NO TIME TO DIE ( 2021) Bond movie review

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Star - Daniel Craig My Rating *** Genre – Action Run Time – 2 hr 28 Minutes. Certificate – 12a Country – U.K Awards – 1 Nomination = = = = = = = = = = = = = Just as Tenet saved cinema last year at the heart of the pandemic as people nervously ventured out masked up to at least put some cash in the multiplex coffers the Bond movie has been released at a time to rev up audiences some more and try and get us get us back to a near normal. It’s done good money in its first month of release and its huge budget of $300 million dollars ($80 million of that its marketing campaign) has clawed back $420 million so far. That’s well down on where it needs to be at this point as a Bond movie but beggars cant be choosers in this crisis. Bond films are like no other, a 27 film franchise and counting and you can only really judge them against each other as a critic. There’s never really a good or bad Bond movie in truth. They are like fast food. You know what you like, you know your favorite toppings and you expect them to be in it. You are not looking for anything new when you watch Bond and you just want beautiful women, cool action scenes, sexy locations and corny dialogue doing battle with the indestructible British agent, comfort cinema at its finest. Well 007 is back and he is doing all of those things once again. But in this politically correct world he is a dinosaur, in and outside of the movies, and change is coming fast. There have been calls for the new Bond to be a woman as Craig retires from the role this year, the franchise first ever female 00 agent in No Time to Die, and she is black. But the purest simply won’t accept a female being the next Bond as the role was always written for an Englishman. You wouldn’t cast Gerard Butler as Lara Croft! We have female super agents, Angelina Jolie in Salt great fun. In fact most action movies have a strong emancipated action hero in there somewhere, Star Wars the best example with Daisy Ridley. Cinema is not meant to reflect reality sometimes and I'm pretty sure most women want Bond to stay male so they can drawl over him. ===Cast=== Daniel Craigas James Bond Ana de Armas as Paloma Rami Malek as Lyutsifer Safin Léa Seydoux as Madeleine Lashana Lynch as Nomi Ralph Fiennes as M Ben Whishaw as Q Naomie Harris as Moneypenny Rory Kinnear as Tanner Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter Billy Magnussen as Logan Ash Christoph Waltz as Blofeld David Dencik as Valdo Obruchev ===Plot=== A masked assassin, Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), visits a woman and her child in a big isolated house on a snowy lakeside. The woman is unable to provide the whereabouts of her husband, his target, or defend herself as the little girl hides under the bed. We flash forward two decades and the young girl all grown up, the beautiful Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), the current squeeze of 007, Bond (Daniel Craig) oblivious to that past in his latest romance. They are staying in a rustic Italian village, Bond there to visit the grave of Vesper Lynd. It’s a painful moment in more ways than one, the pair soon being chased by sophisticated killers, tearing up the villaggio, a narrow escape. But Bond wants to know how Spectre found him there, suspecting Swann, the pair parting ways at the station, Bond full of suspicion and regret. Five years later, MI6 scientist Valdo Obruchev (David Dencik) is kidnapped from an off the grid secret London MI6 laboratory. With the approval of M (Ralph Fiennes), Obruchev and his team had developed Project Heracles, a powerful weapon there. Bond has retired to Jamaica, where he is contacted by CIA agent Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) alongside fellow agent Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen) to freelance with them in finding Obruchev, filling him out on the details of the new weapon and the fact someone bad has stolen it. Bond declines and returns to his martini but quickly intercepted by sexy/powerful Nomi (Lashana Lynch), an MI6 agent and his successor as 007. Bond agrees to help Leiter, over Nomi's warnings not to interfere as they soon all end up in Cuba in pursuit of Spectre as the body count rises. But with Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) locked up in the super secure prison then who is running the Spectre show and are there now new world domination players on the block? ===Results=== So, after your wallet is emptied for your multiplex confectionary and your eardrums are assaulted with 30 minutes of adverts and trailers, prepare for a bum numbing 162 minute movie, the longest Bond ever, beating Spectre into second by 15 minutes. The film is reassuringly Bond, the cheesy super villain, stunning locations, cliché womanizing by the older man with the younger women and clunky corny dialogue a plenty to go with, the later a surprise as hot young female writer Phoebe Waller – Bridge was bought into to beef up the script from an emancipated female perspective, the move away from the misogynist Bond and more towards a more feminist franchise because someone somewhere seems to think that’s what we all want. Disappointingly there are moments in the movie where you throw up your hands and say really? Did that just happen? Did he really say that…? It’s buffed up cheesy 1970s Bond when it comes down to it, as good as alpha male Daniel Craig has been in trying to pull away from that with a more visceral Bond. The super spy pretty much had to when Jason Bourne exploded on the scene. Macho change is happening in the franchise, none more so than the ending here, literally, visually and physically, out with the old and in with the new, an unexpected emotional jolt for older Bond fans in the final scenes. It’s the first James Bond movie to feature all the characters of Q, Felix Leiter, Miss Moneypenny, and M since License to Kill (1989) but missing that Roger Moore comedy tongue-in-cheek texture or that Connery charm. It doesn’t take itself too seriously but that Bond magic thinned out somehow; perhaps because it’s trying to tick too many boxes for its increasingly target world-wide cosmopolitan audience the modern blockbuster has to go after to make its money and some. Illiterate Indian kids are watching this in shack cinemas in the slums and they don’t want it too complicated as far as subtitles and plot go. There wish is granted. At times it feels like it was written with those subtitles in mind as the actors constantly explain the plot to you if you can’t keep up. I hate that. Where it ranks in the Bond film list of 27 is subjective, of course. The British press loved it and felt duty bound to talk it up. I think it’s a lot better than the cheesy action CGI mess of Quantum Of Solace but lacks the story and depth of Skyfall and more in the Spectre ball park. I think the older Bonds are of their time and so hard to compare the different decades for me. A, not No, Time to Die would sums up where Bond is heading and it will never be the same again as political correctness erodes its soul, a sort of Brexit moment for the franchise where it tried to hang on to its past glories. ===RATINGS=== Imdb.com 7.6 /10.0 (121,231votes) Rottentomatos.com –84% critic’s approval Metacritic.com – 68% critic’s approval ===Trailer===