Endings, timely or otherwise

Spoilers! 

No Time to Die is Daniel Craig's last excursion as James Bond 007 which, in a way, seems fitting as, in the macro sense, the overall impression that I got from it was that they'd kinda run out of ideas. It's well-constructed and director Cory Fukunaga still has action scenes down to a science. But what most attracted me to his work on the first season of True Detective was the intrigue and moody atmosphere that he was able to convey in every, single, well-paced scene. When I heard that he was the director for this film, I anticipated that kind of thoughtful storytelling. But what I got was a James Bond film, most of which haven't been lauded for their stories, despite the often subtle approach of novelist Ian Fleming. In fact, the one film that does stand out for story is Craig's first effort, Casino Royale, which remains as the best Bond film ever made. So, you can say that NTTD was an example of competent filmmaking, but it was hard to shake the feeling that we've seen it all before.

There was a point from about You Only Live Twice onward that Bond became mostly about the hi-tech doohickeys, both used by him and used against him. Then the Other JB, Jason Bourne, films emerged and demonstrated that, yes, you could use advanced technology in action spy movies and still be serious about what was happening on the screen, rather than smarmy and goofy like Roger Moore and Pierce Bronsnan had been (We should really just forget about Timothy Dalton.) Casino Royale was the turning point in the series because it not only returned Bond to being a serious spy, but also saved him from being a better-dressed Inspector Gadget. As Roger Moore himself once noted, Craig's Bond was the closest to the character depicted in Fleming's novels than anyone who'd done the role before; an ice-cold killer, mission above all, but still a "good guy" in true Cold War fashion. The key to Casino was that it took the emotionless, impermeable operative and forced him to confront those emotions that he'd suppressed. Craig's films have largely continued in that theme, as his evolution of the character has shown him repeatedly driven by passion, whether affection or rage, as well as his struggle to contain that passion so that he can put the work ahead of anything personal. That's a solid read on the character, but you can only keep doing that for so long before there should be a breaking point, either within the story or with the audience. I think we probably passed that breaking point in Spectre, leaving NTTD as something akin to a TV series that ran a season too long.

Thankfully, as the Craig version has progressed, his supporting cast has continued to grow and get stronger, having real purpose as opposed to the sideshow carnival that a lot of them were reduced to in the Moore years. There's been a notable growth of stronger women in the Craig era, departing from what almost become hallowed tradition of damsels in distress (A View to a Kill is perhaps the most execrable depiction of that, among its many other flaws) and NTTD was no exception. Indeed, the most entertaining character in the whole film was Ana de Armas' Paloma, who managed to kick ass in a designer gown and heels with "only three weeks training" and a delightfully casual attitude about the whole thing. All of that support combined with Craig's ability to actually act (something not especially common among previous Bonds...) in order to convince us that these were actual people, for the most part, going through these extraordinary circumstances. In the best Bond films, the villains have been part of that ensemble when it really works. But good characters need a combination of two things: good writing and good acting. Rami Malek, as Lyutsifer Safin, had the latter but not the former. Most Bond films are about a personal contest of wills between Bond and whomever the main villain is. One is trying to enact a nefarious scheme and the other is trying to stop him. But part of that personal contest is getting to know said villain as something other than simply a force of evil; a Sauron ("I am mean and angry... because I am mean and angry!") In the early films, they usually did that with Bond meeting said villains and exchanging pleasantries in an "espionage is a gentleman's game" style.

But Safin is introduced in the first few minutes as an implacable assassin, hidden behind a Noh mask. He doesn't deviate from that approach for the rest of the film, despite losing the mask and having a couple scenes fairly loaded with exposition. We don't really get to know the villain as a person. He's just The Villain, like a Sauron. Despite Fukunaga's claim that Safin was "more dangerous than anyone Bond has ever encountered" and a "hyper-intelligent and worthy adversary", we get none of that from this character. He's simply a malevolent force and one more in the list of guys that Bond has knocked off for almost sixty years. There isn't the panache of Christopher Lee's Francisco Scaramanga or the ferocity of Robert Shaw's Red Grant or the desperation of Mads Mikkelsen's Le Chiffre and certainly not the eerie charm of Christoph Waltz's Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who upstages Safin in this very film. On top of that, while it's great to see Léa Seydoux getting lots of work lately (I wrote about her just last week), her scenes as the female lead are largely so angst-ridden that it feels like we move past the "help Bond with his emotions" stage and straight into genuine soap opera at some point. Yes, she's a Bond woman and not a Bond girl. She takes care of herself, largely makes her own choices, and even guns down a few bad guys in true action movie form (Alas, no one passes the Bechdel test.) But in the second half of the film, when she's largely the caretaker of Matilde, we end up doing a bit of the Helen Lovejoy scenario. Yes, it's important to save the child, especially because it's Bond's child, but it's equally important to save all of the other lives that have just as much value. Dropping Matilde into the clutches of the villain to be dangled in front of Bond until he supposedly debases himself is so stock Hollywood filmmaking that it's almost boring. And, again, we've all seen stock Hollywood more times than we probably care to count, which is not what I expected of Fukunaga, who also had a hand in writing the screenplay.

The little touches of classic Bond were funny to see, like the Aston Martin DB5 with the smoke and guns; the recreation of the title shot sequence in the hallway on Safin's island base (near Japan; I half expected the extinct volcano from You Only Live Twice); using Louis Armstrong's "We Have All the Time in the World" which is prominent in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which is also about Bond dealing with emotional loss; and so on. Obviously, these were people trying to tend to the IP as well as continue to tell their version of it. But what might have compounded the flaws of the film is it's mildly ridiculous length, as it runs almost three hours, which is longer than any Bond film before it and longer than this story needed to be. Yes, it's Craig's sending off and there's a certain level of emotion attached to that but you could have excised chunks of some of the longer action sequences and a lot of the dithering with Valdo Obruchev (David Dencik), among other things, and it might have felt like the film's pace didn't descend to the turgid at times; again, not something I'm accustomed to from Fukunaga's previous work. One also can't understate the genuine level of emotion involved in many of the performances. Craig, Seydoux, and others do really well in that respect with what they're given to work with.

So, yeah. Not great, not terrible. If you're a hardcore Bond fan, it's a decent entry. If not, I can't say you'll be missing much that you haven't seen before.