The world’s longest press tour is over. After three major delays to its release date, No Time To Die is finally here, Daniel Craig no longer has to grimace through media junkets or demur when asked who his successor might be. We can finally stop speculating about the trailers, frame by frame. We get to hear Billie Eilish’s theme song not through tinny laptop speakers via Spotify, but in full IMAX glory. It sounds odd to say it aloud, but the film is here. Hoo. Rah.
Even six years since Spectre, the relatively self-contained Bond universe means it’s easy enough to remember what’s going on with the franchise; not for 007 the thousand moving parts of the MCU. Instead, Bond is retired after having sent Blofeld to Belmarsh at the end of Spectre, and is living with Dr Madeleine Swann, Léa Seydoux’s Gallically pouty psychologist who we first met in the same film. Bond has given up philandering, and instead the two spend their time happily hopping around the Mediterranean, staying in luxury hotels. And yet all’s not well. An attack by Spectre agents while he’s visiting Vesper Lynd’s grave looking for closure (more on that later) leads the ultra-paranoid Bond to suspect Swann’s involvement with the terrorist group, and he breaks up with her.
Cue five years of bumming around in idyllic Jamaica, until a major international incident lures him back into the game. Parties unknown, but strongly suspected to be Spectre, have stolen an advanced, weaponised technology called Heracles that can kill anyone whose DNA is entered into it – and also anyone who comes into close contact with that person. There’s talk of quarantines and impossible antidotes, and suddenly, it all becomes clear why Barbara Broccoli and co were so keen not to release this film as originally planned, in the first month of a global viral pandemic…
No Time To Die easily fits everything you’d want from a Bond film into its sprawling 163 minutes, to the extent that you wonder if director Cary Joji Fukunaga had a sort of cinematic shopping list with him on set. There are, of course, the de rigeur cars and exotic locations (Jamaica to please the Ian Fleming traditionalists, plus Norway, Italy and the Faroe Islands standing in for eastern Russia). There’s a literal island lair for the villain, Rami Malek’s poisoner Safin, and lots of convenient close-ups of Bond’s Omega. There’s a henchman who looks like a one-eyed Marco Verratti. Et cetera.
More than that, though, the long runtime means Fukunaga gets to give his wide supporting cast more than the usual two or three minutes that they might each otherwise have been accorded in a blockbuster. Lashana Lynch’s Nomi, the arch MI6 agent who has replaced Bond as 007, is used wonderfully as a foil to the grumpy, Paxman-like Bond (watch any scene where Bond talks to Q followed by an episode of University Challenge and you’ll see what I mean). There’s some excellent back-and-forth between the two Type A double-oh agents that will be a shame to lose in the next film with Craig’s departure. Normie CIA hack Felix Leiter is back, too, visiting Bond in Jamaica accompanied by a shit-eating flunky who turns out to be more important than he looks, and Moneypenny, Q, M and the rest of them are knocking about, too.
Safin is a more elusive presence, but his two introductions – the first in that snowy flashback we all saw in the trailer, and later as he visits a grown Madeleine Swann in her office – both make for deeply chilling scenes. Like Blofeld, Safin is disfigured so as to obey that classic rule of blockbusters that inner ugliness has to show on the outside, too; last year, Malek told GQ, “I met Daniel for the first time with that make-up on, and he took a step back from me.” Having seen his character fully revealed, we can hardly blame Craig.
Tonally, there are some moments that don’t quite jive. No Time To Die features a gas attack on a black-tie event that is oddly free of tension, as well as a brief chase that functions more as a Range Rover advert than a sequence loaded with any true peril. Elsewhere, Fukanaga leans heavily into the comedy side of Bond (not a problem in itself, of course) and cheesy Russian accents abound. Entirely disarmingly, Hugh Dennis – as in, from Mock The Week – pops up as one half of a double act of government scientists alongside Industry’s Priyanga Burford. And about midway through the film, Ana de Armas steals an entire crazy sequence in Cuba as an ingenue CIA agent named Paloma (“I’ve done three weeks’ training!” she tells Bond, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed) who takes Bond to the world’s most 12A orgy. Later, when she takes down three heavies soundtracked by a salsa-inflected version of the Bond theme, you can’t help but wonder where the James Bond who used to drown people in bathroom sinks has gone.
But ultimately, that’s all window dressing. No Time To Die knows to play to its strongest point, which is Bond and Swann’s relationship, and it does this best when it looks back at the beginning of all Bond’s neuroses: his betrayal by Vesper Lynd way back in 2006’s Casino Royale.
Craig has spoken about No Time To Die bringing his time as Bond full circle, and “wrapping things up”, and he wasn’t exaggerating. Fifteen years after Casino Royale came out, No Time To Die is the closest to a thematic sequel we’ve got to Casino. At almost every stage of the film, Bond has to question whether he can trust Swann, and it’s no coincidence that No Time To Die’s inciting incident takes place moments after he has burned Vesper’s note asking him to “Forgive me” beside her mausoleum. Swann’s own personal history is deeply tangled up with Safin’s, and the unspoken question hanging over the film is whether she will end up like Vesper (or indeed like Bond’s only canonical wife, Tracy Di Vincenzo of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service). At one point Bond, glum after ending things with Swann, tells Leiter: “I stopped trusting pretty faces a long time ago, Felix.”
From then on, the throwbacks keep coming thick and fast. When Bond has to save a major character from drowning, there’s an eerie similarity to that moment where he tried to – and couldn’t – save Vesper from her suicide in 2006. Throughout the film, characters including Nomi remark that it’s not in Bond’s nature to be able to trust someone – that he’s a killer, and nothing else. It all plays to the psychological traumas laid down in Craig’s first outing. You might have to have seen Spectre to understand the plot of No Time To Die, but you have to have seen Casino Royale – and ideally remember it, at least broadly – to understand this film’s emotional heart.
And so fans might have been waiting six years to see this film, a year and a half of that unplanned, but in a sense, they’ve been waiting a full 15. The effect is to give No Time To Die not just the emotional heft that it can drum up in two and a half hours (though that’s not inconsiderable), but also to really drive home how this is the end of a decade-and-a-half long project, the culmination of Daniel Craig’s utter reinvention of James Bond as a deeply troubled man with a fraught personal history. It works; bluntly, it’s extremely rare for a film of this scale to be this affecting. It’s not hard to imagine a tear or two was shed, even among the stony-hearted film press corps, in the darkened cinema as No Time To Die’s credits rolled.
Oh, and about that ending: there are two major, major twists that it would be unfair to reveal here. Without giving anything away, it pretty definitively wraps up Craig’s time as Bond, and has massive, massive implications for James Bond lore forever. Let’s leave it at that, shall we?
No Time To Die is released on 30 September.
Daniel Craig: ‘This is my last Bond movie. I’ve kept my mouth shut before and regretted it’