No Time to Die

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)

A very dignified farewell. Daniel Craig clearly enjoys the whole thing much more than in Spectre, and Cary Joji Fukunaga proves to be the perfect man to direct. No Time to Die has a great opening and an excellent ending, and it plods a bit in between, but not to the point where it hurts. Fukunaga is unlucky to have been given the task of retelling the story that was so poorly picked up by Sam Mendes in Spectre, and it was probably no fun to make sense of it all and milk some emotion out of this latest Bond flick. Fortunately, Fukunaga manages it quite well, despite Léa Seydoux being an extremely uninteresting actress and playing probably the most boring Bondgirl ever. Unfortunately, Fukunaga couldn't get rid of her, so I take it he did what he could. He's much better in scenes where he can invent new things and not work with what's left. The action is good, imaginative and different every time. And the whole No Time to Die changes its style unexpectedly and often, so that at times it's reminiscent of Craig's Bond films, at other times it makes you think of the days when Roger Moore or Sean Connery were Agent 007, and in some scenes the film can be surprisingly gritty and uncompromising. The whole thing could have been shorter, had a more prominent villain, and the middle part does drag a bit at times, but overall it's a film that's definitely worth seeing. And Craig can be happy with how he parted with his license to kill. (09/29/2021)

Less is more in the end, but I understand the effort to give the final chapter of an unrivalled era everything. Including two Bond films in one. Because this is a grueling part of the physical period – and yet there is a villain with a megalomaniacal plan that resembles long-forgotten screenplay formulae. At the same time, it is still a series with 007 – and yet dialogue comes up on topics that have never been in it before. No matter which way I look at the result, the spectacle of No Time to Die is different than I expected. And that is precisely the biggest victory and defeat at the same time. It references its own serialization, where it barely matches the finale of Skyfall or the oppressive escalation of Spectre, but even at the end, in the breathless finish on the stairs, it achieves and provides a high point of the last pentalogy. It is a pity that the final threat is Safin, who loses out to the terrifying qualities or abilities of previous villains, but thanks to Daniel Craig standing against him, it is easier to forget about it. Watching his increasingly delicate acting nuances is a joy. So much so that I would repeat this fifteen-year period any time as the most magnificent series. I have all the time in the world for that. (11/08/2021)

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)

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)