I wrote in my Casino Royale (1967) review that it was the only Bond movie I had not seen before starting the review blitz, which is both true and not true. I had actually begun this whole adventure years ago but life got in the way and, for one reason or another, I had to put the project of reviewing every James Bond movie on the back burner for a while. So, by the time I restarted the review blitz and had the time and motivation to make it through the entire James Bond franchise, a newer James Bond film had come out that I hadn’t seen.

No Time to Die is much fresher in my mind than the Casino Royale spoof. In fact, I finished watching all the other Bond movies again, writing up all my James Bond movie reviews, and writing a few more articles that are still yet to be published before I finally saw Daniel Craig’s last movie. Part of that has to do with how streaming has made it much more accessible to see new movies, and I was willing to wait to see it on whatever service would show it. Since I was not interested in buying another Bond Blu-ray if it was as bad as Spectre, I was more than willing to wait it out for the rest of the year before I finally saw it. Now that I have seen it, well…

I cannot say that I’m surprised. I can say, however, that I will not be adding it to my collection. With the previous two entries starting a strong downward spiral of quality in James Bond movies due to a blatant dislike of the character and a disregard as to why people liked James Bond in the first place, it was unlikely that the final film in the Daniel Craig era would avert course. Unfortunately for me, it not only stayed on its current course, it doubled down in some specific ways. In addition, it adopted yet more tropes of modern filmmaking to make it just as forgettable as every other movie designed to subvert expectations and destroy its attached legacy that has come out in the last decade. Despite using the words “hate,” “loathe,” and “despise” to describe this movie while I was watching it, it took me several hours the following morning to remember that I had even watched No Time to Die. I’m not sure if it’s because the film is forgettable or if it’s because my brain was trying to wipe it from my mind as a repressed traumatic memory.

Spoilers ahead as I will be covering the majority of the plot in this review, but also, who cares? This movie sucks.

Pros

Acting from some of the cast is good
Exotic locales
Music is good
Well-shot
Some cool stunts

Cons

More denigration of the character of Bond to the point of literal and figurative assassination and replacement
Retreading old ideas from the same era
Bond is dumb, again, and now his friends are too
The villains are either boring or irrelevant
Ruins good material from previous films
Same old theme we’ve seen involving fathers and daughters lately
Contrivances abound
Rewriting characters and their motivations
Visual effects do not look good
It’s more than two and a half hours long! WHY?!

Plot & Thoughts

The movie begins with a flashback to a young girl living in a quiet home on the edge of a frozen lake. This girl is Madeline from the previous movie, Spectre, and we’re witnessing the story she told Bond on the train about how she doesn’t like guns—except a lot of details don’t line up with the story, but don’t think about that. She gives her lush of a mother some wine for lunch before an assassin shows up on their doorstep wearing a mask. He wastes no time killing her mother on the couch. Young Madeleine then shoots him multiple times with a gun, but he just shrugs those shots off because what are bullets, anyway? She then escapes onto the lake, but falls through the ice and nearly drowns before we jump into the present day.

James Bond (Daniel Craig) is living out his days with his new love (again), Madeleine (Lea Seydoux), having left active service (again). However, as he visits the conveniently nearby grave of Vesper (because he just cannot get over her), he’s ambushed and immediately assumes that Madeleine has betrayed him for some reason. This causes a rift between them because the movie demands it and they manage to escape the assassins before he sends her on her way via train, never to see her again (but not really). She holds her belly for a split second before the door closes—telegraphing the thing that has to happen in every movie after Logan came out in which our favorite heroes become unwitting dads who are only capable of having daughters unless their movie demands they have sniveling asshat sons likes Kylo Ren in Star Wars. With their romance destroyed and Bond having nothing better to do in his retirement than continue to not get over Vesper by himself, the opening credits finally begin about 25 minutes into the film.

