Smart. Elegant. Sexy. Shaken, not stirred. That’s the Bond, James Bond we have known since 1962. However, the final Daniel Craig 007 movie comes as a surprise. Bond is simply as a human being who loves, fights and eventually dies.
No Time to Die, which was expected to be released a year ago but was delayed due to Covid-19, opens with an ambiguous scene showing a little girl trying to escape from a mysterious man who has just killed her mother. Later on we discover that the little girl is Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), Bond’s lover who was first introduced in the 2015’s Spectre, while the mysterious man is the villain of the story named Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek).
In a following scene we see Swann as a young woman in a car with Bond (Daniel Craig) as he says to her passionately the famous words “We have all the time in the world” which brings to our minds memories of George Lazenby’s 1969 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service where these words were the theme song of the movie. The classic movie showed Bond’s love story with wife Tracy (Diana Rigg) and may be the same words in No Time to Die, describes his true love to Swann.
As events unfold, Bond discovers that he has a daughter with Swann — a family which he would sacrifice his life for.
But this is not the whole story. In No Time to Die, Bond has quit his active service and is enjoying his life in Jamaica, until his CIA friend Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), asks him for help in a mission to rescue a kidnapped scientist but, eventually, Bond finds himself fighting a mysterious villain named Lyutsifer Safin, who is using dangerous bioengineering technology.
During the six-decade history of the movie series, Bond is usually an invincible hero who can survive bullets, severe attacks and all manner of life-threatening dangerous situations. Now Bond dies.
In No Time to Die — just like Craig’s style in his other four 007 movies — Ian Fleming’s Bond here is features as a real character, not just a super hero. Now, he is a father, a passionate lover and a human who can’t survive missiles and dies without bothering himself to escape. Unlike popular opinion that Bond’s classic starring Sean Connery and Roger Moore are better, I find Craig’s ‘human’ Bond the best.
But for a Bond movie, action scenes have a great importance and that’s what Director Cary Joji Fukunaga was keen on. Although the movie is too long (160 minutes) the action scenes are stunning, especially the car chases which were filmed in a small Italian village as you see Bond driving up old stone steps.
Finally, No Time to Die, Craig’s final as Bond, is an emotional goodbye by the actor which will remain a special movie not just another one in the series.
