No Time To Die is an action drama, the latest in the Bond franchise, the last to feature Daniel Craig as 007. After the events of Spectre Bond retires with Madeleine(Léa Seydoux) but the two become estranged after an ambush. Flash forward five years Bond is alone in the Caribbean and is brought back into the fold when a secret diabolical weapon is hijacked by a mysterious and scarred villain, Lyutsifer(Rami Malik).
Craig is a compelling Bond but his tenure has overstayed it's welcome. In this installment they fumbling attempt to inject some pathos but comes across as melodrama. There is little action, which Craig is always competent with, because so much time is taken sewing up and concluding mostly irrelevant plot threads from Craig's tenure in the franchise. Seydoux and Craig don't have great chemistry and she's mostly phoning it in as she doesn't have much to do on the page. Malik throws himself into the mustache twirling Bond villain mold but the character, backstory, and context are muddled and boring. Ana de Armas shows up as a CIA agent for a brief sequence in Cuba and she's a standout, as she seems to actually be having fun and her character isn't weighed down by ponderous backstory. Lashana Lynch as Nomi a new 00 agent is well cast but she's given virtually nothing to do.
Visually slick but in some ways woefully lacking personality in its kind of generic Hollywood globe trotting sheen, the production is solid but unfortunately the script is very much not. Craig's Bond differentiated itself but its darkness, its focus on action, his Bond more solider/assassin than spy which was pretty effective depending on which of his first three Bond movies you look at but starting with Spectre and continuing with No Time To Die they have drifted away from that attempting to inject some character dimension, emotional complexity, and humor and are roundly unsuccessful. Not to say they can't evolve the character but they didn't do it successfully. The jokes fall completely flat, the "emotional" moments are ineffective because the situations are either overly dramatic or have no stakes rendering it all moot. Craig's tenure began with a focus on "realism" but has since evolved into the same over-the-top world-ending preposterous for which the franchise is known, which is fine, but, the self-serious tone set by Craig's Bond doesn't mesh with that. If you're going to have a preposterously scarred mincing villain who is attempting to cull the world's population with genetically programed nanites there needs to be some awareness that tonally there should be some levity, that that premise is kind of silly.
Plodding, bloated, generic, and all around flat.
Currently in theaters, coming soon to VOD.
Don't See It.
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