“No Time To Die” (dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2021)
The name of the game here is spoilers. Bond spoilers. You have been warned.
The general critical reaction to Daniel Craig’s last Bond movie has been remarkably positive. Sure, it’s eleven hours long, or thereabouts. OK: the theme song is lame. Alright, the throughline plot is bonkers, the dialogue often risible (‘Q, I want you to hack Blofeld’s bionic eye!’) and the set-pieces hit and miss. But some of it works! The opening motorised chase-fight in a hilltop Italian town is very well done, and I liked the motorised chase-fight through a misty Norwegian wood halfway through. Then again, quite a lot of it doesn’t really work, actually. Bond’s meeting with Christoph Walz’s Blofeld aims at a ‘Clarice Starling meeting Hannibal Lecter’ intensity (not the first time the franchise has swung at that target actually) which it does not deliver. Bond escapes a sinking boat by opening a hatch and bobbing around in an inflatable life-raft for a while. Meh. Q has only twenty minutes to decode the villain’s encrypted data before the world ends, no, wait, before his new boyfriend comes round for a little light supper. Meh. Goons are gunned down both hither and thither in prodigious numbers, to a degree that diminishes the film’s returns in every department except the nagging voice inside your head that says, this is so heartless it approaches the psychotic. But, licence to kill, I guess. The plot calls for a double-cross but the film is too sentimentally attached to Felix Lighter, to M, Q, Moneypenny and Tanner (Tanner? since when did he become a major franchise character?) for any of them to be the double-crosser. So the script shoehorns in a CIA suit-and-tie Felix sidekick who might as well be wearing a T-Shirt that says ME, I’M GOING TO DOUBLE-CROSS YOU, IT’S ME in his first scene.
It’s a handsomely mounted movie of course, and the players are class acts: Craig’s Bond is perhaps the best there has been. Léa Seydoux is fine, if a bit wet. And I liked the way the film handles its diversity of gender and race, managing to be normalising on both fronts without ever trying to imply that the franchise hasn’t had huge problems in those areas for most of its existence.
Then again, Rami Malik’s performance didn’t land, for me. He strains every pip to project sinister-evilosity as blotch-faced ubervillain Lucifer Safin — the most overdetermined villain name since Nogbad the Bad — whilst remaining solidly unsinister and unintimidating throughout. I feel for Malik, actually: a talented actor who is given nothing very much to do here but seethe and monologue and limp about. The ‘poison garden’ on his supervillain island lair is a bizarre misfire: scriptwriters locked in a room and told they won’t be getting their cocaine back until they come-up with something suitably world-scale doomy, slapping the table and yelling at one another, wide-eyed, ‘you know what’s really scary? Flowers, that’s what! FLOWERS!’
Malik’s supervillain island lair also contains long paddling-pools filled with acid or somesuch, above which are positioned precarious walkways. This enables this $300-million dollar movie elaborately to reenact that game you used to play as a kid where you could step on things left on the carpet, but the carpet itself was lava that would kill you if you touched it with so much as a toe. Exciting!
Or not. Overall I thought the final shoot-and-run scene on the supervillain island lair overextended and saggy, although I concede that the surprise ending, Bond’s death, caught me on the hop. Right up until the last minute I figured the film was going to do a Dark Knight Rises eucatastrophe thing, with some ingenious last-minute reprieve. But no: the movie follows-through on its tragic denou., a dramatic moment whose effectiveness is only slightly undercut by the viewer’s realisation that this is why the film has spent so much time on Léa Seydoux’s 5 year old child. Bond dies but something of him survives, in the form of his young daughter. Sappy, but OK.
Earlier in the movie there’s big Cuba-set gunfight that takes place during a jamboree in which all the Spectre baddies in the world have assembled so that Blofeld’s bionic eye can initiate the film’s main plot-conceit: a DNA-targeted nanobot swarm that kills only preprogrammed folk and leaves everyone else alive. Ah, but the rival supervillain, Lucifer, has managed to switch the programming! So the nanobot swarm kills off the whole of Spectre and leaves everyone else, including Bond himself, alive! I mean, I say that. It doesn’t kill off the Spectre henchmen, which necessitates a prolonged shoot-out as Bond, Nomi (the new 007, played by Lashana Lynch) and Ana de Armas’s CIA agent Paloma go all John Wick on the hundreds and hundreds of gun-toting goons left over. Was that the Luciferian plan all along? Kill off the Spectre senior staff but leave all their gun-toting goons alive? How was that supposed to work? Not so much eliminating Spectre, as freeing-up promotion opportunities in the organisation for junior staff, perhaps.
