No Time To Die is a sentimental, unsatisfying end to the Daniel Craig era of James Bond
Delayed for a year and a half, the latest 007 adventure falls short of Skyfall
Film Reviews James Bond
No Time To Die is the 25th film in the endless James Bond series, and also maybe the first to offer something like an actual ending. “Goodbye” isn’t usually in the spy’s vocabulary—not with a sequel always on the horizon, a return always promised in the credits. Even on the cusp of recasting, it’s rare to get any finality from a Bond movie; producers like to leave the door open, in hopes that they’ll lure their star back for one more round of martinis. No Time To Die is different. It’s been conceived as a proper send-off to Daniel Craig, taking his fifth and final spin in the tuxedo, and as an attempt to wrap up this serialized stretch of a series that’s been running since the early ’60s. Unfortunately, the film is so concerned with valediction that it ends up treating the actual pleasures of Bond—the stuff that’s kept audiences coming back for six decades—like an afterthought. It’s all punctuation, no sentence.
In devising some closure of sorts for this iteration of the character, No Time To Die looks backwards. This has been a strategy of the series ever since Craig took over the role, bringing a more brutish charisma to cinema’s most beloved secret agent. An obsession with the past was, of course, a driving principle of the thrilling origin story Casino Royale. And it hung over the films that followed, evident in every self-conscious wink at the ancient tropes of the 007 formula and every attempt to tie a new menace to an old mission, mistake, or adversary. In its smartest stab at symmetry, No Time To Die takes Bond back to Italy, and to the grave of the woman whose death shaped his future. Her tombstone literally explodes. Metaphorically, this signals a fallout with the one woman Bond has allowed himself to love since, the psychiatrist Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux, reprising the role she played in Spectre).
Is this the Endgame of spy movies? It’s as sentimental and nearly as long, running a patience-taxing two hours and 43 minutes. And here, too, is a five-year time jump, finding a retired, heartbroken Bond living off the grid, forced to return to active duty at the emergence of a new global threat. Didn’t Skyfall go there already? It did, and more gracefully: That gleaming installment, the second big highlight of the Craig tenure (and, in general, a more fitting swan song for it), had some fun playing, however briefly, with the idea of a disgruntled and slightly rusty Bond. Here, British intelligence’s finest lurches back into the field with almost a perfunctory shrug.
No Time To Die’s danger is viral: a plague of nanobots that target a specific person (or people’s) DNA. Vaguely and coincidentally, this evokes the real worldwide medical crisis that delayed the film’s release for a year and a half. It’s also a rather confusing weapon of mass destruction, with rules that don’t make a ton of sense, even for a Bond movie—which is a problem, given how much the film ends up hinging on them. The heavy threatening to release this destructive force on the world is the vengeful, cadaverous, and well-named Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek, the third Oscar winner in a row to play a Bond villain). Safin gets a great introduction, in a misleadingly superb opening suspense sequence that recalls Halloween more than one of the franchise’s usual in-media-res prologues. After that, though, he reveals himself to be little more than a stock adversary, whispering threats with perpetual calm; Craig deserved a more distinctive final foe than this generic sociopathic terrorist.
There’s faint tension in the introduction of a replacement, Nomi (Lashana Lynch), with whom Bond playfully spars over ownership of the 007 codename. This is clearly a symbolic gesture, a generational torch passing meant to offer a rebuke to the historic white-dude chauvinism of Bond as a character and icon. And it might be easier to appreciate if the rookie agent weren’t relegated constantly to the sidelines, disappearing for long stretches to run offscreen errands. Perhaps there was scant room for her in a film that can barely find the time for its usual supporting roster, the home-office cavalry of M (Ralph Fiennes), Q (Ben Whishaw), and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris). Crowding an already overstuffed ensemble, No Time To Die wheels in once-quintessential archrival Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) for a single-scene verbal standoff. He’s meant to be scary behind glass, like Hannibal Lecter or something, but the cameo is a non-event—possibly because Spectre did so little to build Waltz up as the ultimate big bad of this Bondverse.
Like almost every actor that’s played the role, Craig has reached the point where he’s a little too long in the tooth for it. But it’s less his age than his effort (or lack of it) that shows: Where once he brought an invigorating balance of thuggish aggression and cucumber-cool wit, the star seems borderline bored in No Time To Die, as itchy as his character is to put the spy games behind him. His fatigue creeps into every corner: It’s there in the half-assed banter, in the been-there-exploded-that gadgets, in the fleeting checklist appearance by Craig’s Knives Out costar Ana De Armas as a second-tier Bond girl so obligatorily incorporated that she could be airlifted out of the movie with the most minimal of rewrites. The set pieces—the usual car chases and gunfights and climactic races through exotic lairs—are nothing special either. The most memorable is probably a single-take brawl up a flight of stairs; you want to ding it as an Atomic Blonde ripoff, until you remember that director Cary Joji Fukunaga did the extended-shot action sequence thing on True Detective years earlier.
If there’s been a legible emotional arc to this five-film, mini-franchise narrative, it’s the tug-of-war inside Bond himself. Can this ice-cold killer and ladykiller learn to love again—to rediscover the humanity hammered out of him through years of service and the formative betrayal of Casino Royale? The problem is that this final installment builds its stakes around a relationship it’s barely dramatized: Seydoux’s thinly sketched Madeleine is but a shadow of the dearly departed Vesper, a love interest so richly drawn by Eva Green that you could actually buy her getting through to a hunk of patriotic human weaponry like James Bond. No Time To Die is forgettable in all the places that usually count—it’s a Bond movie with little excitement or panache. All the film has to distinguish it is an uncharacteristically sappy ending, a late bid to jerk some tears after nearly three hours of boring us to them.
403 Comments
Goddamn
No Time To Day?
No, Time to Die
Oops, I shouldn’t have this MI6 logo here either.
Correct.
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme to Die!
“Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme to Die!”In which Bond tackles oreganoised crime….
Not I’m me, to day?
Know thyme? Two, Di!
Everyone thought a blond Bond was a mistake, but they were rushed and thus had no time to dye.
But five stars in The Guardian – looks like I’ll have to make up my own mind.
Most reviews I’ve read so far are more positive than this one. I don’t think it will be as well received as Skyfall and Casino Royale but it looks like it might get better reviews than Spectre.
That’s all I really want- we got the great ones from Craig (Casino, Skyfall) and the really bad one (Quantum) and a mediocre one (Spectre) but a solid middle ground one that’s at least rewatchable would be fine by me
Spectre is SO MUCH worse than Quantum.
Anything would get better reviews than SPECTRE. Timothy Dalton and Chuck Norris in Goldeneye would get better reviews than SPECTRE.
Having seen it, I think you rank it just right for the DC era:Casino RoyaleSkyfallNo Time To DieSpectreQuantum of whatever that was….Solace? THAT was just awful.
Last few Cs this site has given out I’ve really enjoyed. Getting to the point a bad review here is as much a reason to check something out as a good review was 6 years ago. That being said the Guardian sucks and their coverage is aimed at sour faced English middle class wankers so this is a toss up.
I want to tell the reviewers here that it’s ok to like things sometimes. That doesnt make you uncool. Even when something goes get a decent grade, it’s twinged with embarrassment. “This was alright… I guess. If you’re into that kind of thing. Which we totally aren’t.”
You read a review where Dowd praises Casino Royale and Skyfall, and you want to tell him it’s ok to like things sometimes? Weird.
Do I know you?
Don’t think so!
You seem to have me pegged.
Save it for Savage Love!
I’m sorry to hear they wouldn’t publish you 5000 word article on why the UK is the bestest country in the world.
Im not right wing (or even a unionist), though they do regularly publish articles from people who are.
AA Dowd is known by some commenters as “C+ C+ Dowd” because he looooves giving out Cs and seems to hate everything.
That being said the Guardian sucks and their coverage is aimed at sour faced English middle class wankers so this is a toss up.Coincidentally, “Sour-faced English Middle Class Wankers” is the name of my new punk band.
I thought that is the next Bond movie:“James Bond will return in Sour-faced English Middle Class Wankers”
“That being said the Guardian sucks and their coverage is aimed at sour faced English middle class wankers so this is a toss up.”Hey one of those sour faced wankers said they loved Phantom Thread because they “found it the most relatable film they had ever seen about a romantic relationship” so they aren’t all bad 😉
I stopped trusting negative Dowd reviews quite some time ago.
Each review starts with: How can I crap all over this?
for real–if this had been rated higher than C+ I might have been concerned that the Bond producers made something SO good they were going to charge MORE to see it LOL
If only there were dozens more reviews out in the world.
If I started reading more than two reviews of everything I’d have to give up work entirely.
The only things dowd had ever liked I haven’t so I’ll probably like this
It’s a Dowd review. Always give it 1, 1 and a half score more than what is actually written. A Dowd C score means at least a B for us common folks.I’m still amazed Dowd gave Army of the Dead a solid B.
That score made me simply not trust Dowd’s reviews of action flicks. It’s clear he has wildly different tastes than I do, because I thought Army of the Dead will be right up my alley and I hated every self-indulgent, cynical, stupid minute of it.
