No Time To Die - Movie Review

Critics Score - 6 of 10

General Audience Score - 8 of 10

The James Bond saga is entering is sixtieth year as a movie franchise in 2022 and while the series as a whole has had its ups and downs, each portrayal of Bond has had it’s unique elements and contributed to the character in interesting ways. The debate of which actor portrayed Bond the best has been going for decades and while Daniel Craig has been the face of Bond for the current generation, many lovers of the films still prefer the Moore and Connery days of yesteryear. But Daniel Craig finishes his stint in No Time To Die, which finally dropped into theaters last month and just hit streaming last weekend. While it needs to be commended for trying to do some new and inventive things with the series, the film feels like it follows a Mission: Impossible style film plot and deviates in ways that may leave hardcore Bond fans puzzled. It’s a decent enough movie and certainly has the action sequences, characters and Bond girls that we come to love in No Time, but some of the elements of the film just aren’t To Die for.

SYNOPSIS - This final installment of the new age Bond starts with a gun toting, mask wearing man, walking across a frozen wilderness to take out a woman in a cabin. The woman’s daughter turns out to be a young Madeleine (Léa Seydoux), Bond’s love interest from the last film, Spectre. After she escapes her masked assailant, we move to current day and she and James Bond (Daniel Craig) are enjoying his retirement in seclusion until he pays a visit to Vesper’s tomb and an explosion sends him flying and initiates an impressive chase sequence with members of the villainous group Spectre. There’s a lot of film here, at over two and a half hours it’s the longest Bond film, but at this point of the film we enter the realm of convoluted characters and plot points. Bond’s old friend Felix (Jeffrey Wright) pops back in to get him into a Spectre party to look for a Russian scientist with the help of Paloma (Ana de Armas), who does a fantastic job bringing Bond girls back to form. But before James can contend with the film’s actual villain Safin (Rami Malek), he must figure out how and why Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) is able to oversee Spectre affairs while still incarcerated.

By the time half the film is over and we’ve spent virtually no time with the film’s main villain, which really actually works in the favor of the audience as Malek proves to be one of the worse Bond villains of the Craig era. Most of the cast is doing perfectly fine work and Daniel plays Bond to a tee, but the main problems the film is dealing with lay at the feet of the screenplay. The films packs in a lot and suffers from doing too much and while it manages to do some things well, there’s really very few truly great aspects of the film. There’s likely to be an Oscar nomination in line for Best Original Song and very possibly for the many great practical Visual Effects, but there’s not many things that are happening here that will get real lovers of cinema excited about the last time we get to experience Craig in his Bond tuxedo.

SUMMARY - This final installment of Craig’s 007 will satisfy the action junkie in all of us, the Bond girl aficionados and the average cinema goer. But there’s a lot of film here, at two hours and forty-five minutes, the longest film in the franchise gets bogged down with an overloaded screenplay. With so many moving parts that I can’t mention for the sake of time, there’s really No Time To Die, which some cinephiles and hardcore Bond fans may contemplate.