Five years later, a scientist named Valdo Obruchev (David Dencik) is kidnapped by S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Obruchev does a little bit of double-crossing in the process, unbeknownst to his kidnappers, and sets things up for events to occur later. The important thing to know about him is that he has developed a special bio-weapon containing nanobots that infect people like a virus upon physical contact and are coded to a person’s DNA. This means it can spread throughout the entire world but only affect and kill specific individuals—a very similar disease idea was the backstory to the Sapienza mission in the HITMAN game from 2016, but I cannot confirm if that was an inspiration in any way. Having given up on grieving in Europe for the girl he met fifteen years ago and dated for a week, Bond has retired to Jamaica to continue grieving for Vesper there. Coincidentally, Bond’s CIA buddy, Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), is in Jamaica too. He attempts to enlist Bond in investigating a S.P.E.C.T.R.E. gathering that is happening conveniently close by in Cuba and in finding Obruchev. Since Bond is busy doing absolutely nothing else meaningful in his life, he declines—he needs more time to not get over his dead girlfriend whom he barely knew, after all. Then, coincidentally, he runs into an MI6 agent operating in the area named Nomi (Lashana Lynch), who happens to have been assigned his double-o number since he retired. She conveniently informs him the virus is somehow related to MI6 and M (Ralph Fiennes), even though she would have no reason to disclose that info to a retired agent she does not know and for whom she has a slight disdain. For some reason, this information motivates Bond to join Felix and his partner, Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen), who is so obviously a henchman of the villain, it’s stunning how dumb Leiter and Bond are not to notice it.

After a few action scenes and a bit of infiltration, Bond crashes the S.P.E.C.T.R.E. meeting. Despite all the smoke and mirrors, Bond’s presence is not a surprise to the members of the organization. It looks like he’s walked into a trap when, suddenly, a twist occurs. Obruchev, who seemed like he worked for S.P.E.C.T.R.E. during the kidnapping sequence, betrays the organization during the moment in which Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) intended for Bond to be killed by the virus in front of everyone at the meeting. Watching on a camera from his cell, he sees something very different play out. The virus has been programmed only to affect S.P.E.C.T.R.E. members. This means that Obruchev was able to get the DNA of all these people who are part of a SUPER SECRET ORGANIZATION THAT OPERATES WORLDWIDE UNDER ANONYMITY and program his virus to kill them. Maybe who he’s really working for is just so much better and smarter than everyone in S.P.E.C.T.R.E.—including the mastermind who apparently was responsible for all the other Daniel Craig Bond plots, Blofeld—and he just has access to this information, somehow. Also, because this has to be a serious movie with serious consequences, as well as another bummer Bond film in which he loses a friend, Felix Leiter is killed and Logan Ash escapes with Obruchev after betraying them.

Does this sound stupid so far? If you ignore the contrivances, conveniences, and people behaving out of character, you might be able to find something redeemable. Too bad all those other not-so-little issues that are signs of lazy and incompetent writing get in the way. It doesn’t stop with the death of Leiter either. We got some more stupid, arbitrary nonsense to come with Madeleine’s reappearance in the film.

Madeleine has gone back to being a psychotherapist (somewhere). She is then approached by Lyutisfer Safin (Rami Malek)—is his name supposed to resemble Lucifer Satan? Safin is a terrorist with a vendetta against S.P.E.C.T.R.E. and reveals himself to be the assassin from the flashback at the beginning of the movie. He’s the big bad of the film and he coerces Madeleine to infect herself with the nanobot virus to kill Blofeld because she’s (somehow) been in contact with him since his imprisonment and she’s been appointed as his doctor (by someone). How convenient that the woman who would probably want to be as far away from Blofeld as possible, having been kidnapped and nearly killed by him, happens to be assigned as his therapist. I do not know how Madeleine got her job back or for whom she works, the movie doesn’t say. I don’t know who would be dumb enough to assign her as the therapist to the guy who tried to kill her, the movie doesn’t say. Do you know why the movie doesn’t say any of this? Because the writers needed her to come into contact with Bond again for the movie to happen and couldn’t think of a better reason.

