No Time to Die Review: Daniel Craig’s James Bond Gets a Sentimental Send-Off

James Bond, retire? Blimey, no. Yet the libidinous British secret agent played by Daniel Craig, in his final go-round in the iconic role, still gives post-employment life a try in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s pandemic-deferred No Time to Die. Bond’s entrance is itself delayed in the film’s prolonged opening teaser sequence, a good portion of which details the backstory for Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux). She’s the grave-looking gal with the Proustian name who won the spy’s heart in Sam Mendes’s Spectre, then drove off with Bond in his beloved Aston Martin toward a life of domesticated, non-globe-hopping bliss.

That was the plan, anyway. It turns out that the lady has quite the checkered past, with a heretofore undisclosed connection to a vengeful psychotic named Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), who killed Swann’s mother many years before but spared the young girl’s life. This secret now jeopardizes the older Swann’s romantic idyll with Bond, who has his own baggage to contend with in the opening sequence as he visits the grave of Vesper Lynd, his doomed inamorata from Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale. It just so happens that there’s a bomb in the mausoleum, and one eardrum-traumatizing explosion later, Bond is on the run from a group of gun-toting adversaries and fully convinced of Swann’s treachery.

By the time Billie Eilish finally warbles the title song, we’re 20-plus minutes into what’s officially the longest Bond film to date. And this bloated blockbuster, with its personality-free direction by Fukunaga, unfortunately makes you feel every one of its 163 minutes. Nearly half the runtime is given over to Bond as a rogue agent, teaming up with his C.I.A. contact, Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), to catch a Russian scientist, Valdo Obruchev (David Dencik), who was working secretly for MI-6 on a nanobot bioweapon that can be targeted to a person’s DNA. In the wrong hands, it’s a tool of potentially genocidal destruction.

If that sounds like the formula for a ripping 007 adventure, then you haven’t been keeping up with the increasingly convoluted storytelling of the post-Casino Royale Bond flicks, where even the fleetest action scenes are freighted with ponderous portent. This didn’t much matter in the most recent entries, Skyfall and Spectre. Any heaviness was counterbalanced by truly exalting moments of visual and aural poetry, such as the silhouetted hand-to-hand combat scene in front of a neon skyscraper in Skyfall, or Spectre’s massive “Day of the Dead” opening set piece, where much of the action was captured in fluid single takes. (The dream-big efforts of Roger Deakins and Hoyte van Hoytema, respectively, far exceed the more prosaic, first-person-shooter approach of No Time to Die cinematographer Linus Sandgren.) And there was still plenty of room in those other Bonds for some sublime goofiness, such as the giddy moment in Spectre when our martini-imbibing protagonist’s archnemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), pompously opines, “It’s me James. The author of all your pain.”

Blofeld returns here in an extended cameo that falls horribly flat. But then, none of the rogues in No Time to Die have the monomaniacal magnetism of the best Bond villains. As Safin, Malek is all scarred-visage makeup and foreign-accented lisp; it’s as if he’s doing his Freddie Mercury impression from Bohemian Rhapsody by way of Joaquin Phoenix’s depressive Joker. Dencik’s duplicitous scientist, meanwhile, unfortunately recalls Alan Cumming’s campy turncoat from GoldenEye, and a henchman nicknamed Cyclops (Dali Benssalah), because of his eerie mechanical eye, never attains the indelible presence of an Oddjob or a Jaws.

The good guys fare somewhat better, as they’re given space for character development, such as it is. We get to see Ben Whishaw’s adorkable quartermaster Q puttering around in his kitchen, prepping for a date that he cancels because saving the world “isn’t a nine-to-five job.” Eternally loyal secretary Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) returns for some pleasurable banter, and a new agent, Lashana Lynch’s Nomi, bickers with Bond about his neanderthal tactics while proving her own mettle as a double-O for the modern age. And Craig’s Knives Out co-star Ana de Armas pops up for some secondary shoot-‘em-up action in a Cuba-set aside that, with its affectedly witty repartee, bears the clear imprint of co-screenwriter Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

There’s a fun moment in the film in which Ralph Fiennes’s M sits stoically in a portrait gallery of his predecessors, allowing for oil-painted appearances from Judi Dench and Bernard Lee. This scene, however, highlights one of the major problems with No Time to Die. The film’s big emotional beats are all fan-servicey callbacks, most egregiously in the use of “We Have All the Time in the World,” the Louis Armstrong-crooned number from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service that underscored perhaps the most devastating moment in the entire series.

There’s a similar narrative-upending climax in No Time to Die, and Craig is certainly up to the challenge of unearthing the bleeding heart of his bruiser Bond, which is still one of the most memorable cinematic portrayals of the character. Yet in the harsh light of this distended closing chapter to Craig’s run as 007, his character’s overall arc from modishly merciless killing machine to aging assassin with the familial feels comes off as a treacly sop to psychological complexity. Bond is best when the simpler, more savage pleasures prevail.