Bonds, this was always a welcome change and even somewhat prompted for me to wonder if Bond was allowed to be happy. Sure, he often ended movies bedding the Bond Girl of the movie, but these relationships never lasted much beyond the closing credits, and Bond would start each movie alone, a man with seemingly no real life outside of the job. This Bond does have something, even if that something is a feeling of absence.
I wouldn’t rate No Time to Die ahead of either Casino Royale or Skyfall, but it was better than either Quantum of Solace or Spectre, particularly in the last act as Bond comes to grips with some unexpected revelations. Craig really owned this role, and while he will not be back, he leaves quite the legacy to live up with whatever actor comes along to play Bond next time. This was a Bond with a character arc, and if nothing else, No Time to Die lets this particularly world-weary take on the character end the movie in an appropriate manner.
That said, small note: Craig’s Knives Out co-star Ana de Armas is featured on the movie’s poster and in a number of promotional images. Now, I am always glad to see de Armas in anything. She’s a good actress and always brings her A-game. However, her character only really appears in one extended sequence, and while she kicks a lot of ass and acquits herself well, she’s not really in the movie all that much given the film’s nearly three hour runtime.
Grade: A-
0 Comments