Bond and she touch during the interrogation with Blofeld, infecting Bond with the virus. Bond then unwittingly passes it on to Blofeld in a fit of rage after Blofeld reveals that he was the one responsible for the Vesper grave incident at the beginning of the movie. That was somehow supposed to make Bond distrust Madeleine but, again, no details are given as to why Bond would justifiably think that. Blofeld dies from the virus and, unfortunately, the movie does not just suddenly end. Instead, Bond decides that he should go after Madeleine for answers about who’s responsible for the virus. He tracks her to her childhood home in Norway where it’s revealed she has a daughter. The daughter is Bond’s, because of course she is, but Madeleine insists otherwise.

The introduction of Bond’s daughter is clunky and raises a few questions about the transition between scenes. Did Madeleine just quit her job in London from having to interact with Bond and Blofeld on the same day? Was her daughter with her in London or does she just fly back and forth on a daily basis? Why wait to reveal the daughter until the characters are in a completely different country?

The daughter’s introduction marks the halfway mark of No Time to Die, which is supposed to be a big pivot point with such a revelation that Bond is now a dad. Yet, the plot and characters do not progress much after this point. Did I mention this movie is nearly three hours long? With Blofeld and S.P.E.C.T.R.E. eliminated as threats, and with the new plot device to use as leverage against Bond established, the movie finally starts to focus on its primary villain…eighty minutes into the movie, which means it’s time to talk about Safin.

Safin wants Madeleine and Bond’s spawn to be his family because his previous family was killed by S.P.E.C.T.R.E. If he can’t have them, he’ll kill them and Bond to tie up his loose ends. He is also using a missile base to mass-produce his virus to kill millions of people for…reasons. The end.

Is there supposed to be more to Safin as a character? Because I didn’t see anything that made him interesting, or cool, or dynamic, or memorable. He’s barely in the movie and, as far as I’m concerned, Safin is a loser. It’s not entirely Rami Malek’s fault, as he tries to give him personality and menace, slightly overacting in the process. Safin is just a lame villain who is entirely forgettable, especially in comparison to other villains that came before him. There’s no real charisma or presence to him and I do not see the point in having him replace Blofeld other than as a weak method of making him seem worse in some way by killing Blofeld and surprising the audience that Blofeld is not the main villain. It’s the same logic as trying to up the stakes in Star Wars by giving a Death Star cannon to individual ships—somehow, that’s supposed to make me more concerned when it just sounds dumb.

The worst characters in this movie are not the villains, however. They are 007. The plural in that sentence is intentional as it applies to both Bond and Nomi. I don’t have an issue with Lashana Lynch as an actor—though Hollywood really seems to want to make her an action star for some reason. Take away the fact that she shares James Bond’s number, there’s nothing about Nomi that is memorable or interesting in the movie. I would have forgotten she was in it if not for the main problem I have with what Nomi is and what she represents. Since Skyfall, the filmmakers have been putting down and insulting James Bond, attempting to tear down the character as much as possible by calling him outdated or making him a mentally deficient secret agent. Now, they’ve finally done what they wanted to do this whole time and replaced him with none other than a black woman. What better replacement could there be for the heroic male icon that has existed for more than half a century? I could give the film credit that she actually says something along the lines that “she could never replace him,” but that just feels like a line thrown in at the last minute for damage control, as though they hadn’t already done everything they could to make Bond replaceable. It’s not like Daniel Craig’s Bond doesn’t practically roll out the red carpet for her to replace him by doing things that are out of character to ensure it.