Peter Bradshaw’s reviews need a huge grain of salt, and he also gave Spectre 5 stars. Dowd gave it a B-. I know who I’m trusting.
i never understand the concept of what ‘trusting’ a review means. i trust dowd thinks this is a C, just like i trust that guardian reviewer who gave it a much higher review. the idea that if something gets a low score it’s because of some personal axe to grind, yet positive reviews are somehow pure and righteous has always weirded me out.i understand that you mean, ‘i know which review i think i’ll ultimately agree with’ but the implication with the word trust…just ain’t right.
The AV Club comments (and pop culture website comments in general) would be a much better place if people would admit they just don’t enjoy the cognitive dissonance of a high status person (i.e., a professional critic) disliking something they really want to like. It’s always just motivated reasoning dressed up in blather about Reviewer X having a personal axe to grind or not “getting” the movie etc. TLDR: Let People (Not) Enjoy Things.
Honestly, the last thing I expect from these sites or Polygon is a positive Bond review.
but that was Peter Bradshaw, who also gave Spectre 5 stars, after trashing Skyfall. Felt like he was over compensating, and probably still is.
oh, don’t do that!
Don’t do that. Making up your own mind is how you get to believing that the movie is a plot by Hollywood liberal elites to give you show-cancer.
I mean, AV Club gave the “Party Thor” episode a C too, so…
The Guardian is British. British people have a cataract when it comes to James Bond, they have a vested interest in believing these movies are good, or necessary.
This is absolutely one where we’re going to have to wait for the word of mouth to get any accurate sense of how good this thing is. Most of the 5* raves read like they were written before the reviewer even watched the thing.
It could be 2+ hours of Daniel Craig reading the ingredients of randomly-selected prepackaged foods while wearing a smartly-tailored white suit and it’d still be better than Quantum of Solace.
of course the guardian loves the new bond movie, they also love every new doctor who, harry potter, the great british bake-off, the actual MI6 and the queen.
A cursory glance at reviews gives the impression that the mainstream “boomer” outlets (The Times, Variety, The Guardian, etc.) like it, whereas the internet “cool kids” (AVClub, vulture, etc.) don’t care for it.
I’ve seen a lot of British publications giving it great reviews, not sure if it’s bias because well duh or if it’s really worth watching. Granted the people on here are pretty pessimistic sometimes
I’ve now seen it and am a toss up (on the Guardian scale) between 4 and 5 stars. Very good film.
But what if you think Skyfall is a ridiculously overrated mediocrity?
If that’s the case, meet me out back in 20 minutes.Bring a tarp…
What bits did you find appealing about the?The Train Ex Machina?The Home Alone Homage?The fact that they missed the only opportunity to make it a decent film?The rape?The single-shot AR-15?
Mostly when M recklessly endangered the lives of, what, fifty government employees for literally zero reason by continuing to blather on in a hearing instead of, you know, evacuating when there was an urgent and credible threat against her life.
Wait, what about the bit where Q, tech genius (in the Apple Genius Bar™ mould it seems), plugs a fucking laptop from the villain directly into MI6’s own network?!I mean, if they wanted to prove that human spies were still worth a damn and shouldn’t be replaced with ELINT – which had just been proven to be compromised – which was the whole fucking point of the movie, they should’ve had Dead Bond track down the hard drive, eliminate the threat, and walk into that Parliamentary Inquiry with Silva’s head on a platter of non-specified precious metal and the hard wedged between its teeth.And then M stands up and says “I’ve yet to see a computer program come back from the dead. You can’t code loyalty, gentleman.”
Oh my god, I forgot about that! Holy crap, I was yelling at the screen.Second dumbest scene in modern bond history after scanning the ring in SPECTRE.
on the other hand, i love how silva’s entire plan, clearly devised over years, entails: seize list of covert agents, leak agents’ identities to discredit M, blow up MI6, leave a breadcrumb trail for Bond to follow, get captured, take over MI6’s network using an unshielded laptop connection, escape, obtain disguise and weapons from allies in the tube, drop a subway if any pursuers corner him at exactly the right place and time, and do all of this before M’s hearing is over. and all of this is so that he can get ONE (1) shot at M from across a crowded hearing chamber. when he whiffs his shot his face absolutely shatters because his years-long plan just went up in smoke with nothing to show for it.
LOL yeah that gets me every time too—”a genius-level spy who is psychotically obsessed with you is coming for you.” “So? I’m not going to run and mitigate the risk for everyone else here.” That and why Q hard-wired the bad guy’s laptop directly into MI6—it almost seemed like the director was trying to lowkey prove that the current espionage situation is an incompetent shitshow.
TBF all James Bond does is rape. Like in the last film, he killed a guy then raped the widow at the guys funeral. Like James Bond is a metaphor for imperialism bro. An English man who comes into a foreign land and rapes and murders with impunity all for The British Government’s sake. He’s imperialism.
Glad to see you’re enjoying the few weeks of your Cultural Studies 101 elective.
I imagine you’re a lot of fun at parties, huh.
Two inevitable things in online Skyfall discussions: (1) someone makes a “hilarious” Home Alone zinger and (2) illustrates they dont know anything about movies.
IIRC Judi Dench and a gameskeeper (?) are trying to sneak away from bad guys in the middle of the night and decide to employ a great big white light to guide their steps. Anyone with basic military knowledge (or common sense) would have eschewed artificial light completely in such a situation.
I’m sure movie audiences would have loved looking at a black screen during this sequence – but hey, that would be more realistic, right?
c’mon , they could have filmed it to look like moonlight . In the scene they’re immediately spotted by the bad guys who are looking for them and know they’ve escaped on foot. It’s insane that anyone in that situation would turn a big white flashlight on.
there are so many valid and damning criticisms to make of skyfall, but the “home alone!” one is such a non-issue, it’s like saying “still a better love story than twilight” in 2021 and acting like it’s funny.
I…I don’t know. I was just making a joke…
Two things you can always count on in Skyfall debates: (a) someone will make a hilarious Home Alone zinger and (b) illustrate that they don’t know anything about movies.
Do you keep a handy list of things to complain about from a film that came out 9 years ago? Sheesh
Just have to point out that AR-15s, and pretty much their entire family lineage of rifles, are select fire, meaning that you can choose between single-fire and either fully-auto or 3-round burst, depending on the model.
Nope.Just to properly point out that “single shot” doesn’t mean “semi-automatic”, which is what you’re referring to. “Single shot” refers to its cartridge capacity, meaning not having a magazine, and requiring a new cartridge to be manually inserted into the chamber from somewhere outside the weapon by the shooter for each shot.All ARs have had magazines. As did that one in Skyfall.
I used single-fire as a colloquialism because some people might not understand what semi-automatic means, especially if they don’t know guns. My comment correctly denoted “select-fire”, as AR-15s have had that capability since their first iteration.
That being said, were you saying that there was a scene where someone was using an AR-15 (or a derivative) without a magazine, but still managed to shoot? Because in that case, it would be fucked. However, if it had a magazine, then I’m failing to see what the issue is? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with using an AR-15 as a semi-automatic, and if the gun only had one round chambered, and the magazine was empty, then it would only fire once before it had to be reloaded. So again, why was that such a burning issue of yours in Skyfall?
For a make-out session?
is that what the tarp is for?
I think the tarp request suggests a little bit more than a make-out session…
The plot’s overall pretty dumb, but it’s shot fucking beautifully.
Then I tend to wonder if you’re a fan of Bond in general. Because although Skyfall is absolutely dumb as a bag of rocks, that still somehow makes it more clever than the back half of Connery’s run, just about all of Moore’s, 75% of Brosnan’s, and half (so far) of Craig’s. And while I agree its treatment of women is awful… again, that’s kinda par for the course in this franchise.I feel like Casino Royale was good enough for people to forget that Bond movies kind of play by their own rules and are to some degree graded on a curve, like Godzilla movies. This is the series with “Japanese” Sean Connery and Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist. Bond got in dull never-ending slow-motion fights underwater and in space. He surfed a tsunami and jumped a car to the sound of a slide whistle. This is a franchise that somehow wasted Christopher Lee and Christopher Walken.Is Skyfall dumb as shit? Absolutely. Still not a bad Bond movie overall, though. The acting, cinematography and action are all pretty fantastic, it’s got a few memorable set pieces, the theme song is rock-solid, and while I absolutely hate the whole “too old for this shit” angle (coming directly on the heels of “too young to really fit the job”) I don’t have much else to complain about that isn’t in some way a complaint about the franchise as a whole.On a scale of Godzilla vs Megalon to Shin Godzilla, I give it a solid Godzilla vs Biollante.
Yeah, the thing about using “plot holes” to critique a movie is that you’ll convince everyone who hates it already but fail to win over anyone else. It’s like when people who hate TLJ open with the bombing scene and “there’s no gravity space!” regarding a series featuring laser swords and magic space wizards.
The thing is, I’m sympathetic to the argument that verisimilitude matters. Stuff doesn’t have to be realistic, it just has to play by the rules that it lays out, so [stupid thing] happens isn’t an excuse for any stupid thing to happen.But the complaints about Skyfall are just so of-a-kind with all the other dumb shit that happens constantly in this series that it’s odd to me when someone criticizes it from the perspective of a Bond film.
