Daniel Craig’s fifth and final Bond is handsome, sincere and too long. It opens with one of the series’ best action sequences and closes with real feeling; the plot in between, and the villain carrying it, do not earn the 163 minutes.
Cary Joji Fukunaga’s No Time to Die is the fifth and last of Daniel Craig’s Bond films, and it knows it. Every scene is a farewell to something: to Madeleine (Léa Seydoux), to the 00 number, to the Aston Martin, to the idea of Bond as a man who feels nothing. It runs 163 minutes, the longest in the series, and about a hundred of them are good. The rest is plot, and the plot is the problem.
The opening in Matera is the best stretch. Bond and Madeleine are on holiday in the hill town, in love and uneasy, and Fukunaga lets that sit before the motorbikes arrive. Linus Sandgren shoots the town in honey light, the stone the colour of toast, and when the ambush comes the Aston Martin ends up spinning in a piazza with bullets bouncing off the glass while Craig sits inside deciding whether he can be bothered to live. Tom Cross and Elliot Graham cut it tight and clear; we always know where the car is and where the men with guns are. It is a proper Bond sequence, and the film never quite matches it again.
Cuba, forty minutes later, comes close. Bond and a nervous new agent called Paloma (Ana de Armas) gatecrash a party in Havana in evening dress, and for ten minutes the film is funny, fast and flirtatious in a way the Craig years have mostly avoided. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s fingerprints are on the dialogue here and in the scenes with Ben Whishaw’s Q, who has a boyfriend coming round for dinner and a kitchen full of Bond and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) at the wrong moment. Lashana Lynch’s Nomi, who has inherited the number 007 while Bond fished in Jamaica, is sharp and dry and given too little to do once the story moves indoors.
The story moves indoors a lot. Valdo Obruchev (David Dencik) has been stolen from an MI6 laboratory along with a weapon that gets explained at least four times, and the explanations do not improve. The script, credited to Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Waller-Bridge and Fukunaga, keeps stopping so that Ralph Fiennes’s M can look guilty and Rory Kinnear’s Tanner can read out a briefing. Christoph Waltz returns as Blofeld for a single scene in a glass cell, and the scene is over before he has finished being menacing. Somewhere in the middle hour we found ourselves restless, counting the rooms in which people stand and describe the danger, and we were annoyed at being restless in a film that had begun so well.
Rami Malek’s Safin is the weak point. He whispers, he wears a cracked white mask in the prologue and a long coat later, he talks about tidiness and gardens, and he never once seems to want anything specific. Mark Tildesley builds him a base of Soviet concrete with a poison garden at its heart, one of the best sets in the series, and the villain rattles around in it like a lodger. Suttirat Anne Larlarb dresses Craig well throughout, a cream jacket in Jamaica, a dinner jacket in Havana, and puts Safin in clothes that seem to be doing the acting for him.
And then the last stretch, which we will not describe. What we can say is that Hans Zimmer has been threading John Barry’s “We Have All the Time in the World” through the score since Matera, and when the tune arrives in full it did to us exactly what it was designed to do. Craig plays the closing scenes with a stillness he has been building toward since Casino Royale (2006), and Seydoux, given more to play than she had in Spectre (2015), meets him. We were moved, more than we expected, and slightly cross about how much plot we had sat through to get there.
Set against the Craig run, it sits below Casino Royale and Skyfall (2012) and above Spectre, which is roughly where most critics have put it. It wants to be an ending more than it wants to be a thriller, and the two jobs keep getting in each other’s way. See it for Matera, for Havana and for the last twenty minutes; bring patience for the hour in between. It carries a 12A, which the violence tests more than once.