Don’t get me wrong, Craig’s Bond in this film is still an action star and the character does fantastical stunts that fit with what we expect the super secret agent to accomplish. In terms of action, he’s no slouch. However, there are specific events in the film that I can point to in which he acts out of character, especially in the last act. The moment that most stands out to me as something that epitomizes the disdain the writers have for James Bond is when they use the leverage of their little blonde plot device to justify an act that James Bond would never do. In a scene in which he’s trying to protect his daughter from Safin, he gets down on his knees and grovels. No. Simply, no. Bond would not beg, he would find a way to eliminate the threat by whatever means he could. Begging is not something Bond does, regardless of the situation and who might be at risk. This is partially because Bond is supposed to be a man who is tougher than most men and capable of getting out of impossible situations due to his determination and strength. It’s also because Bond interacts with sociopaths and psychopaths on a regular basis during his missions. Why would begging work this time? I wouldn’t believe it and nor would he.

Bond’s behavior does not get any more consistent by the movie’s finale, either. When he has the opportunity to escape death from the incoming missiles the British government has fired upon Safin’s island to destroy the silos containing the virus—instead of doing what all the other Bonds would do, like jumping off the island with the slim chance of surviving the improbable—he just stands there and watches the bombs drop. That’s right. James Bond dies in No Time to Die as an empty shell of the character. Despite the movie’s attempt to justify his actions, he doesn’t die a heroic death. He gives up.

I’m glad I waited to watch this movie until I had written all the other reviews because this would have infected and tainted my opinion of some of the other James Bond movies—especially Daniel Craig’s. One of the reasons I disliked Skyfall was its disrespect for the character of Bond, which was then made worse in Spectre by having him act out of character. This movie, however, just kills him, figuratively and literally at the behest of the filmmakers who hate Bond and what he represents. Bond is a pathetic cuck in No Time to Die who is easily manipulated and evokes barely any of the good qualities of the masculine hero he once was.

I guess it’s no surprise that one of the writing credits happens to go to Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She’s partially responsible for destroying James Bond on paper while also assisting in the destruction of Indiana Jones on screen in Indiana Jones & The Dial of Destiny. You go, girl! What popular characters are you going to assassinate next? Lara Croft? To be fair to her, there are several other writers responsible for this travesty and she was brought into the production relatively late. It’s likely that she’s the one responsible for all the jokes I didn’t laugh at. There are a lot of moments in the movie where it tries to add a little levity and cleverness through humor, but it just throws off the tone rather than improves the scene. I wasn’t in the writers’ room to accurately attribute blame, though, so who can say?

I can, however, certainly blame the writers for all the contrivances and the retreading of ideas from previous films. For starters, why can Bond not get over Vesper, already? He knew her for a week and she died after betraying him. Then, he got even with the people who killed her, but that didn’t bring any closure, apparently. And now, she has a grave he needs to visit while he is retired with Madeleine? He wasn’t married to her, like Tracy from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, with whom he spent far more time. How convenient, by the way, that Bond and Madeleine are staying close to Vesper’s grave. How convenient for it to explode and give Bond enough brain damage to just assume that Madeleine betrayed him. How convenient that Madeleine is just made Blofeld’s psychotherapist even though no mental health organization or spy agency would assign her to that role if it was aware of the history between the two. How convenient MI6 and the CIA are operating in Jamaica at the same time to give Bond information necessary to motivate him to stop moping in retirement and help with a mission. How convenient that Bond agrees to help Felix and the CIA with the mission simply because he’s mad at M for funding the virus project. At the time of writing this, IMDB’s synopsis of No Time to Die says “Bond is furious at M for some reason…” Even the people trying to track the events of the film for IMDB don’t understand what’s going on or why! So much of what happens in this movie needs to be described with the phrase “for some reason” because it’s all such arbitrary bullsh*t. “For some reason” should have been the tagline for this piece of garbage it’s so poorly put together.

As I watched, I just sat there asking “Why?” in my head regarding the various choices that were made in telling the story. Some I can assume the answers to, while other questions remain a mystery to me.

