Movie Review: No Time To Die (2021)

[Dave Gray]

No Time To Die (2021)

Premise: A retired MI-6 agent works with former contacts in the CIA to track down a scientist that has created a bioweapon, and secrets from his past get entangled.

Rating: Great, but controversial and a product of attempting to serialize a episodic story with mixed results.

This is a big one.  Bond never really made sense, from a standard continuity standpoint.  The same guy wasn't running around for 50 years, in different eras of technology.  It never rebooted.  It seemed to reference things from his past, but then discard them when convenient.  Actors changed, not only in the main, but in the supporting roles.  It was never really nailed down.  And the stories were mostly stand-alone.

With Casino Royale, it was a Bond reboot or sorts, acting as "Batman Begins" -- it was a post-Austin-Powers world, where the jokes and gadgets and winks were toned down or subverted.  Quantum of Solace was filmed without a script, during a writer's strike and was the odd man out.  Skyfall was fantastic, but again, continuity was confusing -- it seemed to be part of this reboot, but with callbacks to his old cars and gadgets and it delved a lot into Bond's history.  And then Spectre, for better or worse sought to tie all of these films together, seemingly after the fact.  It had mixed results and there was not good chemistry between Bond and his leading lady, but again -- really delved a lot into James' past with Blofeld.

And now, No Time To Die acts as a "The Dark Knight Returns" to the Daniel Craig era of Bond.  You kind of have to let continuity go.  Though the direct story is standalone, the fingerprints of the previous characters is all over this.  The death of Vesper is front and center, Blofeld, James' love interest from Spectre, as well as Felix (the CIA agent from Casino Royale).  It's all set to come together here to wrap up one big story.  And while that is cool, and I would argue, works well -- this wasn't really set up by the previous movies.  I'm cool with the choice and I think it was a good one, BUT what it means is that the shortcomings of Spectre (specifically the strange love story) and the lack of foresight from the first few movies hamper this story.  There's a lot of weight No Time To Die has to carry in order to tie all this stuff together, which means an enormous runtime of 2 hours and 40 minutes.

We also have to ask ourselves how we can have Bond in the future.  You can't really have a man out there slapping women, sleeping with women just to kill them, etc.  It just doesn't play, so how can you do it?  This movie tries and is successful in that the Bond girls aren't just there for his sexual taking -- they play with the formula.  In fact, they play with the formula in a lot of ways.  The pre-credits isn't some big action setpiece to start, though it gets there -- and I'd argue that the pacing of that initial scene is as creepy and effective as anything before.  The entire first half of this movie had me thinking that this was going to be my favorite Bond movie ever.  The setup is superb.

The Bond girls (specifically Ana De Armas) are used differently than in the past and are excellent additions. 

And then, the movie gets bogged by its story, which is ok by me.  It takes risks and does big things with the character and a bunch of other characters, as well.  This will make some people mad because it's complicated to go back to pretend this stuff never happened and fundamentally changes what James Bond IS or WILL BE.

The villains plot doesn't really make sense to me or is overly complicated, but that's par for the course for these super-villains.

I'm a Bond fan and I enjoyed this send-off of Daniel Craig.  It does make you wonder how to continue.  I don't know if you can keep making gritty, alcoholic, damaged Bond movies -- I'm not sure you can make womanizing Bond movies -- and I'm not sure you can make cheeky, one-liner movies either.  I just don't know where to go with it.  Do you treat it like Batman, where you reboot the character and give a different 5-film vision every 10 years?  Do you make stand-alone movies that don't require continuity with anything that came before?  I'm excited to see where it's headed.