This review contains mild spoilers for No Time to Die.
No Time to Die is the most cursed movie in some time. Shot in 2019, it was rushed to meet an April release date last year before being punted back twice due to a plague and finally dropped into cinemas eighteen months behind schedule. Meant to end Daniel Craig’s era as James Bond on an epic high note, the film spares no expense, from its massive action scenes to a runtime almost on par with Interstellar. But after all this time and chaos it proves to be a film not worth the wait.
The movie plays as a hard sequel to Spectre, Craig’s previous and least loved entry (give or take a Quantum of Solace), to the point of its entire plot hinging on your investment in that film’s cast. Starting with a continuing feud between Bond and his stepbrother Blofeld, it turns into a family drama when Madeleine Swann, Bond’s girlfriend from the last movie, gets dragged into both his scheme and that of a new supervillain played by Rami Malek.
Lyutsifer Safin (God help us), who Malek plays in an utterly confident performance ranging from slightly annoying to downright unbearable, is a preening drama queen bent on mass murder because… I’m not sure, really, but I’ll get to that later.
He wants revenge on Swann because of their new backstories for this film, and the film is attempting a “cycles of revenge” theme that never quite comes through.
The story does not work at a fundamental level, because it’s impossible to care about the relationships it’s meant to turn on. Making your movie a sequel to a film no-one liked is one thing, but centring it on a character no-one liked (Waltz’s Blofeld) and one no-one remembers (Swann) makes every moment meant to tug at your emotions fall flat. And the film does try to tug them. There are so many moments meant to be loaded with pathos and empathy that go nowhere because we don’t care about the people they happen to.
Then there’s the elephant in the room. Rumours have circulated for the last eighteen months that this film got pushed back because Safin’s plan was to release a deadly virus, and that’s not actually true. At least not now. Knowing the film’s history and the current climate makes it really obvious this film was shot as a killer virus movie and later reworked into something else.
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Safin’s men steal a deadly infectious agent from a bioweapons lab which kills people it’s specifically targeted at, covering them in boils as they die. It’s every programmable virus from every sci-fi movie, show and game that’s ever touched the concept (Metal Gear Solid’s FOXDIE came to mind), but as Q tells us in a cheap exposition scene in a small room it’s not that at all.
No, it’s nanobots, something no-one mentions at any other point in the film.
In fact the agent is never specifically described at any other time, making me think they cut or dubbed every mention of “virus” later on. This would certainly explain why Safin’s big villain speech completely fails to explain who he plans to kill with it or why, leaving his evil scheme a total mystery.
No Time to Die is not Craig’s worst film, or even his second. It often looks very nice, there are some genuinely suspenseful and shocking moments, the actors — Malek notwithstanding — do as well with the material as they reasonably could, and the action scenes aren’t bad even if they only occasionally carry the story.
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But this is not a compelling movie, and its mediocre (at best) drama makes you feel every minute of its 163 minute runtime. No matter how pretty you make it you can’t build a castle on a foundation of sand.