Why have Bond resign from MI6 for the third time in Daniel Craig’s run?
- To be able to replace him with a black woman and give her the number 007
  - Why do this?
    - Because the filmmakers hate James Bond and his fans
Why can’t Bond let Vesper go?
- Because it was the last time there was a romantic relationship in a Bond movie that was compelling and they don’t know how to write romance
- Remember how good Casino Royale was? ‘Member?
Why have Bond think Madeleine has anything to do with the attack at Vesper’s grave despite everything they’ve already been through?
- To make him break up with her so she can come back in the movie five years later with his daughter
Why make Bond have a daughter?
- Because they’re doing this with all the other legacy heroes and it seemed to work for movies like Logan
- So they have a plot device to leverage against Bond and make him behave the way the filmmakers want men to behave
Why kill Blofeld?
- To build up the new villain quickly and without any effort.
- Because Blofeld was so botched in Spectre as a villain they needed someone who could be threatening
Why kill Bond?
- Because they hate James Bond, his fans, and everything he represents

What this movie ultimately does is attack and try its hardest to ruin James Bond, both as a character and as a franchise. It certainly manages to taint all the films of the Daniel Craig era. If you disagree let me point out a few things. Daniel Craig’s entire Bond stint involves S.P.E.C.T.R.E in some way. Casino Royale introduces the shady organization with hints. Quantum of Solace builds up the group more with some intrigue and espionage, which is actually where that movie shines. Spectre tries to tie all of Craig’s movies together—including Skyfall—as part of a master plan, which is dumb, but it still at least makes sense in terms of trying to build up the power of this secret organization and the influence they have over the entire world, even if it misses the mark. Then, No Time to Die introduces a lame and forgettable villain who quickly kills Blofeld and essentially destroys S.P.E.C.T.R.E. with his nanobot virus. It doesn’t matter if only a few members died in that one scene or if all of them did. The virus is capable of spreading everywhere after that scene and it’s only a matter of time before any remaining members are wiped out. This diminishes S.P.E.C.T.R.E. and Blofeld to the point they are just disposable jokes. And they’re wiped out in the first half of the movie! James Bond’s nemesis and the secret group he chased FOR YEARS are all just undone swiftly and without any fanfare. It’s another sign the people making this movie have no respect for the James Bond franchise.

If you still disagree, I have another example of how this movie manages to undo good moments from previous films, and it does this from the very beginning. As described at the top of the review, the flashback scene is the memory that Madeleine referred to when she explained why she didn’t like guns in Spectre. I mentioned it in my Spectre review as a moment I liked because it wasn’t explicit in its description, being concise enough not to share too many details. So, of course, we have to ruin the ambiguity of the story and add those details while also changing things because the details that were shared are no longer true with this flashback.

In Spectre, Madeleine says she was playing when the assassin showed up, but that doesn’t happen in No Time to Die. She is reluctant about having to use a gun in Spectre, suggesting she was traumatized during an event in which she used one, and the way she tells the story infers that she killed someone with a gun. In No Time to Die, however, she doesn’t kill Safin, the assassin. Madeleine also didn’t mention that her mom was killed in front of her that day as part of her story, which is a detail you would expect someone to include if they’re talking about a traumatic event. You would also expect that the trauma she developed that caused her to hate guns would be because she killed a man and the process of taking a life affected her, not that she shot a guy without killing him and then fell in a frozen lake. You’d expect her to be afraid of the water after that, not guns. Funny enough, the flashback scene ends with an editing cut of Madeleine swimming as an adult. This flashback is unnecessary and ruins one of the few good moments from Spectre for the sake of trying to tie Safin to her in some way. Aside from this particular scene, there’s nothing about them that is related and it doesn’t do anything to build him up as anything other than a guy who can shrug off several bullets to his upper body and shoot a drunk woman on her couch.