Precisely, context matters. Star Wars is a space fantasy; James Bond is a spy fantasy. If we’re talking about gritty war movies or political thrillers then our standards of verisimilitude would be higher. And regardless, nitpicking and plot hole mining just aren’t as effective critiques as people seem to think they are. I don’t care if Q did a dumb thing so long as it advances the plot and makes sense within the overall narrative. Other people might, but I don’t.
There’s also no friction or air resistance in space though? The ship clearly has artificial gravity that clearly pulls matter towards the bottom of the ship. If you open a door and drop a bomb within the ship, it will go through the door and continue on in the same direction until it hits something.
I know you only brought this nitpick up as an example of the absurd. But it’s more absurd than most nitpicks, since it’s wrong. Yes, the SW movies ignore physics, but the concept of a space bomber actually doesn’t. Just like human beings can survive a vacuum longer than pop culture has led us to believe and Leia didn’t need the force to do that.
The annoying thing about the bomber sequence in TLJ is that Star Wars already has bombers – Y-Wings – which use torpedoes (and X-Wings can carry torpedoes too). They are attacking a “dreadnaught” … why wouldn’t you have it be attacked by torpedo bombers? Has there ever been a capital ship in history sunk deliberately by slow-moving dumb-bomb bombardment like they set up in this film? Why weren’t they using Y-Wings? Because the filmmakers who made TLJ didn’t think of it, that’s why. The Y-Wing is back in Rise of Skywalker, the “BTA-NR2 Y-wing”. In the extended lore the Y-Wing is even called “the starfighter that broke the Empire’s back”. This scene could have been the tragic destruction of the Resistance’s last Y-Wings, or we could have had them plough through three Star Destroyers and then be all dolly-zoom when the dreadnaught pops up… but no, they thought what would be better is a super slow-moving easy-to-blow-up cluster of PEZ dispensers, like a cartoonist’s idea of a WW2 Allied firebombing mission conducted late in the war after the Luftwaffe had run out of planes.
God I despise that criticism so much, mainly because the people making it have no clue what they’re talking about, and also ignore that Star Wars has never really presented space combat realistically (how can you hear the explosions in space?). But the bombing scene is fine from a science perspective. They clearly have some sort of artificial gravity on the ship where they drop the bomb, so the bombs will start to accelerate downwards initially. Once they exit the artificial gravity, due to Newton’s first law, they will keep moving until they hit something, not slowing down because there isn’t any air resistance. And while it’s been a while, I seem to remember them saying something about the bombs locking onto the ships magnetically, which would explain why they’re accelerating like that (sure there are some logistical problems about how they would exclusively magnetize to the other ship, but a ton of aspects of how Star Wars technology works has never been explained and would seem to contradict known laws of physics).It’s not really a valid criticism unless you want to hate Star Wars as a whole for ignoring physics in space combat, and even then, this makes more sense than hearing explosions in space. If someone is complaining about this specifically, they are searching for reasons to hate the movie at that point.
It’s like when people who hate TLJ open with the bombing scene and “there’s no gravity space!” regarding a series featuring laser swords and magic space wizards.TLJ is so bad I hadn’t even thought of that aspect of its badness. TLJ was a like a special feature-length episode of a Galactica rip-off.
That’s a great summary of the Bond franchise. All these long-running franchises are graded on a curve, to some extent.
I can’t profess to have any internal, logical consistency to which Bond movies I like and which ones I don’t. Sometimes dumb plotting is a deal breaker. Sometimes it’s not.It’s mostly about tone and each movie’s specific internal logic. Skyfall posits itself as a Daniel Craig Bond movie – lean, gritty, and at least somewhat “smart” – but fails frequently by its own standards, but I don’t despise the thing like I did SPECTRE.
That said, I have enjoyed otherwise ridiculous Bond entries like “Tomorrow Never Dies” and even (somewhat) “The World Is Not Enough”, while I actively dislike “Goldeneye”, even though that one seems pretty universally loved.I guess my overall preference is for the slightly more serious Bonds (at least in terms of tone and the actor’s approach), which is why I like Craig and why I liked the Dalton entries (even though License to Kill obviously becomes absurd by its ending.)As for Connery and Moore – I give those movies much more latitude simply because I was a young kid when I watched them and haven’t really revisited them much at all as an adult. They’re more images now, concepts, ideas about what Bond is, divorced of specific context.
“That said, I have enjoyed otherwise ridiculous Bond entries like “Tomorrow Never Dies””I feel like TND is at least entertaining. Teri Hatcher and Michelle Yeoh did a good job with their roles. Mainly though I enjoyed the remote control BMW and have wanted one of those ever since. Oh and although I found the guy who played Carver cheesy, at least the film had some sort of decent point, namely to be careful of people who control large swathes of media.
I distinctly remember disliking the first half of Tomorrow Never Dies, but thinking it really picked up in the second half and won me over. The turning point was literally the death of Teri Hatcher’s character. Once she was gone, the movie improved dramatically.
And Bond driving a car via remote control from the back seat was simultaneously thrilling and goofy in all the ways a Bond movie should be.
TND has an amazing opening. Title is stupid as hell though. Original title was Tomorrow Never Lies
Those movies recognized they’re dumb fun, Skyfall takes itself seriously.
The underwater fight in Thunderball was fucking awesome.
I hated it
Then you can have a beer at my house any time.
Seriously, that movie is Home Alone in Scotland.
Also, I grow so fucking weary of Ms who have to do stuff. I get it. You have Judi Dench. You have Ralph Fiennes. But there’s a reason Mike Myers called him Basil Exposition.
Bernard Lee and Robert Brown showed up, got their bagel from catering, put on their suits, did their lines and cashed their checks. They didn’t have to be right there in the action or reading poetry or whatever.
It’s always weird to me that people like Skyfall so much. Casino Royale is still by far the best Craig Bond movie. Everything since has been a clumsily-written mild disappointment.They’re all beautifully shot, though.
I agree. Casino Royale is quite possibly my favorite Bond movie, and an exceptional action flick. Which makes it super disappointing that all the other entries have been mediocre (Skyfall) or terrible (Quantum, Spectre).
But what if you think James Bond, full-stop, is ridiculously overrated mediocrity?
Skyfall is a fun Home Alone knockoff, but definitely a bit nonsensical. Especially Javier Bardem’s Joker strategy. It’s kind of hilarious how much Bond rips other films off.
Ugh. I really hated Skyfall when I saw it. I can’t remember all the reasons now. But, one of them was that it felt like they were totally ripping off the Dark Knight.
There’s always one.(Though everyone has their own “wtf is wrong with you people” movie. Mine is Star Trek VI, which I absolutely loathe)
Mine is Star Trek IV.
You didn’t like the humor? How can you not like Kirk’s attempt to explain away the oddity of Spock by saying “He did a little too much LDS in the 1960s”? or Scotty when instructed to use the mouse after his voice instructions to the 1980s Mac didn’t work starts using the mouse as a microphone, shouting “Computer!” into it?
I say this as a kid who skipped school to go see every new Star Trek movie until The Undiscovered Country and I have to say that I loathed The Voyage Home. At the time I thought they went for way too many easy jokes and fanservice (OH LOOK EVERYONE THE ONLY NAVY SHIP CURRENTLY IN THE BAY IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS ENTERPRISE et al), but as time has gone on I’ve found more and more things to dislike: the absolutely obvious extras in the Federation Council chambers; the overacting by John Schuck, who went Klingon Shakespeare way before Christopher Plummer ever did; the terrible musical score which fit the film like an undersized shoe; the “resolution” of Kirk and co.’s theft of the Enterprise (really? A standing ovation?); the absolutely dumb idea to add an “A” to the new Enterprise’s registry number…I could go on, but really – even The Final Frontier is above it on my list, because at least Star Trek V, as horrible as it is from start to finish, was horrible because everyone was just fantastically bad at what they were doing, rather than being bad because everyone was coasting.I guess I’m still salty about it to this day because of how let down I was as a kid when I saw it. You generally don’t tend to forget those letdowns at that age.
I can see your point, I still love IV as a weird anomaly but it definitely has many threads to pull. V while not great isn’t as bad as people make it out to be. I think I feel saltier about First Contact for the same reasons you dislike IV. And I generally hate when all the main characters pee on the Temporal Prime Directive
First Contact has exactly three things going for it and absolutely nothing else: Jerry Goldsmith’s finest theme music since The Motion Picture; Alice Krige; and Patrick goddamned Stewart. He is never more watchable as Picard, IMO, as he is in First Contact. His Ahab moment gets resolved way too quickly with Alfre Woodard, but right up until that point, when he loads the words, “…here! No further!” with enough venom to melt a starship… god, just chills.The Final Frontier is just bad all around. It’s William Shatner’s Peter Principle moment, and he took everyone else along for the ride. I think the only real high point of the whole movie is a cancer-ravaged DeForest Kelley – he’s the only person in that movie who brings anything but a sense of confusion to the proceedings.The problem with Trek is that Wrath of Khan should have been the final coda for the Captain Kirk era, at least in the movies. Everything after Khan is just a letdown in one way or another, and the less I say about J.J. Abrams’ catastrophic reboot universe, the better for the commentariat. I feel that the fecundity of the Trek universe is profound enough that they could have told new stories with a new ship and crew after Khan with nary a blip on the radar (same way I feel about Star Wars and the Skywalkers, too, by the way).