The nanobots business bothered me, if I’m honest. On the one hand, it’s obviously just an evil mcguffin, a don’t-look-too-closely plot enabler. We might even want (I mean, I’m not sure how much actual weight this iced-over pond of an argument will support, but) we might want to praise it as an intriguing way of talking about our current Covid-y plague days. So the nanobots are targeted to whichever database your villain prefers, just as Covid disproportionately kills the elderly, or certain ethnic groups. At one point the scientist junior-villain tells the new 007 that he could easily programme the nanobots to kill off all people of West African descent. It’s not clear, in terms of the story, why he says this, unless it is just to give Lashana Lyncha a cast-iron reason to throw him over the gangway into the acid bath below. But we get it: these nanobots are evil. Lucifer’s plan is visualised via a global map upon which millions of red dots spring up, across all the continents, to indicate which people he is going to murder. How has he selected these folk? We’re not told. Redheads maybe. Left-handers. Brexit voters. I don’t know.
How do these nanobots work exactly? They come in tiny little vials, so if they’re killing millions then presumably they replicate inside our bodies like viruses or bacteria. From where do they get the metal to generate new nanobots? Where do they get the energy? It is not explained. But wait, there’s more: once you get even so much as one of these microscopic buggers on you (by for instance, touching the skin of your ex-girlfriend with your fingertip) it enters your insides and can never again be removed. ‘What’s that?’ you ask. ‘Can’t they be purged, filtered, deactivated somehow?’ Nope! We are told several time, by Q wearing a THIS IS A CHEKHOV’S GUN MOMENT, ALRIGHT? T-shirt, that the nanobots are absolutely uneradicable, permanent, once they get inside you, you’re stuck with them forever. No way to get rid of them!
Why? Read the T-shirt, people. Just before the movie ends Lucifer infects Bond with a specific nanobot that means if he ever so much as comes near Léa Seydoux’s Madelaine, or their daughter, both will die. Oh no! Doomed never again to embrace the woman he loves! It’s a resonant twist this, and does do something interesting with the larger (broad-brush, but still effective) characterisation of Bond himself. He starts the Craig mini-series of movies as a stand-offish, emotionally repressed bloke who slowly thaws, allows-in first Eva Green’s ‘Moped Lynd’ and then Léa Seydoux’s Proustcake. But, ironically, this final twist seals him away from the woman he loves! They could perhaps have made more of this, instead of hurrying straight from this to Bond’s death. Nothing more to live for, you see! It’s Romeo and Juliet, if Romeo and Juliet were in their 50s and 30s respectively, and Juliet had lived, and Romeo had been offered the chance to facetime and whatsapp Juliet instead of actually touching her, and had decided: nah, I think I’ll take the poison instead.
[I had a “do you expect me to TikTok?” “no Mr Bond I expect you to die!” joke prepped for this paragraph, but in the end I decided to drop it.]
And so we get to this final piece of dialogue:
BOND: Q — those Royal Navy frigates that are patrolling the sea between Japan and Russia, for some reason — tell them to launch their missiles to blow-up the island! It’s the only way!
Q: The missiles will take nine minutes to arrive. Shouldn’t we launch them when you are off the island?
BOND: No! Now!
Q: You could take a boat to that nearby island where Nomi is, and we could launch them then?
BOND: Now!
Q: y tho?
BOND: Just do it!
Q: I mean, those two supervillain boats are coming, remember? To collect the genocidal cargo? They’re 20 minutes away. You’ll recall I told you that a few moments ago? Shouldn’t we time it so the missiles blow them up as well!
BOND: NOW!
Q: Well alright then. If you’re sure nine minutes give you time to get off the island …?
BOND: Just B and Q it, you bastard
Q: … and time for all the minimum wage chemical workers Safin has employed to get away too?
BOND: fire! missiles! splode!
… and so the missiles land, and Bond disappears in a blaze of fire, and presumably the billions of nanobots being cultivated in the island’s acid baths and stored in the vast racks of glass phials are scattered to the four winds, to drift, like a scene from Shute’s On The Beach, over Japan and Russia and, given the nature of the atmosphere, further afield too, killing billions and causing apocalypse. The film doesn’t show us that bit, but it’s pretty strongly implied.
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***
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Hmm. Looking back over this, I’m struck both that I felt moved to write at such length, and that I seemed to have talked myself into a much more negative reaction to this movie than was my actual in-cinema experience. I did enjoy it! Honestly! The eleven hours running time hurried by, it did all the things I expect a Bond movie to do and one or two new things too. Why so negative? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? Maybe it’s the way this one movie has been presented, in the press, as the one thing standing between cinema and its total post-Covid collapse. Perhaps I am reacting against that, and the inflation of a jolly pastime into something more than it needs to be. Ah well.
