No Time to Die (2021)

Official trailer

No Time to Die is the final entry in Daniel Craig’s James Bond tenure and among the most divisive Bond films in the franchise’s sixty-year history.

Cary Joji Fukunaga directed. Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Fukunaga, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote. Craig returns as Bond in his fifth and final appearance. Léa Seydoux returns as Madeleine Swann. Rami Malek plays Lyutsifer Safin. Lashana Lynch plays Nomi, the new 007. Ana de Armas plays Paloma, a Cuban CIA agent.

The plot involves a nanotechnology weapon called Project Heracles, Bond’s return from retirement, the revelation that he’s fathered a child with Madeleine, and his choice to remain on the island to die instead of infecting his family.

This film pulls me in two directions. Parts of it look terrific, and Craig still commands every room he walks into, but the script spends its last hour dismantling the character the whole series was built on. A 5 is where those two things cancel each other out.

The film made approximately seven hundred and seventy-four million dollars worldwide on a two hundred and fifty million dollar budget. The pandemic affected theatrical performance. The film was a commercial success below earlier Craig-era Bond returns. The reviews were mixed.

The ending divided the audience permanently. The decision to kill James Bond is the most-discussed franchise decision in decades and the central reason the film appears on the Woke Disasters list.

What Made It a Woke Disaster

The script commits to three structural choices that read together as the franchise pivoting to the late-2010s replacement narrative. The first is Nomi taking the 007 codename. Bond has retired. MI6 has reassigned his number to a younger Black woman who’s positioned as his successor. The film stages multiple sequences in which Bond and Nomi compete and Nomi proves equal to or better than Bond. The framing is that Bond was always replaceable and the institution has now replaced him.

The second is Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s writing pass. The producers hired Waller-Bridge to “modernize” Bond for the post-#MeToo era. The result is a script that systematically depowers the Bond character. The script treats the womanizing as past-tense regret. A love story with one woman across two films replaces the casual sex. The script dials back the dangerous-male-charm engine of the franchise. Bond’s interactions with women are softened, apologetic, and respectful in ways the 1962-2008 Bond wouldn’t have recognized.

The Bond the franchise had built is incompatible with the moral structure the film is operating in.

I don’t need Bond to be a cad in every scene, but a Bond who spends the film apologizing for being Bond is a strange thing to buy a ticket for, and it’s the film’s worst mistake. I think the writers mistook sanding off his edges for growing him up.

The third is the death itself. James Bond dies in his final scene. The film presents the character as definitively dead. The franchise will continue with new casting. The decision is the most-debated creative choice in modern Bond history. The defense is that the Craig era was always treated as a self-contained continuity.

The criticism is that James Bond is a franchise character whose survival is a structural assumption of the property, and that killing him in a Craig-era film doesn’t technically end the property but does establish a precedent that future productions will have to handle. The death is the film’s permanent argument that Bond as the franchise had known him is over.

The death itself leaves me cold, and I think that’s the film’s real failure. Killing Bond should have been devastating. Instead it plays like a thesis statement, and the finale keeps me more aware of the argument than of the man.

The Nomi Problem

Lashana Lynch’s Nomi arrives as the new 007. Bond has retired. MI6 has reassigned the codename. The script establishes Nomi as a competent successor.

The character then spends most of the film as Bond’s support instead of as her own protagonist. The structural decision to introduce her as the new 007 and then sideline her in favor of Bond’s return is one of the film’s central inconsistencies.

The script doesn’t commit to either approach. If Nomi is the new 007, she should carry her own arc. If Bond is the lead, the 007-replacement plot is decorative instead of real. The film tries to position Nomi as a passing-of-the-torch character while also keeping Bond as the actual lead. The two functions aren’t fully compatible. The result is a Nomi character who’s underused and a Bond return that’s undercut by the suggestion that he’d already been replaced.

Lashana Lynch deserved better than this. I’d have either given Nomi her own mission or cut the 007 business entirely, because as it stands she’s a headline the script never bothers to write the story for.

Ana de Armas

The Paloma sequence in Havana is the film’s most successful individual passage. Ana de Armas plays the Cuban CIA agent with specific charisma that raises every scene she’s in. The sequence runs about twenty minutes. The audience could have watched another two hours of Paloma. The character is then gone for the rest of the film. The decision to introduce a performance this strong and dispose of the character so quickly is one of the script’s clearest structural choices that didn’t pay off.

The Paloma material is one of the strongest Bond Girl sequences in decades. The character is competent and funny, and her relationship to Bond doesn’t define her. Paloma flirts with Bond, makes a joke about her short CIA training, then performs at his level through the action sequence. The character is the film’s clearest evidence that the production knew what a strong Bond film could feel like.

That the production then put Paloma down at the airport and moved to the Safin plot is the film’s clearest evidence of its priorities. Losing Paloma is where the film loses me for good. Ana de Armas walks off with twenty minutes of the picture, and I’d have traded a big chunk of Safin’s plot for more of her without blinking.

Is No Time to Die worth watching?

5/10. I admire the Matera pre-credits and the Paloma sequence, and I’d rewatch both on their own. The rest is a Bond film arguing with its own hero, sidelining its new 007 and ending on a death the franchise will be stuck with. That’s why it’s dead center at 5: the craft is there, and the choices around it keep dragging it down. Watch it if you’re following the Craig-era continuity. As a standalone Bond film, it sits well behind Casino Royale and Skyfall.

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