Love the soundtrack to First Contact. That moment where the Vulcans land brings a tear to my eye. I have very mixed feelings on Cochrane, I like that he wasn’t the great man everyone made him out to be, but he didn’t feel like a futureman at all, he felt like a 90’s loser who happens to like music WE know! And not even one of the many good Roy Orbison songs. As much as I love James Cromwell I wasn’t convinced his character understood advanced science any more than Denise Richards’ Christmas Jones. I like the idea of Mad Picard but they also treat the film like it’s the first time he’s seen the Borg since Best of Both Worlds, which it isn’t at all. The Federation shut the flagship out of the battle instead of having another captain (Riker?!) take over the ship temporarily. Also Picard hasn’t been treated like that before, he’s dealt with the Borg since his assimilation. Picard turns down an opportunity to wipe them out once and for all because despite everything he considers that genocide. An easy fix would’ve been to bring that episode’s events up in one line. It wouldn’t confuse the casual moviegoers too much! I did love Kelley’s performance (and a bold statement for the time about euthanasia for people)Agreed on Star Wars, I was hoping the new trilogy would be set long enough after ROTJ to emphatically NOT answer what happened to Luke and company or the EU books. You could still have them appear as ghosts (maybe not Han but they could come up with something) and keep Chewie (undo his book death) and the droids alive. I still think IV and VI were fine as overall finales to the TOS era, but the original spirit of the show and Kirk’s story did peak at Wrath of Khan.
Trek 6 is wildly overrated and not really all that good. It was just “good enough” to serve as a nice sendoff to the original crew and to course correct after the obviously dreadful 5. But, objectively, I think it rates a B- at best.
I’m not going to go into my deranged ranting about how bad Star Trek VI is – it starts with “they betrayed characters to make a stupid point badly” and then basically descends from there – but I like it less than Star Trek V, and also pretty much all other movies.I have an incredibly deep loathing for Star Trek VI.
I love VI but I think I get where you’re coming from. Kirk suddenly turns into a bigot and remembers he had a son for plot purposes. I do like that he at least isn’t the Gary Stu he was in V and is in the wrong for once, but there wasn’t much build up to it. They do this to Picard too in First Contact, he previously doesn’t have an issue with Borg despite his trauma, but then suddenly does.
Everyone is a bigot! It suddenly turns into a ship of bitter racists. And the motivations are an incoherent mess entirely because they were desperate to maintain the whole “look it’s space Russians!” theme.
Also they laid on the Christopher Plummer quoting Shakespeare a bit too much. At one point he’s just spinning in his chair yelling cliche Shakespeare. Another Sci-Fi pet peeve of mine is when aliens know about/reference not only human things, but human things WE know about (does invoking Hitler or 1939 mean anything to Klingons?). At least throw in some alien references like Aktuh and Melota Also how does Uhura not know any Klingon whatsoever?!
Yeah that’s another thing! Uhara’s job description is to talk to other civilizations! She’s been doing this for decades! She’s a senior crew member on the god damn flagship! How the hell does she not know the language of one of the Federation’s major adversaries? It seems like that would be INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT.Why the hell make one of your main characters totally incompetent?
It’s one thing the JJ films do right, they make Uhura very good at her job. Except they also make her little more than eye candy and a romatic plot for Spock of all people. They even imply she blew him to get her position on the ship. So-nevermind fuck JJ
Similarly, I hate it when aliens insult humans by calling them “monkeys” or “apes”—like, not even to a human’s face, but just in conversations with each other. It may seem like a weirdly specific nitpick, but it happens surprisingly often. Are they aware of earth monkeys? Are they referring to some sort of monkey-equivalent creature from their home planet and it’s just being translated as “monkey” for our benefit, or what?
Hell yeah. Ugh.
The opening of the movie and the title song are incredible but the rest of it is a snoozefest.
Ooh, I thought it was just me that wasn’t in love with Skyfall.Nice to meet others!
If you think Skyfall was over-rated, you’d be correct. Also if you think Skyfall is one of the very WORST ever 007 movies ever made–also correct. Horrible movie. After Casino Royale, Craig’s Bond movies went downhill even faster that Brosnon. For the record, I have liked everyone ever cast as Bond so far, but Brosnon and Craig were screwed over by awful scripts.
Then you are overrating Skyfall. It aspires to mediocrity and does not reach it.
THANK YOU! Literally everyone loses their mind over Skyfall and I thought it was the most mediocre overhyped Bond film ever. Even the theme to the movie is mediocre at best. I never understood why people were so enamored by that movie
My take on SF was that it was a terrible script elevated by a director who wanted to depict Bond in the most honest light possible, which turns out to be regressive, violent, and childish. Yet somehow still compelling. I don’t think Mendes was trying to do a revisionist take as much as he wanted to show what the Bond of the Connery era would like like in the 2000’s, warts and all. So much of SF is horribly regressive, from the rape-y sex, to Bond’s emotionless response to Severine’s murder, to his childish dismay over his car getting blown up. The movie even ends with MI6 basically redecorated in Connery-era fashion. The modernist offices are gone, replaced with the classic quilted doors, M is a man once more, and Moneypenny has given up her delusions of field work and become a secretary. The film treats this as “righting” of things, as if the Dench era was a failed experiment in modern mores and sensibilities. Again, I don’t know that Mendes wants us to believe this is a good thing so much as he’s saying “You want Bond? Well this is what Bond is: chauvinistic, cold, nationalistic, patriarchal. That’s what you wanted, right?”
I thought Craig was great in this. He plays Bond like a changed man.
Bond is a tranny?!?
It’s no Moonraker
Its no View to a Killer either.
A View to a Kill legitimately rules. Awesome villains, awesome theme song, awesome action sequences, Roger Moore was too old but he was the only Bond actor who didn’t seem like he was phoning it in for his final couple Bond movies, he was having as much fun as he was in the early 70s.
How do you tell when a British guy is having fun?I don’t know either
That weird little contortion at the edge of his lips is actually a smirk
I have a rewrite in my head of the film where it’s his last mission, he gets horribly injured in the opening ski chase, and he’s barely keeping up with Zorin. The girl in the film (sorry and RIP to Tanya Roberts) is toned down and he politely rejects her advances in the end realizing how old he is. Or just Timothy Dalton in it instead
ahahahahaha…
Meanwhile Liam Neeson just keeps on going and going …
holy shit were there like 22 cuts in that one shot of him jumping a fence? LOL
I know you don’t typically venture into the comments, Mr. Dowd, but I’d be interested in your take on James Bond movies in general, and whether this movie is a disappointment as a film, or as a Bond film. I scanned the review for something like this, but didn’t read it because *SPOILERS*
I’m not generally interested in them myself, and have only seen a few recent ones. But AMC is playing Casino Royale this week and Skyfall next week, so I decided to go all in on Daniel Craig at least. I’m not really invested at all as a fan, but I did like CR.
As much as I loved Casino Royale, that movie was way too long for an action/thriller — and this one’s 20 minutes longer. That worries me.
Maybe this one ups the poker playing to a full hour!
Wait, maybe we need to factor in the Dowd Handicap when it comes to ratin- latest 007 adventure falls short of Skyfall…jesus fuck. How bad is it?
I don’t know what bubble you live in, but the general reception for Skyfall was pretty good, regardless of your own view. So seeing people hold it in high regard shouldn’t be the least bit surprising.
people also like the mandalorian, so yeah i guess it’s not surprising that skyfall is held in high regard
Casino Royale was a great Bond movie , all the subsequent Bond movies have sucked in one way or another.
Amen. The Craig era has been all crap except CR.
I mean CR was the last Bond film to have a great theme song and not a funeral swan song. They need to stop casting mopey gits as the Bond Theme Singers and instead go back to doing songs like A View To A Kill, The Living Daylights, The World Is Not Enough, Licence To Kill and You Know My Name y’know?
Quantum’s “Another Way to Die” is underrated, imo.
“Another Way to Die” was a banger for about the first 20-30 seconds….until the lyrics kicked inThen it fell off a fucking cliff
Both Quantum and Spectre had much better songs as contenders.
I guess this wasn’t considered, but it should have been! It fits the post- Casino mood so well. And uses solace in the song
It wasn’t considered, because it hadn’t been written yet.For QoS, the producers approached repeatedly Amy Winehouse, who would have definitely been a perfect fit for a Bond singer. She and Mark Ronson started work on a tune, but she already was in no condition to complete anything. When it became obvious, the producers switched to plan B, and asked Jack White, with the condition that he had to deliver the finished track within weeks, as it would then take months for the credits to be built over it.David Arnold had offered Winehouse and Ronson to contribute to their song, and had shared with them one theme he had already written for the soundtrack and that would make a great hook for a song in his mind.A few months after QoS was released, Arnold was asked to produce a new album by Shirley Bassey. He wrote two new songs for the project, including the one you’ve shared. It was a deliberate attempt to write some old school Bond theme song for Shirley Bassey, with the QoS motive he loved and lyrics by Don Black (who wrote the words from songs that go from “Thunderball” to “The World Is Not Enough”).
