James Bond has left active service. His peace is short-lived when Felix Leiter, an old friend from the CIA, turns up asking for help, leading Bond onto the trail of a mysterious villain armed with dangerous new technology.
When Daniel Craig took over from Pierce Brosnan in 2006’s “Casino Royale,” fans were initially skeptical and called Craig the “Blonde Bond,” claiming that his hair color was not part of Bond’s DNA and that the producers should have hired someone else. The naysayers were eventually proved wrong when “Casino Royale” and its subsequent iterations were among some of the most successful entries in the almost 60-year franchise. What the Craig-era films did, starting with “Casino Royale” and concluding with “No Time To Die,” was to give Bond an overall conclusive story, one narrative spanning five films, thus, allowing Bond and his cohorts plenty of character development and story exposition, something none of the previous movies ever did. In the past, every Bond film was a standalone entry, but occasionally, a Bond villain would reappear, such as Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who proved to be a rather irritating thorn in Bond’s side and in 1981’s “For Your Eyes Only,” in which Blofeld’s character was killed off, future entries introduced new villains to the series, operating independently from each other.
In “No Time To Die,” Bond (Daniel Craig) has retired from MI6 with his girlfriend, Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), whom he met in the previous film “SPECTRE.” While on a trip to Matera, Italy, Bond and Swann agree to finally confess secrets from their past so they can start a new life together, learning to trust in each other but when Bond visits the tomb of his old lover, Vesper Lynd, in the hopes of forgiving her for her betrayal of him in the past and finally letting her go, the tomb explodes, knocking Bond off his feet. When men turn up and start shooting at him, he manages to retrieve Madeleine from their hotel and convinced that she is working for SPECTRE, since no one else knew of their whereabouts, he puts her on a train and bids her farewell.
Five years later, an MI6 scientist, Valdo Obruchev (David Dencik), is kidnapped from an undisclosed lab in London and it comes to light that he was working on a top-secret program, Project Heracles, a bioweapon consisting of nanobots that can be regulated to a specific person’s DNA, administering a lethal dose to the intended target, but rendering it harmless to anyone else. Bond has retired to Port Antonio, Jamaica where he is approached by his old CIA friend Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), who states that Obruchev is in Cuba and that he needs his help. Bond initially refuses but is later tracked down by an MI6 agent named Nomi (Lashana Lynch), who now has his 007 number. When she informs him of Obruchev and that he is to stay retired, he decides to help Leiter.
After bumping into Nomi, he meets with Paloma (Ana de Armas), one of Leiter’s allied CIA agents, and after a shootout with agents from what Bond assumes is SPECTRE, they manage to successfully retrieve Obruchev and the nanobots, and Bond slips away in Nomi’s seaplane. When he reaches a boat where Felix is located, both men are doublecrossed by a close associate, who abducts Obruchev and leaves Bond and Leiter for dead after sinking the boat. Succumbing to his injuries, Felix dies, and Bond manages to escape. Back in London, he meets with M (Ralph Fiennes), who informs him about Project Heracles. Through M, Bond sets up a meeting with his old adversary Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) to try and find out why he had agents in Cuba, but before meeting with him, he bumps into Madeleine, who M states is the only person Blofeld will talk to. Bond quickly discovers a new villain, Safin (Rami Malek), who has killed off most of Blofeld’s organization, SPECTRE, but before Bond and Madeleine have their meeting with Blofeld, Safin informs Madeleine to spray her hands with the nanobots and at a designated time during their meeting, she is to touch Blofeld, killing him in the process.
At the last minute, she cannot commit to the plan and while Bond can tell she is agitated and grabs a hold of her hands, trying to quieten her down, she quickly shrugs him off and leaves. During the meeting, after Blofeld riles Bond up, he puts him in a chokehold but M’s chief of staff, Bill Tanner (Rory Kinnear), forces him to let go. Moments later though, Blofeld is dead and Bond realizes that after Madeleine recoiled from him grabbing her hands, Safin must have given her the nanobots to kill Blofeld, and she inadvertently passed them on to him. As a search for her intensifies, Bond quietly retreats to her childhood home in Norway. Once there, she introduces him to Mathilde (Lisa-Dorah Sonnet), her five-year-old daughter who possesses piercing blue eyes, just like him, but Madeleine claims she is not his.
After a brief conversation about their past and a possible future, Madeleine’s house is attacked by Safin and his henchmen, forcing Bond to escape with Madeleine and Mathilde. After an exciting car chase and shootout in a shrouded forest, Safin captures Madeleine and her daughter, leaving Bond to pick up the pieces. Q (Ben Whishaw) locates Safin in a Second World War base on an island between Japan and Russia and with Bond and Nomi preparing to infiltrate the heavily-armed island fortress from the air, for the first time in his life, Bond ascertains that he has a family to protect, and not just himself. Now he must track down and face off against his most dangerous adversary yet, with the whole world waiting in the balance.
One of the first criticisms aimed at “No Time To Die,” was its lengthy runtime. At 2 hours and 43 minutes, one might be forgiven for assuming it would be a labyrinthine ordeal, especially for a Bond film, but director Cary Joji Fukunaga keeps the action flowing and the script overrun with sharp dialogue and scintillating wordplay. Daniel Craig has owned James Bond ever since his first appearance in 2006’s “Casino Royale,” and with the exception of 2008’s “Quantum of Solace,” a direct sequel to “Casino Royale,” and a self-indulgent, sloppy, incomprehensible piece of frenetic filmmaking that director Marc Forster shot in much the same vein as the later Jason Bourne films, Craig has steadily managed to keep his head held high, infusing each chapter with his boyish charm and unrelenting pursuit of good over evil. Every Bond movie brings forth a Bond villain and here, while Rami Malek pushes Christoph Waltz’s Blofeld out of the picture, I found his performance to be too restrained. While Malek is a good actor, his Safin could have benefitted from more malevolence and animosity, instead, when he speaks, he is so soft-spoken and low-key, I half expected him to whip out a children’s night-time story and read it aloud.
While Craig leaves the franchise and his final film in top form, the same can’t be said for many of his predecessors. Connery slept walk through the worst film of his tenure, “Diamonds Are Forever,” Moore was way past his prime in the cartoonish “A View to a Kill,” and Brosnan simply didn’t know what to do with his final entry, the dismal and pretentious “Die Another Day.” Thankfully, the producers learned from their past mistakes and didn’t succumb to any of the series’ previous excessive preposterousness, instead leaving “No Time To Die” in the hands of a very capable director, a group of exceptionally talented writers, and a cast at the top of their game.
My top two favorite Bond films of all time are “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” and “SPECTRE,” and “No Time To Die” references both movies. This is a direct sequel to “SPECTRE” and John Barry’s best Bond score ever, for “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” is identified several times throughout the film, with the producers even including Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All the Time in the World.” I have been a Bond fan since I was a kid, and my love and passion for this series will never wane. Daniel Craig did an incredible job as James Bond, and now it is time for him, and us, to move on. As you sit through the closing credits and see those four classic words grace the screen, JAMES BOND WILL RETURN, you realize that the possibilities are endless. And exciting.
In Theaters Friday, October 8th
