No Time To Die - Review
He does look good in a suit. Image: Universal Pictures.
I still remember my first James Bond. It was either The World is not Enough or Tomorrow Never Dies, but my Bond was Pierce Brosnan, all sleek and polished, always with a crooked eyebrow. I was too young to fully realize what it meant when Daniel Craig stepped into the role Brosnan had so dominated throughout my childhood. But his debut Casino Royal was a triumph and I was hooked.
It feels kind of eerie that the new entry into the James Bond canon starts with a reference to Casino Royal’s doomed sidekick, Vesper Lynd. The echoes of the past continue with the reappearances by Felix Leiter (still played by the amazing Jeffrey Wright) and the rest of the supporting and villain cast of the Daniel Craig era. There are many. So many.
And here lies my main issue with the Cory Joji Fukunaga directed No Time To Die: it plays like a best-of-Bond without putting that much effort into creating a compelling narrative around it. And it is way too long.
Characters pop in and out of the story, often to make place for an unnecessary side plot or dialogue scene. Not to say that the actors are not giving their all: performances across the board are great, and even Daniel Craig, so world-weary in Spectre, is invested and sometimes appears to have fun.
However, not only do the references to past Bond outings (in dialogue, story beats or characters) drag, the action sequences do their own part in the proceedings. They look impressive and are choreographed well. Thought was put into their execution and place in the story. But they feel stuck in 2015: action cinema has come far in recent years. The sequences neither manage to match the recent Mission Impossible-outings in their grandiosity, nor John Wick in their efficiency. Some of them feel as if they were drawn up for the next Mission Impossible, but were rejected for being too tame or too boring.
Ana de Armas pops up and steals the show for approximately 10 minutes. I wish she had taken me with her, her movie looked more fun. And both her and Lashana Lynch (taking over the mantle of 007 for parts of the movie) have more chemistry with Craig’s Bond than Craig has with Léa Seydoux, reprising her role as love interest Madeleine Swann from Spectre. At least her character gets something to do in her few scenes. Did I mention that everybody else appears as well? There is only so much character development possible when you are sharing the film with fourteen other characters.
Did you notice that I failed to mention the villain? Rami Malek’s Lyutsifer Safin is present in the movie. His introduction is impressive, just to end up utterly forgettable. The film does not allow enough room for Malek to fulfill his full villain potential. As he just joked in his recent Saturday Night Live-monologue, he has “resting villain face”. And used under the right circumstances, he would be great (see: Mr. Robot). Just not here.
This movie is long, and for all the wrong reasons. Too many characters, action sequences that go on forever, dialogue that never stops and a main couple devoid of any chemistry. It pulls off some nice sequences and the actors bring some real heart to their characters. But this only results in a movie that is more coherent than Spectre, but does not reach the heights of Daniel Craig’s tenure as James Bond Casino Royal and Skyfall. He should have probably stopped long ago. At least now Daniel Craig can have fun playing Detective Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out-sequels.