Absolutely criminal that they chose Sam Smith’s whining instead. A travesty.
You and I might be the only two people who like that song
“You Know My Name” is like the Kool-Aid Man of Bond songs. It just busts through a wall, screaming at the top of its lungs, and is deeply uncool in an endearing dad-rock sort of way…which makes it circle back around to being awesome by the end of it.
Yeah, at first I was like “WTF this isn’t a sexy lady singing” but the chaotic nature and the way they lay out the opening sequence makes it work so well, especially for a “first” Bond film
Bring back Duran Duran! And then they can make a cool music video of their theme. Music videos are still a thing, right?
The World Is Not Enough is one of my favorite Bond theme songs and very underrated
Definitely the greatest distance between the quality of the (excellent) song and the quality of the (terrible) movie.
A View to a Kill begs to disagree, but then again I might be the high man on actually liking The World Is Not Enough (the movie), stupid villain concept and onetime Mrs. Charlie Sheen aside.
Sometimes I think I should reassess my opinion of World is Not Enough. Then I’ll remember onetime Mrs. Charlie Sheen plays a nuclear physicist. Then I’ll remember her character’s name is “Christmas Jones.” Then I’ll remember the final line of the film is “I thought Christmas only comes once a year.”
The real Bond girl in that film is Sophie Marceau, and she’s one of the best Girls/Villains
When Marceau is dead, the film loses all impetus. The fight with Renard sounds totally hollow.
Offsetting how stupid “Mrs. Charlie Sheen—Nuclear Physicist” and the character’s name are, is the fact that she’s the easiest character to ignore in Bond history. She’s very clearly only there for that opening shot where she’s dressed like Tomb Raider (it was a thing at the time) and to be Bond’s consolation prize after the movie’s big plot twist. She reads like an overly aggressive response to a studio note: “What do you mean, Bond isn’t getting it wet at the end?”
Poor Denise did the best she could with that script. Sophie Marceau was the true Bond Girl for that film and she’s fantastic.
Duran Duran’s title song from A View To A Kill is an all-timer, and – really – the only good thing about the movie at all. Moore needed a stunt double to get up from a chair, the titular love interest was young enough to be his granddaughter, Christopher Walken and Grace Jones were absolutely wasted in their roles, and I’m sorry, but if you can’t outrun a blimp, then you deserve to be pitched into the San Francisco bay.The theme song, though, rocks – although when I listen to the John Barry-ized version that runs under the action, I can’t help but laugh.
I agree Moore was too old (and in later interviews with him he even agrees), and yes, the song rocks, but I don’t think Walken and Jones were wasted at all — they really made the movie and are two of the most memorable Bond characters.
Dalton in that film would’ve made all the difference. Moore had a great sendoff with Octopussy, not that continuity ever matters but he saves the freaking world by disarming a nuke in that (while also dressed as a clown) thus, his anonymity as a spy is kaput.
Moore should have retired after FYEO, which would have made for a fine swan song. But EON Productions had very little choice because of Kevin McClory and Sean Connery finally finding a home to produce their Thunderball remake. Opposite Connery, any new face in the part for an official episode would have been slayed. Roger Moore was their only option. Which, of course, doesn’t explain why he would return for A View to a Kill, which was a colossal mistake, especially with the obvious plastic surgery that makes him even less expressive than usual.That said, the funny thing with the clown costume isn’t just that Moore has to put some disguise to go into the circus. It’s that he has something like five minutes to save the world, but reaches the circus ring with full make-up applied, including a little tear under his eye.
I listen to Chris Cornell’s “You Know My Name” a LOT. Often while exercising. It’s such a fun tune and easily belongs in the top 3 Bond songs of all time.
Heh. We can blame that on the fact that we’re now in a post-Bourne world. The original three Bourne films are startlingly fresh compared to Bond (and more fun too, especially that fight in the Parisian apartment…)(And for clarity: The Bourne Identity came out in 2002 and Casino Royale came out in 2006. Without Bourne, Casino Royale probably wouldn’t have been made)
Yeah, it’s a shame that they had to go full-Bond-mode with the sequels. I mean the CR was fantastic as it was borderline down-to-earth. Personally I would have liked to see more of this realistic Bond, with less silly baddies and plots.
quantum was good actually
I disagree
Casino Royale came out when I was just starting college, and Craig’s gritty, back-to-basics take has always been “my” Bond. And, in terms of sheer ability, Craig’s performance remains the best of the lot—when he tries, anyway. But…as I approach my early pre-middle age I’m ready for some cheese. Screw realism, enough with the serialization, and who needs emotional stakes? Give me invisible cars, evil zeppelins, and henchmen with steel chompers. The world is grim enough—bring back Camp Bond, I say. As long as you don’t dub slide whistles into the car chases you’re good.
The Bond series, book and film, has always been about escapism. The books were meant to draw Britain out of its post-WWII gloom by telling stories about a spy jetting around the world, wining and dining and having adventures while people IRL were still rationing food and trying to rebuild their lives. I would almost say it’s time to put this series to bed, but with the pandemic the urge for escapism might be strong enough to keep Bond going, possibly with a lighter tone (doubtful, but we’ll see).
In the books, didn’t James Bond once get beaten up and was left tied to a tree without any pants or something like that?
Whatever Bond likes to do in his own time for entertainment is his own business.
James bondage.
Was that in James Pledges A Fraternity?
Phi Beta Octopussy
Was that hazing week at Spy University?Van Wilder’s James Bond!
That was The Choirboys.
The series needs to go back to basics. Go back to 60s-70s Bond with the tux wearing, casino frequenting, megalomaniacal villains with secret underground lairs, Oddjob style henchmen, “I expect you to die,” but without the sexism/sexist innuendos, and stop trying to compete with contemporary action movies.
And go back to two hours or less run times for fuck’s sake
Bond: “Let’s adjourn to my bedroom”Bond ‘girl’: “We’ve literally just met 15 minutes ago. I mean, yes, you seem somewhat interesting, but why don’t we date for a couple of weeks, see if we have common interests and hobbies, maybe see if we have similar taste in music, and then decide if we want to go farther?”
Or: “Sure, sounds like fun, but I reserve the right to bail if I ever feel uncomfortable, and deal’s off if you don’t have any protection.”
I’ve got….No Time To Dine!
I watched the 60’s Bonds well after Austin Powers and was shocked at just how much material they didn’t exaggerate.
IMO the whole problem is that Casino Royals returned to basics. It was almost universally beloved and the producers took all the wrong lessons from it. Since then, every film has been doling out “basics,” from Moneypenny to Q to megalomaniacal deformed villains. No Time to Die is the first Craig Bond film where the secret underground lairs and fucking gadgets have returned.
The Bond I was first introduced to was Pierce Brosnan’s, which might be why I didn’t become a Bond fan and still haven’t seen any of Craig’s. I liked De Palma’s Mission: Impossible for being so unlike Bond, but then that series shifted to having similarly stupid plots about villains who want to blow up the world.
It sounds like you didn’t become a Bond fan because you hate fun.
If I’m actually having fun I can forgive a lot more in a movie.
Yes, please. Craig’s gritty reboot Bond still feels very stuck in 2006. The series really needs to embrace some fun again.
Moore was mine. Many of the films were just plain silly, but I always liked his too cool for school take on the character. He had balls and could fight when he needed to but had sort of a bemused take on everything going on around him. I enjoy Craig’s take but he’s a bit too much of a brawler.
I 100% fully agree with you but there’s no way the Broccolis have the vision for that. I think our next few Bond outings will be Marvel movie wannabes.
I think our next few Bond outings will be Marvel movie wannabes. That would jibe with series tradition: always playing catch up to whatever movie trend is big. Live and Let Die comes out well after blaxploitation is dead. Moonraker two years behind Star Wars, Dark and Gritty Bond long after the Borne movies have cooled. So doing Marvel after the apex of the Marvel movies is 100% on brand.
I don’t want cheese, but I do want escapism. I want 60s Bond. Able to go anywhere in the world and get with any woman. I want a dark Bond, “an assassin for the good guys”, but not a gritty one. I want him strutting through fabulous casinos, not staggering through the slums of Rio.
“I’m ready for some cheese” MILD SPOILERS No Time to Die features the line “Q, hack into Blofeld’s bionic eyeball”. It’s definitely not all grim realism. (I don’t know what Dowd’s thinking either – Craig seems to be having a huge amount of fun in this one)
What sucks is that stunt was a really good one and hard to do, and they ruined that stuntperson’s hard liferisking work!
I’m still going to see it. I fucking love the Bond movies without taking them too seriously. They’re always entertaining and a fun way to spend a few hours.I’ve generally really enjoyed Craig’s era, even Quantum of Solace has its moments (including some absolutely fantastic landscapes and locations) amid its super ropy plot.Either way, it’s the end of an era and I look forward to see what they do next.It’s amazing looking back how much things have changed in the 15 years he’s been in the role. I saw Casino Royale at the end of my second year of uni!
$500 says that Regge jean paul, or whatever his name is, from Bridgerton is gunna be the next 007.
