No Time To Die James Bond Review
No Time To Die James Bond Review – “No Time to Die” is a fantastic film: a current, fast-paced James Bond thriller with a pleasant neo-classical edge. It’s an unabashedly traditional Bond film crafted with polish and just the perfect amount of heart, as well as enough stylish surprise to keep you on the edge of your seat.
But first, I’d like to set down my baccarat cards on the table. In many ways, I believed “Casino Royale,” the first picture in which Daniel Craig played James Bond, was the best Bond film since the early Sean Connery days, and the most completely realized Bond film ever. (It’s one of my favorite films of the era, and I’ve seen it several times.) The three Bond films that followed “Casino Royale” have been one of the most deeply disappointing follow-ups of any contemporary cinema series, in my opinion. “Quantum of Solace” was all made-up mechanics, “Spectre” was an elaborate piece of product that went through the motions — and “Skyfall,” though I understand many Bond fans think it’s a masterpiece, was, to me, sodden and overstated, with a meta-hammy megalomanic performance by Javier Bardem and a maudlin with self-pity backstory to Bond. The picture was attempting to be “emotional,” but Bond’s origin narrative as an impoverished little spy boy didn’t enlarge him; instead, it degraded him.
The truth is that so many elements of what the Bond films first introduced to cinema have been integrated into other film series — the “Mission: Impossible” films, the “Bourne” films, the “Fast and Furious” films — that something extra is required to make a first-rate Bond adventure. The ideal layered rhythm of brashly timed fights and amazing escapes and bedazzling chases, delectable quips and nifty inventions, sensual one-upmanship, and the ultimate in world-domination stakes is required. Despite the fact that “No Time to Die” is the longest Bond picture ever at 2 hours and 43 minutes, it is fast, heady, and crisp. Cary Joji Fukunaga (HBO’s “True Detective”), the filmmaker, maintains the components in check like a master juggling. The split-second leaping-off-the-balcony action scenes, the threat of an assassin with a wandering artificial eyeball, the persnickety droll joy of Ben Whishaw’s performance as Q – he gets the details right.
Bond, on the other hand, requires a certain amount of mystery. With its marvelously difficult portrayal of the relationship between Craig’s swift, steely, roughneck Bond and Eva Green’s seductive Vesper Lynd, “Casino Royale” brought back that quality to the series. And, if it isn’t quite the work of art that “Casino Royale” was, “No Time to Die” has just enough of that quality. In an ideal James Bond film, there is a romance – not just a love story, but a romance to Bond’s presence, a larger motivation behind his relentless execution of his every step. That can be found in “No Time to Die.”
We see Léa Seydoux’s Madeleine as a young child and the tragedy she suffered at the hands of a guy in a white mask who came to her house to kill her father — who was a member of SPECTRE and had slain the masked man’s family — in the introduction montage. So, in her own way, Madeleine has broken the cycle of retribution. Then we cut to Bond and Madeleine as adults, traveling over the Italian mountains in his Aston Martin. He assures Madeleine that they have all the time in the world when she tells him to drive faster.
The bliss is short-lived, however, as SPECTRE agents track them down. What evidence did they have that Bond was present? The most captivating moment in the midst of any razor-sharp activity is one of complete inaction: A dozen shooters fire at Bond as he drags the gizmo-laden automobile to a halt in the midst of a town square, blasting away at his bullet-proof windows. Bond does nothing despite the fact that the windows do not appear to be secure. “I know you led them here,” he tells Madeleine through his silent passive rage. I’m quite aware that you betrayed me. What difference does it make whether we live or die?” The film “No Time to Die” is a popcorn riff on the subject of deadly trust.
This topic is brought to life on a large scale. Bond is called back into action, and he teams up with the CIA to travel to Santiago de Cuba, where SPECTRE is holding a kind of underworld convention centered on the criminal cult’s theft of Project Heracles, a chemical weapons project in which the biohazard poisons you by injecting nanobots into your bloodstream, which serve as vehicles for toxifying your DNA. The contagion element in the script predates COVID (because the film was ready to be released last year), but it takes on an unsettling contemporary resonance when we find that M (Ralph Fiennes), glowering with dread, has a darker goal than usual. Project Heracles could only have come from a malevolent mastermind in the past. It’s a power that the good guys now want to wield. The entire world order is contaminated in “No Time to Die,” making Bond even more of a rogue operator.
In Cuba, Bond reunites with an old CIA colleague, Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), as well as Paloma (Ana de Armas), an operative dressed in a slip of a black cocktail dress who turns out to be less naive than she claims. Here’s a scene in which the film’s wit is downright debonair: Bond and Paloma’s espionage logistics are so perfectly timed that they have a ripe romantic charge to them — yet in the old days, these two would have fallen directly into bed. The fact that they don’t takes away nothing from the film; in fact, it makes it even hotter as a lighthearted flirting. Billy Magnussen, a sly actor, also appears as a smirking stooge of a CIA neophyte who is a Bond “fan” until he isn’t.
Craig has mastered the skill of portraying Bond a seemingly unbeatable force who is also a human person with hidden flaws, with his hair cropped into a bristle cut. Another sequence, which would have been a seduction decades before, is now a lot more casual interaction between Bond and Nomi (Lashana Lynch), an up-and-coming MI6 agent assigned the codename of…007. For a little minute, we wonder to ourselves, “Could this be the new — the next — James Bond?” as we watch Lashana Lynch’s every line gleam with a kind of dry sauciness. The interaction between Nomi and Bond, on the other hand, reveals its own story. On some levels, it’s about Bond clearing the way for the new world. The catch is that he’s more than willing to go. And, in a clever bait-and-switch, the picture simultaneously offers an authentically progressive piece of casting while also winking at our increased knowledge of how much the Bond franchise could use it.
“No Time to Die” is, at its core, a typical Bond picture, which adds to its appeal. But it’s not simply the length of the film that makes it feel epic. The film aspires to capture the emotional impact of Daniel Craig’s departure from the series. Yes, it does. The primary plot picks up five years after the events of the opening sequence, when Bond and Madeleine have split up. They’re reunited thanks to Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), who’s now imprisoned in a padded cell in London, where he’s more Hannibal Lecter than babbling lunatic, but hasn’t lost his control. Madeleine is a doctor who has access to Blofeld, and when she and Bond meet again, it is so that Bond can meet the enemy he has imprisoned face to face. Waltz invests Blofeld with a more exquisite dread in his one key scene than he did throughout the entire film. Despite the fact that his bio-weapon is a step ahead of Bond, Blofeld is two steps ahead of him.
Rami Malek as Lyutsifer Safin, the film’s main villain, made his presence felt in the film before we even realized it. Malek is a fascinating creep, with mottled skin, an all-seeing grin, and the caressing voice of a wicked monk. (He might teach Bardem a thing or two about underplaying overstatement.) Of course, Safin has established himself on an isolated island, where he is perfecting his poison and all of his plans for it. The location and chem-lab ickiness are quite “You Only Live Twice,” but what makes Malek’s portrayal so excellent is the obscene way he inserts himself into Bond, Madeleine, and Madeline’s young daughter, Mathilde’s drama. Bond is there to save the world, Madeleine, and Mathilde, and he is there to save himself. Is he capable of completing all three tasks? In a bizarre way, Bond takes on the karma of all the people he has slain in the culminating climax, which feels beautiful. I never expected to cry at the end of a James Bond film, but “No Time to Die” delivers on its promise. It brings Craig’s 007 tale to a close in the most grandiose of ways.
