Beginner’s Bond: No Time To Die

This series has been about my quest to fill the largest gap in my personal cinematic knowledge: the James Bond franchise. So I watched all of the movies in order (mostly) for the first time, and I have been sharing my honest reactions here. It’s kind of hard to believe this is the last one. 2021’s No Time To Die is the final film for not just Daniel Craig, but James Bond as well. Of course the latter will return when someone figures out how to pump more money out of the IP, but the former was rather vocal about being totally done playing 007. Let’s see if No Time To Die will give them both a worthy finale.

The movie begins with a flashback, which I think might be a first for the franchise. It’s not about James, but Madeline Swann instead. After a harrowing encounter with the villain, young Swann falls into a frozen lake. For reasons unknown, the man who was just trying to kill her helps little Swann out of the water and leaves her in peace.

Back in the present, Mr. Bond and Dr. Swann are enjoying a holiday in scenic Italy. She convinces James to visit the grave of Vesper Lynd, a woman he loved but could not forgive for betraying him. But when he visits, Vesper’s tomb explodes and Blofeld’s men jump out and start shooting at him. After a nerve-racking car chase through the claustrophobically tiny streets of Matera, Blofeld calls and thanks Dr. Swann for her help in setting up a trap for James. With Vesper’s specter quite literally hanging on him, Bond is unable to believe Swann when she insists she is innocent. He puts her on a train and then spends the next five years as a beach bum in Jamaica. His old CIA buddy, Felix Leiter, tracks him down and asks for his help capturing Dr. Obruchev, the creator of a terrible nanobot bioweapon called Project Heracles. However, once the bad doctor is in their custody, Leiter’s partner reveals himself to be a traitor and starts shooting. James manages to escape, but alas, Felix does not.

Bond goes to see Blofeld at Belmarsh Prison, where he runs into Dr. Swann, Blofeld’s psychiatrist. Unaware that the villain has infected her with nanobots, Bond carries them into the interrogation room. Blofeld dies almost the instant James grabs him. The same thing happened to the rest of Spectre as well. At some point Q explains how the nanobots function, able to kill targets with pinpoint accuracy and zero collateral damage. Of course, you could also program it to target specific genetic traits which means… Project Heracles is just a genocide machine that should never be in anybody’s hands.

So, obviously the villain, Lyutsifer Safin (Get it? His name is LUCIFER SATAN), is brewing up an ocean of the stuff at his secret island base. Apparently, this island has been in the Safin family for generations. And that’s really the sum total of everything we learn about Lyutsifer—his family was rich, and then Spectre killed them as a test case for their new weapon. Which inspires the villain to use the same terrible weapon that wiped out his family as a means to hold the world hostage via the threat of targeted extinction.

Swann tries to tell James that her five year old that looks just like him isn’t his, which doesn’t fool him or the audience for a second. Lyutsifer doesn’t believe her either, and uses little Mathilde as a human shield when 007 shows up to stop him. Realizing the whole place is a poison factory, Bond convinces M to order a missile strike on the island. He opens the blast doors and is headed for the exit when Lyutsifer just appears out of nowhere and shoots him. After one of the weakest villain monologues I ever forgot, Lyutsifer reveals that he has contaminated James with the nanobots—he can never see Madeline and Mathilde again, or they will die. And then 007 caps him. I’m really confused as to how and why Lyutsifer, on the verge of escaping from his poison factory as it is going critical, decided to double back alone just to give an extra personal “fuck you” to James Bond. But nothing about that character makes sense, so I guess there are no answers to be found there.

Unfortunately, No Time To Die is saddled with one of the most unremarkable villains Bond has ever faced. Not as forgettable as Dominic Green, but not interesting enough to stand out in the pantheon of bad guys. Lyutsifer is motivated by revenge for his dead family, he has a severe facial scar that also represents his inner turmoil, and he has a really weird way of talking that makes it sound like he’s always about to run out of breath. Poisonous flowers are his hobby and his big plan is to kill most of the people in the world and start a new civilization with himself as the ultimate ruler. This is cookie cutter villainy, evil by numbers. Incredibly well-worn territory, especially in the James Bond franchise. Just like Lyutsifer’s namesake, he could be switched out for any other villain without affecting the story much. We don’t learn anything unique or interesting about him. He doesn’t even justify turning the weapon that exterminated his family into a noose around the whole world’s neck. When he does speak, it’s mostly vague metaphors about flowers. By the end, Lyutsifer comes off as more of a tedious annoyance rather than a vicious adversary, because we don’t even know enough to hate him. I had no idea how he amassed his power, why his men follow him, his twisted philosophy, or even a reason why he wants to take over the world. If it was simply revenge, the death of Blofeld and everyone in Spectre would have satisfied it. Something else had to happen to expand Lyutsifer’s hatred to the entire world, but we never find out what that is, and the villain is all the less compelling for it. And without a worthy adversary, Bond’s struggle is reduced to a formulaic action movie trying to copy the popular tropes of the time.

No Time To Die is a serviceable espionage thriller, but it doesn’t have anything spectacular enough to justify its almost three-hour runtime. “The Death of James Bond” should have been an epic finale, but it is no more special than any of its predecessors. An anniversary release with a recycled villain and a recycled plot simply isn’t special enough to end the best spy in cinema. Also seems cowardly from a narrative standpoint to give him a cliche noble sacrifice (that he couldn’t really escape anyway) instead of giving us a villain capable of defeating 007. Daniel Craig’s era of Bond was fun and technically impressive at times, but none of the sequels he did were anywhere near as good as Casino Royale. For now, No Time To Die remains the final James Bond movie. It certainly won’t last, as each of Craig’s tours in the tux grossed more than its predecessor. A James Bond movie is still a moneymaking machine, and no studio executive can resist using one of those for long.

Now that my long quest is finally over, it’s time to reflect on what I’ve learned. After I sit with it for a while, I will make one more post summarizing my overall perspective on this historic franchise. Might even rank some things, or at least call out the “bests.”