For giving it a C and describing it compared to other Bond films you really do just make it sound like most other Bond films (nonsensical plots, poorly written women, the main actor clearly tired of the role).I think you just hate Bond films.
maybe they’re referring to the hepatitis Bond must surely be filled with after decades of drunken whoremongering.
I dunno, isn’t an “average” grade appropriate if something fits the template?
maybe, truthfully, the bond movies aren’t all that good?
CASINO ROYALE has become my favorite Bond film second only to…DR. NO. Not because of that first outing’s story, but Connery’s utterly cold, brutal portrayal (which slipped a bit with each successive film, no matter how good or bad). Cold and brutal is what makes that character work, even if he’s not very human at times. But CR is also a gorgeous and smartly-built film, period. And I think it’s a fucking shame that every outing after CR has seemed lesser by degrees.Though…I thought I recalled SKYFALL being a good film, until I read some of the comments below and had the realization just how badly written it is. Thanks, AV Club responders!
Casino Royale is a strong contender for the best-made James Bond movie, but “best-made” isn’t really what I’m looking for in a Bond film, which is why I’m team Roger Moore all the way (The Spy Who Loved Me will probably always be my GOAT Bond film, personally).
good call about the Spy who Loved Me; I also liked The Man with the Golden Gun and Live and Let Die a lot despite their excessive cheesiness—how can you not like Roger Moore in those high-waisted suits? LOLbut Daniel Craig will always be my #1 Bond (ahead even of Connery) because he was the first one who looked like he could actually beat someone in a physical fight.
Live and Let Die is really great. That one and For Your Eyes Only did show a bit more of a serious Bond. I liked that.
LIVE AND LET DIE and DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER are personal favorites for *really* different reasons. But I would not place either at the top of my Letterboxd list of Bond films.
“Diamonds Are Forever” is a least-favorite of mine, I really don’t like anything about it. But by FAR it’s a favorite Bond song and opening sequence.
Yeah it’s really only good for the opening. Also had the worst Bond Girl
Jill St. John? So…not Bond girl material. Not coincidentally, first American BG as well, right?
When they let Moore be serious he nailed it. FYEO and Octopussy are my favorites of his for that reason. Roger Moore was able to pull off a tense scene disarming a nuke WHILE IN A CLOWN COSTUME. I don’t think any other Bond actor could’ve done that.
Which is nuts because Connery was an actual professional bodybuilder before his acting career.
It has numerous problems and whatnot but I have a massive soft spot for “Live and Let Die”.
Still, The Spy Who Loved Me is the best-made Moore Bond, thanks in part to a slight dip in silliness factor between The Man with the Golden Gun’s slide whistle (it was first Bond I saw and for a long time my favorite) and Moonraker’s…everything.
The Spy Who Loved Me also has the greatest opening title song.
The Spy Who Loved Me will always be the GOAT of double-O-seven movies.
Anointing Roger Moore as the best Bond usually has more to do with when you first starting watching Bond films as a sentient being. Having encountered Connery first, I could never get past Moore’s safari suits, cigars and lingering trail of The Saint.
TSWLM is absolutely the quintessential Bond movie: it has all the things that make the thing work. Big opening, cool gadgets, bombastic bad guy, scary main henchman, secret island lair, awesome car, insanely beautiful women… if I had to show someone one Bond movie to represent them all, TSWLM is the winner. Connery is the best Bond, but The Spy Who Loved Me is the best Bond movie.
Mine is From Russia With Love. Early enough to have the formula but fresh enough to try stuff not done before or since. Also Robert Shaw and Lotta Lenya, incredible.
Just got back from NttD, and this is exactly where I’ve fallen with the movie. It is incredibly well made, but I just didn’t really… like it all that much? It’s so long that you get to linger on all the nonsense in the back half. And a well structured one take isn’t enough for a final Bond setpiece. He’s just firing into hallways, and there’s hardly any actual stunt work after Cube in the first 45 minutes.
If you want to revisit your opinion after watching it, go ahead. But don’t let a bunch of people on the internet tell you how you feel about a movie.
I’m still looking forward to seeing it, Yoda the Pesky Elf, in no small part b/c as a film critic, A.A. Dowd makes a great Sour Owl Poop.
The striking thing about Casino Royale is how closely they adapted the novel. They tacked on a first act (all the Bahamas/Miami stuff), reordered some stuff (Bond meets Vesper before they together meet Mathis) and inserted a couple fight scenes; but basically it’s a modern adaptation of the book. Hold ‘Em instead of Baccarat; a secret password instead of a hidden cheque; etc.
The subsequent movies haven’t made any goddam sense. CR does.
Hold ‘Em instead of BaccaratI remember this scene being incredibly cringe, a dumbed-down, dated-the-moment-they-wrote-it attempt to ride the coattails of ESPN’s then-current attempt to make poker happen.
I loved how they were able to flesh out Casino Royale yet keep it so close to Fleming’s novel. My favorite Bond films are those that retain Fleming’s plot (or the spirit, at least). The stories and villains were all distinctly different, pure pulp.
It seems like screenwriters can’t come up with an original Bond story without pilfering what came before – how many times has Roald Dahl’s You Only Live Twice script been dusted off? Three? Four times? And how many non-Fleming Bond titles involved “time” and “death”? Tomorrow Never Dies, Die Another Day, No Time to Die.
And with Craig’s Bond films, the screenwriters are guilty of two of my sequel pet peeves that have been absent in past Bond films:1. Constantly looking back at previous installments (looking at you Spider-Man 3 and Dark Knight Rises)
2. Personally tying the villain to the heroes (every Spider-Man movie)Bond is out to save the world from global terrorists, the odds that he is personally connected to any of them is slim, let alone several of them. It’s an unnecessary attempt to increase the conflict, and contrary to Fleming’s Bond as a blank slate. It worked in Licence to Kill as a one-off (especially since Bond never truly avenged his own wife’s death) but it doesn’t work for 3 films in a row.
No Time to Die isn’t a bad movie, but it isn’t a very good Bond movie. It attempts to subvert expectations while, at the same time, referencing other Bond stories/films/music cues. But it relies on previous installments to do the work – it’s a really long epilogue, not a complete film.
Skyfall had what I think is THE dumbest opening shot in all Bond flicks, if not all of cinema; what professional or any person in the pursuit of someone dangerous, presumably armed, would just jut out into an open hallway, full body exposed, to the sound of the most hilarious ‘tudum’? Honestly, for the first few seconds I thought I was watching a cheesy dream sequence.
So you believe that “tudum!” to be diegetic?
Maybe if it was diegetic another day.
No Time to Diegetic.
Oh, and if I remember correctly it also had one of the dumbest closing scenes. M, England’s top spy, decides to leave her hiding spot in an undiscovered secret chamber TO WAVE A FLASHLIGHT AROUND IN AN OPEN FIELD AT NIGHT and is immediately caught by the bad guys because SHE WAVED A FLASHLIGHT AROUND IN AN OPEN FIELD AT NIGHT.
Honestly, a lot of that “cold, brutal” character in Connery’s Dr. No performance feels like a side effect of him attempting to suppress his Scottish accent. He makes no attempt in From Russia With Love and immediately comes across as more convivial, even when he and Robert Shaw are locked in mortal combat.
The best Bond film of all time is clearly Goldeneye.
I agree that Casino Royale was the best Craig Bond film, not only because of Craig’s take on the character but because the match up with the villain was reasonable. Le Chiffre was human, so the contention between him and Bond was realistic enough to be interesting. Every subsequent entry fell prey to Hollywood’s need to make each film “more”. As a result, each villain became more and more super-human, and therefor Bond had to become super-human as well.
I think the “More” (no, not Moore) problem is spot-on.Looking back at each generation of Bond movies, I believe I enjoyed each actor’s first outing the most, and it’s downhill (slowly or quickly) from there.And not because the actor was making it worse (necessarily; though Roger arguably hammed it up in some of his later movies), rather because the filmmakers were after a spectacle bigger than the last one.
I even quite like Lazenby’s only tour in OHMSS; no doubt subsequent movies would’ve diminished him too.
I’d place From Russia With Love slightly ahead of Dr. No, simply because it has a better story, a better location with much of it taking place in Istanbul, and a better henchman in Red Grant (the always great Robert Shaw). Joseph Wiseman’s Dr. No was certainly a bad guy and somewhat intimidating, but Shaw’s Grant was a genuinely scary dude. He was basically an Anti-Bond, a bit rougher around the edges but just as lethal.
A much better story, better villains (maybe the only Bond where it isn’t him vs. the big bad—IIRC, Bond only ever confronts SPECTRE lieutenants and henchmen) and the character’s coldness comes off in a more interesting way.Dr. No’s good, but it’s still figuring things out. The James Bond theme is trotted out for things like Connery shaving and uneventful driving scenes.
Shaw’s Grant was a genuinely scary dude. He was basically an Anti-Bond, a bit rougher around the edges but just as lethal.
OMG, Saltier! Grant was Daniel Craig’s Bond’s mirror image!Now that I think of it, I could see Robert Shaw as Grant and Craig as Bond sitting at bar, nursing the injuries they gave each other and polishing off a bottle of vodka between them while chatting about The Good Old Days….
Definitely two sides of the same coin.
