Is No Time to Die a Good James Bond Film?
No Time To Die. Image courtesy of Eon Productions.
SPOILERS FOLLOW.
No Time to Die is the 25th official film in the James Bond franchise, the fifth starring Daniel Craig, and also the last starring Daniel Craig. It gives us a Bond at the end of his career who is tired, disillusioned and looking to fade away into a simpler life. Of course, he is called back into action in service of an utterly incomprehensible plot that requires him to, naturally, shoot and karate chop a bunch of bad guys in a Soviet era missile silo island fortress that is, for some reason that must have flown over my head, filled with pools of liquid poison. Suffice it to say, the writers went to great lengths to show us this would really be the capstone on Craig’s tenure as Bond.
The movie is getting very mixed reviews: some people love it, calling it the best Bond send-off that ever was. Others found it meandering, long, nonsensical and dull. I guess I’m somewhat biased because I have never liked the way the franchise was re-envisioned under Daniel Craig as a gritty portrayal of a morally conflicted weapon of state murder. Having grown up cutting my teeth on the camp of Sean Connery’s Bond, I never felt they were able to make the transition to a 21st century interpretation that captured the quintessential elements of the franchise while updating them for modern audiences.
The fun thing about James Bond is that it is ridiculous and over-the-top. It’s a spycraft fantasy, about impossibly suave and villainous characters doing impossible things with wacky gadgets and delivering idiotic one-liners. This is fundamentally not a suitable canvas upon which to introduce semi-serious (or what passes for serious in the mind of Hollywood screenwriters) ideas about the morality of state-sanctioned murder, or existential mid-life crises or whatever. You don’t really want to think about James Bond as a person, or about the real-life consequences or implications of his actions. He is a fantasy archetype.
I get that many people like that they took the franchise in that direction, but I have never been able to get over it. I don’t think it’s the right choice for the material. Skyfall came closest to pulling it off, thanks to Sam Mendes’ ability to suck us into a beautifully lilting and impressionistic dream world that helped to visually convey some of the existential angst. But none of the other films have come anywhere close, and for me it’s because the way the series has been conceptualized during the Craig years was flawed. But that’s all from a sort of meta perspective about the direction the series has gone it. Aside from that, No Time to Die is in many places simply badly made from a filmmaking perspective.
Daniel Craig is a checked out lead, and he evinces little to no charisma. The action is for the most part boilerplate, barring a few pretty cool stunts. The plot is absolute pablum. Now I realize that in the world of James Bond spy thrillers, a coherent plot is by no means necessary for the film to be enjoyable. But it’s distractingly bad. Characters, like Ana de Armas, swing into and out of the narrative like Tarzan for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Why was she even in this film? Rami Malek as the Big Bad is great as long as he’s behind a mask and not onscreen. Once the mask comes off, he becomes an utterly uninspiring villain and adversary, and seems to still be channeling Freddie Mercury from the Queen biopic.
The dialogue is laughably bad, and in very head-scratching ways. In one scene Bond is walking through a laboratory while Rami Malek’s character speaks to him through a loudspeaker and says “Why don’t you come up here and we can discuss this?” This is followed immediately by Bond pistol whipping an evil scientist in the face and shouting: “Where is he?” The guy points up. You know, upstairs. Like the bad guy himself literally just told you. This might seem like knit-picking, but the movie from beginning to end is peppered with similarly lazy writing and plotting and at a certain point it becomes evident that almost no care was put into the nuts and bolts of constructing this movie. Instead, one comes away with the impression that everyone involved is just coasting on the brand, looking to cash in one last time before Daniel Craig is recast.
True, they were already locked into an interpretation of James Bond that I didn’t like. But if No Time to Die had at least been a competently made film I might have enjoyed it, as I did Skyfall. But it was not. And that’s the note that Craig’s time in the role will end on. At this point, probably the surest way to resuscitate this franchise will be to cast Idris Elba as Bond. Since that is a great idea, I doubt it will happen and in several years when the money-printer is turned on again, the franchise will probably continue to commit to bad ideas cloaked in half-baked execution.
