No Time to Die

No Time to Die (2021) is a James Bond movie directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and starring Daniel Craig.  Since Bond dies in this film, the picture may be the last in the series that began in 1961 with From Russia With Love and so has endured for sixty years,  (A final title ominously promises, however, that "James Bond will return.")  The movie is grandiose and mostly dull.  It runs for 163 minutes and has a needlessly complicated plot involving two sets of unrelated villains, spans the globe from Norway to Cuba, as well as Jamaica, London, Italy and, of course, the Faroe Islands (a location used whenever a remote craggy island-fortress is part of the mise-en-scene.)  Daniel Craig playing Bond overacts in a steely, stoic sort of way.  The film's innovation is that the sentimental and romantic James Bond seems the softest and most yielding character among the vicious criminals and apparatchiks who comprise the rest of the cast.  Bond is loving, forgiving, morose over the losses in his life, easily beguiled and tricked, and a good father to boot.  Everyone else is considerably harder and more nihilistically violent.  Of course, no one pays to see James Bond emote; his forte is enduring torture and inventing quips to taunt bad guys that he is about to kill.  He's also supposed to be a great lover and Don Juan, although there's no evidence of that aspect of his character in this picture -- the women are all the aggressors and Bond remains relatively chaste.  The movie is nonsense although it's not as egregiously improbable as many big-budget action pictures and it features five set-pieces of spectacularly conceived and concentrated violence.  The movie is about these operatic massacres and everything else is just filler.

Early in the film, Bond goes to visit a former lover's mausoleum in an excessively gorgeous Italian hill-town.  The grave has been booby-trapped.  (I can't recall if the bomb is set by Ernst Blofeld, the all-purpose villain who appears in no less than seven of the Bond pictures spanning the whole 60 year series -- he's so famous that he's been endlessly imitated and parodied, or the explosive planted, perhaps, by the principal bad guy in this film, Lutysifer Safir played by Rami Malek in a stupefied performance that suggests that he's been sedated with Quaaludes.)  After the explosion, Bond has to flee on motorcycle from a dozen or so pursuing motorcyclists and limousines full of men with machine guns.  At one point, a convenient metal cable allows him to escape a deadly trap on a bridge blocked on both sides by bad guys spraying bullets at him -- he leaps off the bridge holding the cable (which of course would have shredded his hands) and swings to the comparative safety of some equally convenient ledge or terrace below the ancient stone span.  The chase continues with the villains attacking Bond's bullet-proof car with a thousand rounds of AK-47 fire before the hero engages his own machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades (and a smoke machine as well) to liquidate the attackers.  (For some reason, the thousand rounds fired at Bond's bullet-proof Aston Martin don't hit the rubber tires and so he can speed away unscathed despite the eight-minute fusillade.)  In the second set piece, ostensibly occurring in Cuba, Bond dressed in a tuxedo attends an orgy sponsored by SPECTRE, an international criminal cartel, and supervised by Blofeld's "bionic eye" -- the eye appears on a silver tray, spouting nonsense somehow (do eyes have mouths?), held over the black-tie orgy by several sinister butlers.  Blofeld, for inscrutable reasons, kills everyone in SPECTRE, the scoundrels all conveniently convened for the orgy, and an evil bio-engineer is kidnapped by the CIA.  (Of course, whenever the CIA appear, the audience knows that our spooks are also in cahoots with the bad guys.) There's another rooftop chase with lots of firepower on display, collapsing scaffolds, big explosions and the like.  It's hard to figure out who is killing whom because all the SPECTRE agents have been wiped-out by some sort of contagious nano-bot -- that is, some kind of artificial pestilence a bit like the COVID virus that the Chinese apparently manufactured in their lab in Wuhan and released on the unsuspecting world.  The virus is DNA-targeted, no collateral damage here, but unfortunately once you are contaminated, you are like Rappacini's daughter, poisonous forever to anyone you touch or love.  Later, there's a third big sequence involving the CIA agent and the irresponsible bio-engineer, a Russian, of course.  The ship goes to the bottom of the sea with James Bond and one of his best friends (who has been shot and fatally wounded).  Bond is a good swimmer and, of course, escapes, now aggrieved by his buddy's death and seeking revenge.  Later, Bond ends up in Norway with his girlfriend, who may be a double-agent, and his daughter, a  homely little urchin with a droopy face and startlingly blue eyes (just like her pa).  Bond and his little family get chased by about a hundred men in jeeps, motorcycles, and  helicopters.  He manages to kill almost all of the bad guys and lures the remainder into a forest that has become suddenly very, very misty.  In the woods, Bond finds another metal cable and hooks it around trees to make merry with bad guys on motorcycles -- there are lots of useful metal-stranded cables lying around in this movie.  Unfortunately while Bond is off murdering bad guys, the chief villain (the picturesquely named Luysifer Safir) snatches his girlfriend and daughter and spirits them off to an island fortress where the mad man is planning "to kill millions" with the nano-bot plague.  (Ultimately, it's less lethal than COVID which delayed the opening of this film and has also killed millions -- so the bad guy's contagion, in  fact, took place in reality and there was no James Bond to save us from its dire effects.)  Bond with a lady 007 -- he's been in retirement and she has replaced him and assumed his numbered "license to kill' --  infiltrates the villain's concrete and heavily fortified laboratory.  Bond and the Luytsifer confront one another and engage in "haranguing" of the sort that is featured in super-hero movies -- the two men lecture each other about fate, destiny, power and dominion.  Then, there's more slaughter.  This sequence is like one of the John Wick movies featuring tough-guy Keanu Reeves -- hundreds of armed bad guys ineffectually throw grenades and fire their machine guns while Bond, carrying a handgun, slaughters them by the dozens.  Ultimately, Bond realizes that he has to save the world and so he calls in an airstrike on himself and ends up dead.  His girlfriend and child survive with the tough as nails lady 007 -- they watch the island blowing up from a safe distance.  The point seems to be that Bond is now superfluous -- the world is full of horrible stuff far beyond the imagining of the relative sedate, if sadistic, Ian Fleming.  Women have taken over -- the female 007 is more fearsome than her predecessor and the lady agent in Cuba, who kills about a hundred bad guys while wearing a backless (and almost front-less) evening gown and high heels is a lot more brutish and effective as a murder-machine than old James Bond.  (In  once scene, he characterizes himself as "an old wreck.")  It's time for him to retire both literally and figuratively and so the shower of missiles in which he dies comes as a kind of relief.  