From Russia with Love might be my favorite Connery Bond film, it’s just so much more toned down and more about the espionage than the gadgets and ‘splosions
Agreed. The film leaned much more toward tradecraft than gadgets. The only thing Bond got from Q branch was the briefcase. And Grant had his watch with the handy hidden garrote, which I’m pretty sure was the first gadget watch in the movies. In the book, it was a Girard-Perregaux with day, date, month and moon phase complications. A pretty high-end watch for a guy who wore cheap suits.
Skyfall is great at what it tries to do, which is delivering a slick, stylish action film. The writing is ridiculous, but that’s true of many of the better Bond films.
Skyfall is my favorite Bond film in the way it was made. Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins could film a day at the DMV and it would be better-looking than most movies released today. I mean, just absolute visual splendor.The plot, though, is just goofy. Which is to say, it’s a total James Bond joint.I think Daniel Craig did his best work in Casino Royale, but really, every Bond actor did their best work in their first outing. The Law of Diminishing Returns is in clear effect in this franchise, and maybe George Lazenby is the luckiest of them all since he only did one movie. I would argue that Lazenby is in the running for the best Bond actor of them all, to be honest.
Dalton is best.Lazenby is a close second
Your point about the first outings…yeah, that’s solid. I had to think about it for minute, but totally agree.
I saw ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE when I was too young, and re-watched it decades later and loved it and Lazenby.
OHMSS is a good film despite (not because of) Lazenby. I’m with Craig, who, when asked by Lazenby what he thought of his take on Bond, said “it’s one of the best movies”.
Sadly, the best Bond film would have been a Connery-led OHMSS, filmed after Thunderball.
I said nearly the same thing (“1st outing is best”) before I read your post — great minds thinking alike, and all that. :-)Quite agreed on Lazenby, I think he was underappreciated for a while, but people have come around somewhat over time.
Yeah I enjoy it as a Home Alone-type film (another classic film which has flawed logic) rather than a Bond movie
“Cold and brutal is what makes that character work, even if he’s not very human at times.”I love Dalton in License To Kill, brutal as fuck, even if the movie itself has been accurately described as a Cannon movie (which is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but doesn’t feel quite Bond-ish).
License To Kill, brutal as fuck, even if the movie itself has been accurately described as a Cannon movie
Naw, Miller – more like a Bruckheimer or Michael Bay movie, given how notoriously cheap Golan and Globus were.
That’s just a matter of budget, and at the time, I honestly don’t think the action in Bond films was quite up to Bruckheimer standards. The point is that story-wise, License to Kill could easily star Chuck Norris. The main difference would be that when a helicopter explodes in Golan & Globus’s License to Kill, you’d see the smoking helicopter fly out of sight over a convenient hill, and then someone would set off some explosives on the other side of the hill. Bond films have the budget to actually blow up a helicopter.
License to Kill could easily star Chuck Norris.
Yes, but it’s so much better with Timothy Dalton, who can actually, you know, act.
What? You mean you wouldn’t be a fan of Chuck having exactly the same facial expression when he’s getting sexed up by Talisa Soto as he does when he’s looking at Felix Leiter’s mangled leg?
he could act, and I have heard his movies were intended to be darker and more violent like the Craig movies, but he had zero charisma. I still can’t really watch the Dalton movies, I just lose interest after a few minutes.
he could act, and I have heard his movies were intended to be darker and more violent like the Craig movies, but he had zero charisma. I still can’t really watch the Dalton movies, I just lose interest after a few minutes.
The crazy thing is, you see Dalton in other roles, and the man drips charisma. He just wasn’t charismatic as Bond, and I don’t know if that was a choice he made to try to differentiate himself from Moore, or if it was just bad direction.
yeah he was awesome in Hot Fuzz, he seemed to be having a blast, and if I had to pick a way to die (or be horribly wounded) in a movie, it’d definitely be with a miniature church spire through my jaw.
Hot Fuzz was a revelation, because given how uncomfortable he looked with the Bond one-liners, I never would’ve suspected he had those comic chops. The first thing I saw that made me feel like I’d been shortchanged by Dalton’s performance as Bond was seeing him in The Lion in Winter, where Dalton—then in his very early 20s—has to hold the screen in confrontations with Peter O’Toole and Anthony Hopkins. You see that and you think, “That guy should’ve been the best Bond of them all.” I think the fact that his tenure as Bond coincided with the AIDS crisis might’ve hamstrung his performance, since they toned Bond’s sexuality way down.
I think of all the Bonds he was the one with the most dramatic and stage experience, it would be like asking Ian McKellan to play Bond
Chuck would’ve been a good sidekick who can kick
It just hits all those 80’s high notes. I really loved the partner he had in that film too, and early Benicio Del Toro, and the televangelist played by Wayne Newton
Dalton and Craig are the two best Bonds in my book — even Connery was usually let down by his scripts, and the need to turn him into a PLAYBOY walking jokebook.If the series had stayed with the Bond of From Russia With Love, then Connery would have been the best Bond hands-down, but he got weighed down by the gizmos and the wisecracks, and his increasingly fraught relationship with Cubby Broccoli.
The Bond in From Russia still had that 60’s playboy quip to him, but it wasn’t cartoony yet. Like, he figures out a clue because someone paired the wrong wine with fish, something only a 60’s playboy who went to finishing school would notice. He pulls off some one-liners but they’re not nearly as bad as future films
I feel like you’d like License To Kill. It’s not a perfect movie, but it definitely shows a no nonsense Bond. Dalton was really good at this….I think the world wasn’t ready for a more literary take on Bond (and his movies were let down a bit by the studios I think…..there’s a somewhat rushed/low budget feel at times).
CR’s opening sequence was spectacular. Visually stunning and a great introduction to a new, still-raw proto-Bond. It grabbed you by the shirt collar but also left room for the Bond character to grow/evolve.
I loved Casino Royal and thought Skyfall was okay but yeah, Craig’s era has been one of diminishing returns since the first outing. I don’t think some of the villains have helped. The ways they use them feel like they could be more creative.
Many people share your high praise for Casino Royale, so I’m not looking to argue (people like what they like), but I really hated that movie. It’s every bit as dated and trend-chasing —with its parkour and its “gritty re-imagining” and its Texas Hold ‘Em and its lovingly photographed Sony Ericsson flip phones— as Moonraker was when it tried to shamelessly copy Star Wars. This many years later, I can’t believe people still like Casino Royale so much, especially since the same director made a far superior Bond introduction with Goldeneye.
Craig’s tenure has been marred by a dated premiere, a writers’ strike sequel, and 3 straight attempts to send him off into the sunset, leading to a convoluted meta-storyline that doesn’t add up and isn’t remotely earned. Assuming this one is as dull as this review says, it will probably end up that Skyfall was Craig’s only properly good Bond movie.
Dr. No is my favorite Bond film as well. The first 3 Bond films are almost perfect.
Skyfall was too showy, sentimental and meta, and Spectre tried to carry on those trends and failed harder.I love Craig but the whole point of Casino Royale was that he’s a brutal assassin who is even colder and more cynical by the end of the movie. This trend toward making him more human (and more Batman) misses the point of the character.
This may be the first bond film since Moonraker I will not see in the theater.
Say what you want about the movie but “Her tombstone literally explodes” is the band name of the day.
Jesus, Spectre. Don’t remind me.Monica Bellucci was such a better fit age-wise for Daniel Craig, that when he winds up proclaiming his love for Lea Seydoux, a character thinner than literal paper, it feels like the boss getting down on one knee for his 22-year-old secretary. Just so creepy and wrong and unearned.
1. Jesus? Spectre? Damn, buddy, pick a Savior and stick with Him!
2. Getting down on one knee and proclaiming my love for paper-thin Lea Seydoux has gotten me some unwanted police and media attention.
Wait, Monica Bellucci was in Spectre?(Googles and confirms) Oh, yeah. I guess I don’t remember Spectre at all.
I actually felt bad for Seydoux coming in after Bellucci, who looked as if she had mileage on the clock and actually had first hand experience of passion, punishment and sudden death (that night time walk from the house into the garden carrying what she probably thought was her last brandy). But actually she’s treated just as badly as any other Bond ‘girl’ – 007 promises to to protect her from her late husband’s masters and then beds her and palms her off on the CIA.
I want to see the reality of that situation turn into a romantic tragicomedy. A 55 year old Bond not being able to relate to a young woman who wants to party, do E, twerk, be bisexual, and eat hot chip and lie. All Bond wants is to be asleep by 10.
I’m pretty sure 55 year olds wouldn’t object to bisexual young women. And hell bisexual Bond is practically canon after Skyfall…
Right? They had me until Hot Chip, I can’t stand those guys.
I haven’t seen Spectre, but saw NTTD yesterday. Was Seydoux that mopey in Spectre? One expression for the whole film. Malek wasn’t any better. But despite those two I think it was a pretty good film.And with respect to Bond’s feelings for her, Bond sleeps with dozens of women in the films, but pre-Craig era, the one that means far more to him is Diana Rigg’s Tracy. And you can accept that, based on Rigg’s performance. But nothing about Seydoux justifies her having that effect on a serial womaniser. Yes, she’s great looking, but so are all Bond girls.
