“For the money,” Daniel Craig told Time Out London when asked in 2015 why he might consider making yet another Bond film. Funny, that’s exactly why I agreed to watch and write about the damn thing.
I jest! Having seen every 007 installment since 1995’s GoldenEye (and seven or eight before that), I knew that serious delights awaited the moviegoer who settled in for No Time to Die. Beautiful girls, beautiful guns. An interesting explosion or two. So what if, in love with its own mythology, the new picture required more prior knowledge than the California Bar Exam? Surely I and the other four patrons at the 12:25 matinee would have a good time regardless.
No Time to Die begins in the Norwegian countryside, where precocious tween Madeleine Swann (Coline Defaud) is fending off a murderous home invader. Her antagonist, the ponderously named Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), is a disfigured malcontent who blames Swann’s father for the death of his family. Despite this bad blood, Safin does not, in fact, follow through with his revenge. Fast-forward two decades, give or take, and Swann is cavorting with a retired James Bond in Italy. As for her nemesis, well, let’s just say that his plans have gotten a bit more complicated in the interim.
Played in adulthood by Lea Seydoux, Swann is the kind of post-#MeToo Bond girl with whom our hero falls in mutually respectful love. Gone are the double entendres and revolving bedmates of the Connery-Moore-Brosnan eras. In their place is a secret agent whom one might confidently send to the mercato to pick up tampons. Has Bond, rising from his mattress like a languid housecat, been domesticated at long last? Indeed so. Can he still, if need be, race a Triumph Scrambler up a cobblestone staircase while dodging assassins? Absolutely.
Necessity in this particular case comes in the form of one Ernst Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), Bond villain extraordinaire and possessor of many a nefarious scheme. Operating from prison with the help of a bionic eye, Blofeld hatches a plot that carries 007 from Jamaica to Cuba to London to the Sea of Japan. The film’s MacGuffin, a “nanobot mist” that attacks its targets while leaving others unscathed, is the sort of high-tech quackery that one expects to read about on an anti-vaccine message board. Only slightly less bewildering are the interlocking machinations of Blofeld, Safin, and the assorted British and American agents who help and hinder Bond along his way.
For viewers who have failed to memorize the plots of Casino Royale and Spectre, the first and penultimate films in the Daniel Craig cycle, No Time to Die offers more than its share of enigmatic gestures. Vesper Lynd, the Eva Green character who died in Craig’s 2006 Bond debut, appears here in effigy to establish Bond’s bereavement bona fides. Swann and Blofeld, veterans of the previous movie, pulse with half-forgotten implications. Even the new picture’s alphabet types are likely to present distracted audiences with a not entirely welcome challenge. How are we supposed to engage with the action when we’re struggling so mightily to mind our M’s and Q’s?
Among the hallmarks of the latter-day franchise has been its insistence on deepening the emotional impact of its narrative. Occasionally, as when Skyfall (2012) explored the relationship between Bond and Judi Dench’s grizzled spy chief, this work has been successful. More often, however, the effect has been to detract from the series’s sense of slapdash excitement. An example in the latest film concerns the personal life of Q (Ben Whishaw), MI6’s master of gadgetry. A scene in which the young man reveals himself to be gay plays not as revelatory but as the most obnoxious kind of woke fan service. More importantly, it brings to a temporary halt a movie that is already overfull, overlong, and overstuffed with maudlin theatricality.
The trouble with a Bond experience that is high on sentiment is that Bond films are simply too campy to be taken seriously. Try as the new movie might, it is next to impossible to balance layered emotions with the ravings of monomaniacal villains. The result, familiar to anyone who has endured an offering from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is a tonal discordance that renders both the tenderness and the tirades suspect. Director Cary Joji Fukunaga (True Detective) may be a rare talent, but even he can’t square that circle.
Is No Time to Die still fun despite this tension? At times, greatly so. Tracking down a lead in Cuba, Bond teams with an American agent (Ana de Armas) in a scene that is as lighthearted and thrilling as action movies get. Fleeing gunmen in Matera, he looks for all the world like the smoothest operator who ever donutted an Aston Martin. Given Fukunaga’s ability to frame coherent action sequences, it is more than a little regrettable that his film wastes so much of its time in conversation. Had the writing team played to the director’s strengths, the outcome might have been a minor masterpiece of the genre.
Instead, lamentably, Fukunaga’s entry is likely to be remembered for its closing moments, which represent the apotheosis of everything that has been wrong with the franchise in the Daniel Craig era. Strapped with postmodernism’s insecurities, mired in doubt, Bond’s handlers have turned an icon of civilized bravado into a man who is boring, defeated, and doomed. No time to die? If only.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
