Daniel Craig’s fifth and final turn as James Bond runs 163 minutes. No Time to Die, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, wants to be both a closing chapter and a fresh start. It mostly manages the first.
Trailer, via James Bond 007.
A Frozen Lake and a Grave in Puglia
The film opens with a young Madeleine Swann watching Lyutsifer Safin murder her mother. Safin’s family was killed by Madeleine’s father, Mr. White, on orders from Ernst Stavro Blofeld. She wounds him, falls through a frozen lake, and he pulls her out. It is a strange, patient cold open.
Years later, Bond and Madeleine travel to Gravina in Puglia. She pushes him to visit Vesper Lynd’s grave. The tomb explodes. Operatives led by Primo, a mercenary with a bionic eye, attack. Madeleine then gets a congratulatory call from Blofeld. Bond accuses her of betrayal and sends her away.
Five Years in Jamaica
Bond has been retired from MI6 for five years. He is living quietly in Jamaica when Felix Leiter, his CIA ally, asks for help extracting a kidnapped scientist from a party in Cuba. The scientist, Valdo Obruchev, secretly works for Safin. He helped steal Project Heracles, a programmable DNA-targeting nanobot bioweapon developed under M.
Lashana Lynch plays Nomi, Bond’s successor as Agent 007. She warns him off her own extraction. He goes anyway, with Leiter’s Cuban agent, Paloma.
The Cuba Trap
The Cuba sequence is the film’s best stretch. Blofeld, watching from Belmarsh prison through his own bionic eye, releases a nanobot mist meant to kill Bond. It kills the SPECTRE members instead. Obruchev had reprogrammed the nanobots to target them. The reversal lands.
Rami Malek’s Safin Stays Under the Skin
Safin is the weak link. Rami Malek plays him as a bioterrorist on a revenge mission against SPECTRE, and producer Barbara Broccoli has called him “the one that really gets under Bond’s skin.” Fukunaga called him “more dangerous than anyone [Bond has] ever encountered.”
The performance is still. Too still. Safin’s plot to kill millions with Heracles is abstract where the Cuba trap was concrete. The film’s villain problem is an old one.
The returning cast holds firm:
- Daniel Craig as James Bond
- Léa Seydoux as Madeleine Swann
- Ralph Fiennes as M
- Ben Whishaw as Q
- Naomie Harris as Moneypenny
- Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter
- Christoph Waltz as Blofeld
What the Ending Costs
Fukunaga has said the film is about Bond “struggling to deal with his role as a ’00 agent’,” a “wounded animal” in a world where “the rules of espionage are darker.” Seydoux said she cried watching it. Craig said it is “about relationships and family.”
That is the ambition. The execution is uneven. Fukunaga wrote the screenplay with Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, working from a story by Purvis, Wade, and Fukunaga, and the pile of ideas shows. At 163 minutes, the middle sags.
But the ending earns its weight, and Craig’s exit is the reason to sit through the rest.
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