Bond faces his most challenging adversary yet: the burden of continuity
This is a Bond Voyage review, so it’s classified as CONTAINS SPOILERS. Proceed with caution if you haven’t seen the movie. It’s probably fair to say we’d been expecting Mr Bond for much longer than anyone had planned and so, weighed down by those sharpened expectations and a surfeit of continuity, No Time To Die at long last arrived in cinemas.
Finally living the dream, albeit in surly fashion, James Bond (Daniel Craig) is enjoying his retirement in Jamaica when an impromptu visit from old friend Felix Leiter draws him back into a deadly game which will see him reunited with his lost love Madeline Swan (Léa Seydoux), his arch-nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) and his replacement, Nomi (Lashana Lynch). But someone is pulling the strings of the puppeteers: lurking in the shadows of the past is a new threat, not only to Bond but to the entire world.
For those who feared the trailers had given away most of the film, there is immediate reassurance as it becomes clear that most of the trailer footage comes from the pre-credits sequence – and what a pre-credits sequence it is! Opening more akin to a Scandi Noir or even a horror movie, not for the first time in the Craig era the pre-titles sequence feels more like the end of another movie, not the beginning of a new one. It’s a retroactive crowbarring-in of more continuity; another dose of narrative Viagra to try once again to make the entire five-movie cycle stand up instead of flopping limply to the side. It’s all thrilling enough, I suppose, but there’s never a moment where you can’t see the filmmakers moving things around to get everyone where they need to be once Billie Eilish has finished her mumbling lamentations and No Time To Die can start properly.
For better or worse, this is still very much a Daniel Craig Bond movie so of course, the motivations are going to have to be personal – only this time they’re awkwardly and unconvincingly paired with a more orthodox world-threatening supervillain scheme which never comes close to being convincingly, or even clearly, articulated. If nothing else, No Time To Die epitomises Daniel Craig’s time as Bond, packing all the triumphs and follies of his era in one expansive and indulgent (almost every scene feels a beat or two too long) final romp around the world. It’s packed with characters and call-backs to his previous films yet despite its voluminous run time (two hours and forty-three minutes ), it still doesn’t seem to have time to do any of the new additions justice. Lashana Lynch gets a promising debut only to fade into the background and become just another Bond girl flunky, culminating in a cringe-inducingly pointless and underwhelming moment when she nobly requests that Bond be reallocated the number of 007 – which might have had some weight had there been even a moment when the number appeared to mean anything at all to this most cynical and world-weary of Bonds. Anna de Armas’ Paloma likewise explodes onto the scene in spectacularly energetic style but jarringly departs the movie almost as soon as she arrives – perhaps for fear her energy and vibrancy would overshadow the po-faced regulars for the remainder of the movie.
For a film called No Time To Die, it sure manages to rack up the corpse count as faces both new and familiar fall by the wayside in order to clear Bond’s path to his apparent yet cruelly underdeveloped and under-foreshadowed nemesis, the ludicrously monikered (even by Bond standards) Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek). He’s the fulcrum upon which the movie’s successful first half turns into a muddled and disjointed second half as it asks us to swallow the concept that, like some kind of terrorist Matryoshka, looming above and around every supposed ultimate evil mastermind Daniel Craig’s Bond has dealt with there was actually another, eviler, more masterly mind. Above Le Chiffre was Quantum, above Quantum was SPECTRE and above SPECTRE is Safin. It’s a cavalier attitude to global villainy that continually diminishes the threat, much the same way as Bond picking up and discarding gadget-laden cars like Ubers cheapens their impact (even if the 1964 Aston Martin boasts impact-resistant glass Elon Musk can only dream of).
No Time To Die exemplifies the identity crisis which gave rise to and continued to dog the Daniel Craig era of Bond movies. As the likes of Tom Cruise and Vin Diesel stole Bond’s crowd-pleasing action-adventure crown, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson turned to the more grounded and gritty style of the Bourne films for inspiration, proving they didn’t quite have Cubby’s knack for spotting what the coming thing would be and, instead, putting the franchise on the back foot in the cinematic action stakes. As they drifted away from the action blockbuster model of old, the series started to flirt with the idea of becoming a prestige picture, and gradually came to believe their own hype. Increasingly polished production values and aesthetic approaches started to take over from the signature stunts and potent mix of action, glamour and humour which had been the hallmark of the series. With Casino Royale it tried for something of a clean break but may have broken more than intended in wiping the slate clean. If No Time To Die teaches us anything, it hammers home the lesson that continuity has been an unalloyed curse for the Bond movies and whatever era the films move into now needs to leave it behind in favour of the previous model of ‘film and forget’. Occasional nods to the past can be, and have been, fun but carrying them from film to film – especially when there was clearly no overarching strategic narrative has proved crippling to both character and creators.
The extemporisational approach to storytelling permeates down through the film-by-film level to the individual films themselves and No Time To Die is as chimeric as it comes. While its beginning feels a little like a reprise of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and the middle feels like leftovers from SPECTRE, its end goes right back to the source (in a much more subtle way than, say, setting some early scenes at Ian Fleming’s real-life house Goldeneye) by plundering Fleming’s final Bond novel “The Man With The Golden Gun”. But while a return to the source is a welcome development, its application is sadly superficial and largely superfluous to the story at hand. More could have been made of it – and its connection to Bond’s ultimate fate – instead of providing window dressing to the location where Bond contracts a tailor-made STD and decides to accept his ultimate and deeply uncharacteristic fate.

Actually, that’s very unfair. There is perhaps nothing as on-brand for Daniel Craig’s Bond – a character that’s been determined to quit being a 00 since he first pulled the trigger of a Walther PPK – than being confronted with seemingly insurmountable odds and deciding to give up and die. For me, though, that very failure to take a scenario where the odds are against him and the situation is grim and not somehow find a way to thwart certain death, kill the bad guy and get the girl is a betrayal of the most fundamental aspects of the character.
Of course, if you squint a little – and turn a blind eye to era and actor – you could put forward an argument that every previous Bond film takes place in between Craig’s Casino Royale and No Time To Die, giving us an unevenly portrayed end to end view of a secret agent’s career. Of course, the counterpoint to this theory is the wildly variable competency of said agent, which always takes a noticeable dive when Daniel Craig’s in the hot seat, in service of a Quixotic quest for deconstructed vulnerability the character really didn’t need.
Seeing No Time To Die in a busy cinema though, even under the morose and all-encompassing pall of Covid restrictions, reminds you that it’s enduringly a film franchise with an almost uniquely multigenerational appeal, despite its ongoing identity crisis. Sixty years of audience goodwill can take you only so far though, and while I and many audience members stayed in our seats to the very end of the movie just to get the never more needed reassurance that “James Bond Will Return”, the fatal finality of the end of No Time To Die raises the burning question: just how will James Bond return from this? I can only hope that they avoid the obvious and very of-the-pop-culture-moment temptation to double-down on its own burdensome continuity and explicitly explain why the name James Bond has belonged to so many different people down through the years. As it moves into another new era, the only thing Bond needs a licence to kill is the spectre of his own continuity.