I’m going to step outside the movie for a second here and get a little meta before wrapping things up. If it isn’t clear, I’m a fan of James Bond. I don’t think I would have gone through the process of watching every movie in the franchise up to this point and writing reviews about them if I wasn’t a fan. I haven’t read all the books, but I’ve enjoyed what I have read, even with all of Ian Fleming’s “quirks” in his writing style that would be extremely unacceptable by today’s standards. There aren’t many things that I consider myself a fan of anymore. So when there’s a bad movie in a franchise I like, I have more to say about it, and when it’s a movie that goes so far as to insult and destroy a beloved character I still care about, I get more than just a little irritated. By the time The Last Jedi came out and spat in the face of Star Wars fans, I had already become apathetic towards the franchise, so the assassination of Luke Skywalker didn’t upset me as much as others. But I’m still a fan of Bond, so No Time to Die really angered me. I’ve seen plenty of other beloved franchises get attacked and decimated over the past few years, and I knew Bond wasn’t safe from the same treatment. It wasn’t until I had the perspective of someone who has seen these stories destroyed by hack writers who hate the heroes of old that I finally understood the real reason why I was so disappointed by Skyfall. With that perspective, it makes everything that happens in No Time to Die that much clearer.

Halfway through my process of writing up all these reviews, rumors started swirling about who would be the next James Bond. I already scoffed at the prospect because I didn’t have faith the people chosen to write the next Bond adventure would be capable of writing James Bond. What little faith I had has been destroyed after watching this last film. If Amazon/MGM wants to make a successful James Bond film, they cannot allow the people who share the viewpoints of those involved in No Time to Die to be responsible for telling the story because they either don’t understand or hate the character. Bond movies are supposed to be fun action and espionage stories about an extremely talented spy thwarting evil organizations and saving the day. That’s it. James Bond is a man men want to be and women want to be with. If you want to make him bi-sexual, that’s fine because I still believe James Bond would be willing to screw anyone attractive enough or important enough to be worth his time. If you consider that he slept with a woman working for an organization that was willing to kill hundreds of millions for “King and country” in Thunderball and still managed to maintain an erection with the genocidal maniac, I’m fairly certain Bond would be able to perform just as well sleeping with a man if it meant saving the world. Regardless of who he slept with, James Bond would never be the “bottom.”

Simply put, James Bond is a masculine icon. He’s a brave hero. He kicks ass despite his flaws like alcoholism, ego, and constant libido. He could even be a father and it could still work because he would fight for his family, not grovel or beg. What we’re more likely to get in the next film, if it’s written by the same types of morons as those who wrote No Time to Die, is a story in which James Bond is a fat beta male in a fedora who can never get laid because the girls get turned off when he asks for consent and he makes sure that all of the female badasses around him succeed as he applauds from the sidelines screaming, “Yass, queen!” Would that be a movie you’d want to watch? Does that sound like a fun and successful James Bond movie to you? I can’t wait to see how much money it loses.

TL;DR

Looking back on this film and the James Bond film franchise as a whole, including the unofficial movies, No Time to Die is at the bottom of the barrel. I wasn’t expecting much, having heard plenty of details surrounding this movie beforehand, including how it ended, but I didn’t expect to dislike it as much as I do. It’s actually difficult for me to decide if this or Casino Royale from 1967 is worse, and which I would prefer to watch because, as far as I’m concerned, neither movie has James Bond in it. The latest three films have done their best to attack and break down the character to the point of being unrecognizable because they’ve been made by spiteful egotists who hate James Bond and hate the people who like him. Skyfall disappointed me. Spectre frustrated me. No Time to Die disgusted me. F*ck this movie.

Hair of the Dog Drinking Game Rule

If you’re a fan of James Bond who enjoyed the movies prior to the Craig era, I find it unlikely you will find much to enjoy about No Time to Die and how it treats Bond. So, it could be very easy for me to just make the rule to drink whenever the movie does something to insult or diminish something about the Bond franchise. However, I know people who actually enjoyed No Time to Die and they are entitled to their opinion. So, let’s make a rule that everyone can play along with.

There are a number of “jokes” in this movie’s script. I don’t think I laughed once during my viewing, but I still recognized the moments at which a joke was made. Laugh or don’t, but drink responsibly.