Breaking the Bonds of Bond

Despite its name, 2021's No Time to Die features a lot of people dying. In Daniel Craig's final turn as his particularly grim and dour James Bond, he manages to have a little fun in an otherwise unremarkable outing.

I'm not an especially big James Bond fan and the only one of the Daniel Craig movies I'd seen was Casino Royale. But I figured, all the James Bond movies are meant to be stand-alone anyway. Well, turns out they used to be, now it's an ongoing serial and this one starts with Bond in a settled relationship with Madeleine (Lea Seydoux). Since a lot of the film's superior first two thirds involve his struggle with whether or not he can trust her, I wondered if she was named after Madeleine in Vertigo.

That relationship paranoia is good, and plays well with the somber Billie Eilish tune that plays over the credits, but the best part of the movie by far is the Cuba sequence.

Here the film seems to take a brief detour into a completely different, much more old fashioned, Bond movie. Ana de Armas is gorgeous in an impossible dress, every bit the classic Bond girl otherwise absent from the film.

I laughed when I saw the article a few days ago about the guys suing a studio because de Armas had been cut out of another film. But now I kind of get it. And in this one scene, her character is more vividly established than in the entirety of her previous collaboration with Craig, Knives Out.

Bond himself, now divested of his patronising humour and other character flaws, is just a generic Action Guy, and this is a significant aspect of the final act's lack of lustre. Remi Malik as the villain spins some philosophy about how people long for oblivion and Bond is presented as a counterpoint, neatly summed up by M (Ralph Fiennes) with a quote from Jack London:

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

Sure, that's a good message, but it doesn't really come from any argument organic to the film. Oblivion has no advocates, we don't get the sense Bond is ever truly tempted to just sit and watch the wheels go round.

Lashana Lynch is introduced as Nomi, the new 007. If the idea was to float her as a potential replacement protagonist in a spin-off series of films, No Time to Die makes surprisingly little effort to sell her to the audience. Even Jeffrey Wright, in a small role as a CIA agent, is given more interesting things to do. Nomi doesn't get one badass moment, not one clever line, no eyebrow raising punctuation of a scene. The only mystery around her is about what she's doing in this movie.

Craig still has that nice sense of brutality that made him so good in Casino Royale despite some impression of him sleepwalking in the role. Whoever really does replace him, I hope they don't seem quite so mature, and I'm not talking about age.