The movie glances at all the elements from previous movies that have pleased audiences for my entire life.  Bond has a vodka martini "shaken not stirred," there is the obligatory extended opening sequence with spectacular effects after the first few seconds in which we see Bond appear in a sort of spiral camera shutter and fire a shot right at the camera.  Bond jousts with M, played here by Ralph Fiennes and Ms, Moneypenny is still hanging around the M16 HQ.   An owly nerd contrives special weapons for Bond's use in the final attack on the villain's citadel (although it's not really clear how any of this stuff works).  Billie Eilish croons a sultry opening ballad over a surrealistic title-sequence featuring giant fragments of classical statuary strewn across a weird cartoon desert.  There are some playful homages to earlier Bond movies and the action set pieces are reasonably effective -- although I'm bothered by the bullet-proof tires, the over-use of convenient steel cables, and the fact that the mist that fills the Norwegian wood fades away immediately as soon as the last bad guy is eliminated so  that the director can provide us with some narrative information to set up the next scenes.  As I have noted, the final attack on the hyper-modern concrete laboratory with its mighty silos and prestressed cement walls channels similar ultra-violent battles in stairwells and corridors featuring Keanu Reeves as John Wick (scenes derived ultimately from John Woo's operatic gun fights in his early Hong Kong thrillers.)  Blofeld appears in this movie as a descendent of Hannibal Lecter, a mad man in a glass cage like a latter-day Eichmann spouting weird insinuations.  (Blofeld probably inspired Lecter and so the circle is closed in this film.) The four of the five set pieces all involve Bond escaping armies of thugs reminding us that Bond is really more the victim than the aggressor throughout most of the film.  The final half-hour battle in the biolab fortress makes no sense and involves such bizarre elements as men in red biohazard suits standing motionlessly in  an acid-bath swimming pool.  The pool is lit by stanchions of bright light and the henchmen look like people looking for a lost contact lens.  The movie is handsomely shot, although not as clearly as I would have liked -- it features all sorts of Spielberg-style lighting, halos and clouds of amber light against which figures are silhouetted, dark bluish voids, and elaborate if stark sets against which the figures loom like flattened cardboard cut-outs; to my taste, many shots are underlit and too atmospheric -- sea shores and forests are draped in implausibly dense fog.  The exotic locations are shot from picture-postcard vantages.  There's a Hans Zimmer score and Louis Armstrong has been recruited from the army of the shades to sing the final ballad.  The movie is crisply edited but it's way too long.  And there's a garden variety assassin wearing a bland porcelain-white Kabuki mask. (He gets drilled with about nine bullets in one scene and, then, somehow comes back to life.)  The theme from Hawthorne's "Rappacini's Daughter" as to a person becoming the bearer of some kind herbal poison (this is the subject of one Luytsifer's monologues) is central to the movie -- Bond become the bearer of a poison that renders him literally untouchable.  Ruefully, one realizes I think, that this theme may have a broader meaning -- what sort of cultural poison did sixty years of James Bond inject into our society, even, our world?  I would like to recommend this picture to you as well-crafted escapist fare.  But the movie is too long and I don't think you should waste almost three hours of your life with this picture.