163 min | PG-13 | October 8, 2021 | United Artists Releasing
James Bond has retired to Jamaica with no missions and no MI6. The CIA pulls him back for one more job, and the woman he loved becomes the thread that unravels everything. Daniel Craig finally gets the exit the character has never been allowed.
James Bond has walked away from the work. He lives in Jamaica with no missions and no agency and a quiet he does not trust. A CIA contact drags him back into the field, and the woman he loved becomes the thread that pulls his past back into the open. No Time to Die is the fifth and final Daniel Craig Bond film, and it treats that finality as its actual subject. The series has spent fifteen years building a Bond who can be wounded, and this film asks what it costs to send that man on one last mission.
Daniel Craig plays Bond as a man who has run out of certainty. He carries the fatigue of someone who has done this too long and survived too much. Léa Seydoux plays Madeleine Swann with a guardedness the film slowly cracks open, and their relationship becomes the engine of the plot rather than a decoration. Rami Malek plays the villain Lyutsifer Safin in a near-whisper, a man whose calm is the threat. Lashana Lynch plays Nomi, the new agent who has inherited Bond’s 00 number, and she meets him with competence and zero deference. Ralph Fiennes as M and Ben Whishaw as Q give the bureaucracy around him both weight and warmth.
Cary Joji Fukunaga directs with a patience the franchise rarely allows. The pre-title sequence in Matera stages a chase that holds on the Aston Martin absorbing gunfire while it spins in a tight circle, the camera staying close as Bond refuses to run. Fukunaga shares the script with Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Waller-Bridge’s hand shows in the sharper exchanges between Bond and the people who outrank or replace him. The cinematography moves from the warm stone of Italy to the fog of a Norwegian forest to the gray concrete of Safin’s island, and each location reads as a different stage of the character’s death. The production design of Safin’s poison garden turns the usual Bond lair into something closer to a tomb. The score quotes the franchise’s history without drowning the quieter scenes.
No Time to Die wants to be an ending and a spectacle at the same time, and the two ambitions strain against each other. The plot runs on a nanobot bioweapon and a grudge that stretches back decades, and the machinery gets convoluted enough to slow the emotional line it cares about. The film works best when it stops moving and lets Craig sit with what the job has taken from him. Fukunaga commits to a conclusion the series has avoided for sixty years and earns it through accumulated weight rather than shock. This is a heavy, deliberate goodbye to one actor’s version of the character. It closes the door with conviction even when the story around the closing gets noisy.