No Time To Die review: Daniel Craig’s James Bond exit goes out with a bang – CNET [CNET]

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Last time we saw Britain’s sexiest super-spy, he’d chucked in the espionage game at the end of 2015’s Spectre and revved his Aston Martin into the sunset with new love Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux, 17 years Craig’s junior). Every relationship has its little tiffs, like how Madeleine’s boyfriend and her father spent several previous films trying to kill each other. But she’s more vexed about his ex: the late Vesper Lynd from Casino Royale, who started Craig’s inexperienced spy on the road to becoming the James Bond we know. So Bond interrupts a scenic Italian holiday to say goodbye to his past — and you can probably guess how that goes. Bond, Madeleine and Aston Martin are soon locked in an explosive battle with mysterious assassins as their romantic getaway becomes, well, a getaway.

That early showpiece shootout marks out No Time to Die as something a little different. In previous Bond movies, bulletproof glass is just another cheeky little optional extra for a gimmick-packed chase scene, as bullets bounce off harmlessly and Bond zooms away for a well-earned vodka martini.

But here, the bludgeoning impact of every machine gun round is brutally felt, with whip-crack sound design giving a real sense of threat. But more importantly, inside the car Madeleine also batters at Bond’s own bulletproof shell. It isn’t just the glass cracking with every punishing impact, it’s two battered human beings threatening to break.

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This transition from the “blunt instrument” of Casino Royale to a fleshed-out character comes thanks to the people around him, the men and women he loves and respects. Lashana Lynch and Ana De Armas are more than a match for Bond as the high-kicking, sharpshooting women in his life. De Armas breathlessly pirouettes in and out of the film leaving you wanting more, while Lynch could easily carry the whole film. Ben Whishaw‘s Q is always fun to have around, although Naomie Harris as an office-bound Moneypenny is a little upstaged by Lynch’s arrival.

Ralph Fiennes also gets to do some real acting beyond handing out orders as Bond’s boss, M. He too has changed, the vibrant new broom of Skyfall shrunk into his stuffed shirt, appalling even Bond with his questionable tactics. This begins as an intriguingly ambivalent portrayal of establishment authority, although it’s quickly forgiven and forgotten in favor of cozy familiarity. 

As Bond gets tangled up in plots and counterplots, there are times when everybody packs such a punch that you might wonder why Bond is even there — on occasion he’s left literally running around looking for someone to rescue. With a cast assembled over several films, the expanded 2 hour, 43 minute runtime gives it an almost television-like expansion of focus to other characters. Purists may be unhappy, but there’s a frisson that feels almost transgressive to explore the interior worlds of other characters in the 007-verse. And after 15 years Craig is the heavyweight anchor around which the chaos and carnage revolve. It’s still a thrill to see him in full black tie casually vaulting a bar and pouring a couple of liveners while a shootout continues around him, downing a drink and going back to mowing down bad guys with a signature swagger.

The Bond series has always drawn on action movie trends, from Roger Moore’s ’70s karate chops to the Bourne-esque stylings of Craig’s previous films, and No Time to Die puts the pedal to the metal with savage and battering fights evoking the accelerated action of John Wick and Atomic Blonde. The Bond brand allows for a mix of genres within the one film, and there’s also a spine-tingling touch of horror on show in a nail-bitingly tense opening flashback and a deliciously surreal black tie bacchanal.

Not everything works: The film doesn’t bother to give Rami Malek‘s unsettling villain a discernible motive for his fiendish plans, and even if it did you probably wouldn’t hear it amid his whispered dialogue. Still, he looks the part, which is more than can be said for some of Bond’s costuming choices. The relatable off-duty Bond looks more rumpled than ever before, which means a lot of truly awful, awful corduroy.

It remains to be seen what comes next after No Time to Die so comprehensively blows up the franchise formula. Whoever takes on the role after Craig has a very big bow tie to fill. But a new bar has been set for the series, with Craig going out in incendiary style. It may not be true any more that nobody does it better, but Bond still does it pretty damn well.

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