by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Daniel Craig, Rami Malek, Lea Seydoux, Ana de Armas, Lashana Lynch, Ben Whishaw
Intro:
It may lack vitality in the action scenes, but it still delivers on everything that makes the Daniel Craig era worth celebrating.
Much like when fellow British legacy character The Doctor changes actors, the passing of the torch from one James Bond to whatever comes next is a certified event in terms of popular culture. And for an actor who has been the Bond of the 21st century, the final outing for Daniel Craig has a lot riding on it. In all the ways that truly matter, this is the right send-off for the man who has been 007 for a whole new generation.
Starting with the script, each writer is pulling from their specialised skill sets and doing so in highly satisfying fashion. Long-time Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade learnt from their mistakes with Spectre and have fashioned a story that suitably caps off a lot of the themes and character arcs that they’ve been playing with for the last decade and a half. There’s also Phoebe Waller-Bridge of Fleabag fame, who brings a solid combination of genuine drama and heart and the right dashes of one-liner humour to keep things interesting without devolving into self-parody. That, and some of the best Bond girls yet, with Léa Seydoux bringing the heart, Lashana Lynch bringing the cool, and Ana de Armas bringing back that winning chemistry that helped make Knives Out such a delight.
And then there’s writer/director Cary Joji Fukunaga, the first American to helm a Bond production, and for someone eerily suited to telling the stories of traumatised children (Beasts of No Nation, along with his writing contributions to It: Chapter One), he ends up being an ideal fit for a narrative all about how the sins of the past irrevocably affect future generations.
Revenge, as a whole, has been a regular staple of this series, and as refracted through Rami Malek as the new villain, it unearths moral ambiguity about what it means to have a license to kill.
As for the main farewell, it thankfully sticks to the best aspect of this incarnation of Bond (the vulnerability of the character) to highlight what has made this era of the franchise so engaging, occasional missteps notwithstanding. It has a real Logan sense of finality to it, but again with the generational themes in mind, it celebrates the character and the actor’s contribution by showing that while Craig may be leaving, there will always be a 007.
No Time to Die serves as a fitting and stirring conclusion to this era of the gentleman spy, aiming a golden gun right at the audience’s feel centres. It may lack vitality in the action scenes, but it still delivers on everything that makes the Daniel Craig era worth celebrating.
