No Time to Die

The enormous runtime hides one feature-length Bond film, which has great action, works on an emotional level and contains a passage that ranks among the best ever (not only) from the Craig era. The snag is that there's another feature-length Bond film in that runtime, tedious, full of wadding and lame line closures after Mendes, with a dime-a-dozen villain and no hints that lead to anything substantial. A solid farewell, but not memorable. It is absolutely true that less would be more. A lot more. (09/30/2021)

One thing is for sure, in a year we won't be seeing many filmed concerts like this one. A few hours after the premiere, I can still hear the reverberations in me, so I know something is very right here. Sufficiently Bond cool, sufficiently suspenseful, visually spectacular, and surprisingly still full of emotion. Plus, it beautifully delivers on the demands of the times without annoying the viewer. (10/19/2021)

This time the Broccoli party played nicely on emotions. And in the role of Bond, Craig tried out the broadest range of inner developments and facial expressions not only of his five appearances in the franchise, but all of the Bond films. As an emotional viewer, I was thoroughly moved. The relationship with Léa Seydoux was nicely deepened. But what about the faulty logic in the main villain’s (Malek) motivation and behavior and the other ill-conceived things? Is it so difficult to polish the screenplay of a much-anticipated, worldwide mega-film also in this respect? A repeat viewing of Spectre the day before was helpful, and No Time to Die follows directly from it. Zimmer is excellent in the suspenseful scenes, particularly in the encounter with Blofeld (Waltz). (09/30/2021)

The days of going to see Bond for the explosions, gadgets and cleavage are definitely over. Daniel Craig has taken Bond to a time when protagonists bleed, feel and have a finite amount of time. No Time to Die beautifully concludes the arc begun by Casino Royale and, despite a chaotic villain, delivers exactly what I expected: a surprisingly intimate and moving finale for the best Bond of all time, Daniel Craig (09/29/2021)

After the screening, I gave it full stars and contentedly enjoyed the reverberations of an experience overflowing with testosterone and adrenaline, only to begin to slightly waver the next day in favor of the "objective findings" that it had a rather futile villain and an often overly determined effort to tighten all the storylines from previous stints. But this is love, pure and sincere. Spectre could have been a full-on epilogue, and thankfully, it’s not. Daniel Craig came for a complex farewell in No Time to Die, brimming with big emotions that jostle for a place in the audience's good graces with an absolutely archetypal old-school Bond film, where the aforementioned villain with totally "full-retard" motivations fills his role to a tee and Q serves up the toys he mocked less than a decade earlier. Fukunaga paces it at an incredible rhythm (where is the much-mentioned mid-film tempo drop?) and keeps everything running in a completely polished and compact whole, where there is no room for peaks and valleys, but rather a thoughtful interplay of emotional outpourings and fantastic action. T. C. may be hanging under a helicopter and my jaw is dropping, but when a sweat and blood-soaked Craig climbs a staircase in one camera take, accompanied by Zimmer's thunderous music, I still know which agent with permission to replace a bulldozer will always be the most popular with me. (10/26/2021)