They obviously tried to finally deliver with Spectre/NTTD the OHMSS/YOLT arc from the novels, the one that was bungled in the films, as they first shot a film version of YOLT that left out the revenge thing, then made a faithful adaptation of OHMSS, then had no reason to continue, with Connery back for one more film (Diamonds Are Forever), the personal story that had been started with Lazenby.Madeleine made for a poor love interest in Spectre, especially as the character was underwritten. But they had no other choice if they wanted to reuse a woman from one of Craig’s previous entries. That’s also why they spend a lot of time to reestablish her here, as the audience would have otherwise very little idea of who she was after five years.For Blofeld, it was the elephant in the (interrogation) room. At least, they acknowledged that the character had been damaged beyond repair because of the stupid foster brother thing from Spectre, but Blofeld and Spectre are too much part of the Bond mythology not to be in a movie when they’re still supposed to exist. Hence, Safin, who’s supposed to be an even more ruthless villain than Blofeld was, and allows the story not to be burdened by a Blofeld who seems pettier than really dangerous. And the shared story between Bond and Blofeld from the novels is transposed to a shared story between Safin and Madeleine.
I’ve really enjoyed the Craig Bond series, I like the damaged emotionally unstable take on the franchise. Plus he brought a certain ruggedness to the role that was missing since …..forever. Now they can circle back and reboot with someone younger but who?
Jacob Tremblay.I considered Jackson Robert Scott as a funnier option, but that was countered by lower name recognition.
The hot dude who just left that show Bridgerton would be a good choice.
If Jumpy from In A Valley of Violence is still available, he would be an ideal (if unconventional) choice.
Henry Golding!
Team Henry Golding all the way. He’d make a great Bond.
LOL that reminds me of how all the fanboys lost their shit over a *blonde* James Bond, but I’m sure they’d be fine with an Malaysian Bond. Having said that, his action-heavy turn in Snake Eyes did seem a bit like a Bond audition.
Jack Bannon from Pennyworth
Goldeneye and Casino Royale are the only Bond films that I think truly could stand on their own without the cachet of the franchise. Probably Thunderball too. And that admittedly might have more to do with the first two being kind of soft reboots and the last being the one that really established the franchise (at least at the box office).But that’s just it, a Bond movie is a Bond movie. I can’t think of a single one I really didn’t like. No Time to Die comes with as close as you can get to a guarantee that it will be worth watching.
“On Her Majesties Secret Service” stands on it’s own as well, even overcoming Lazenby’s Mattel plastic toy version of Bond.
It really is something that it ended up being one of the best Bond movies *despite* him. I put this opposite the two Dalton movies that ended up being good *because* of him….elevated them.
Savalas is also the best Blofeld, IMHO, his overexposure as Kojack in the 70’s makes one forget how good of a character actor he was playing villains and side-kicks in the 60’s.There’s a vocal minority that says if Connery has decided to continue the role into OHMSS the film would be a drop dead classic, but I don’t agree with them. As seen in YOLT, Connery was bored with Bond by 1967 and while SC is a great actor I don’t think he would have been able to portray Lazenby’s vulnerability in the role.
I agree. I think it would have been another “by the numbers” take. They tried some new things in OHMSS and I’m not sure they would have been so adventurous had SC come back. I kind of look at DAF as an example of that…they just went right back to the old formula and SC seemed bored.
OHMSS probably could have been improved with maybe a 10 min shorter run time, just to tighten it up a little. But that’s minor…it’s really good!
DAF, good lord that’s a Bond film that has not aged well, you can almost see Connery checking and double checking his bank account during the entire movie to make sure that Cubbies checks didn’t bounce.
yup. combine his indifference with some obvious aging/weight gain. And then throw in some pretty bad early 70s fashion + Vegas and it just feels tired and washed out. Live and Let Die was so much more stylish and had better sets. SC squinting in the dessert sun was just “blah”.
The thing that always sticks out to me with OHMSS are the on-location shots and lighting. M’s office looks like an actual office! The institute is an actual building in the Alps! It doesn’t feel as much like moving from one studio lot set to the next.
There are other parts of the direction that are… ehhh. The way they speed up the action scenes and cut to different angles gets pretty disorienting. The fact that a sizable chunk of the movie is someone doing a voiceover for Lazenby throws me every time. The other voiceovers, the Louis Armstrong sequence… it’s definitely different, and it doesn’t all work.
But the stuff that does work, works REALLY well in my opinion. Diana Rigg is just stellar. Telly Savalas is wonderful. There’s real tension in the cat-and-mouse chases on the ski slopes and in Switzerland, and the strike on Piz Gloria at the end – with the Bond theme flourishing – is legitimately one of my favorite third act action sequences in any Bond film.
I thought Dalton made a terrific Bond and wish he got the chance to make a couple more. If there is a kind of second tier of “good but not quite a classic” Bond movies I think both of his are near the top of it. I still misspell the word license about half the time because of that movie.
Same. It seemed LTK needed one more coat of polish on the story or editing. I can’t quite put my finger on it. I just generally think it was the studio was having financial troubles and cut corners.
In a better timeline Dalton starts at View to a Kill and gets another film between Licence and GoldenEye
Cough Diana Rigg Cough.
Sounds like it’s the quality of an average Bond with the added weight of Craig continuity and being an ending.
“….a hunk of patriotic human weaponry.”My god Dowd, you’ve done it again. +1
That would make a great movie title. The song would have to be by some indie band
Bonds are like busses. Another one will come along soon to give us a ride.
I still don’t get the hype for Craig’s Bond movies. Skyfall was great, top 5 Bond movie ever. Casino Royale was good but not amazing or anything and the other two were bad and then meh…..I still prefer Moore, Sean or Pierce to Craig and fuck even License to Kill was better than 3 of Craig’s 4 Bond movies I’ve seen.
I’ve posted this once or twice a year for several years now, but I remain astonished that the people running the Bond movies decided that what they wanted to do in the wake of the smash success of Casino Royale (and the inevitable writer’s-strike-affected stumble of Quantum of Solace, though I must note that I had a better time in theater with that one then with either of the next two) is turn the serious into an extended rumination on how much it sucks to be 007, like it was all really a film school project on the meta-textual impact celebrity has on how films are made and how we watch them, as the movies bent themselves to reflect how much Daniel Craig resented making them. Five movies, fifteen years, and I THINK (can’t remember Spectre clearly at the moment) he will have either quit or been temporarily presumed to be disloyal in all of them.
I think we have to blame Craig’s Hamlet-like approach to playing the character (driven, to be perfectly fair, by the fact that he’s suffered significant injuries in each of his Bond films, including No Time To Die). If I remember right, his original contract was three films, and so the “I’m too old for this shit” theme of Skyfall was in part based on the possibility it might be his swan song, in part on Dench actually leaving the series. Then he signed on for a two-film extension, and almost immediately regretted it. During pre-release press for Skyfall, he actually kind of hoped the movie would tank so that they’d let him out of the contract.
Yeah, it was definitely weird to go from the “Introducing 007″ two-parter of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace directly into “007 is Too Old” with nothing in-between . . . and then two more “007 is Too Old” movies. If seems like they needed at least a couple of movies where Bond gets to have fun being Bond before he gets all disillusioned and over all this spy shit.
I think Craig’s supposed dislike of playing 007 is over-hyped, it’s just that filming those movies have been really hard on him, so at the end of each one (right when all the pre-release press is happening) he’s been kind of traumatized and beat up.
It’s weird that the Mission: Impossible movies had a very similar pattern, and managed to break out of it, where the Craig Bonds didn’t. Ethan Hunt’s introduced in the first movie, and by the second one there’s already meta-commentary from his former IMF colleague about how predictable he is. In M:I3, Hunt’s behind a desk training new agents, he gets pulled in for one last job, and he gets married, all of which would have made for a decent end point if the series stopped there. Then in Ghost Protocol, he’s now officially too old for this shit, all his tech fails him, he gets beat to hell, and Jeremy Renner’s there, apparently to take the handoff as the new series lead. But by the time Rogue Nation comes around, Hunt’s gotten over all this “getting old” and “being retired from spying” crap and is just going on more or less as if the previous two movies hadn’t happened. Cruise decided he had more Mission: Impossible in him, and the series is better for it.I love Skyfall, but it might’ve worked better if, instead of Bond becoming disillusioned with spying and quitting the service, they’d been able to copy the promising opening of Die Another Day, and have Craig’s Bond get captured, instead. It would’ve served the same story purpose of weakening Bond and shaking his faith in Queen and country, but without repeating the beat of Bond quitting, which we’d already had briefly in Casino Royale.
Skyfall was less a meditation on Craig’s Bond being too old than on the franchise getting old and supposedly out of touch with the current world. It was released for the 50th anniversary, and the story asked what was the point of having a professional assassin while a lot of things in the intelligence world now imply hacking.
Yeah by Skyfall he was considered too old and banged up, and had gone AWOL for months to start the film.
Have James Bond movies ever been genuinely good, as opposed to just spectacles, with their theme songs and lead actors and femme fatales and stupid stupid fucking villains? Sounds like par for the course. I’d much rather watch Austin Powers.
I’d say that Casino Royale, From Russia with Love and maaayyyyybe On Her Majesty’s Secret Service count as “good” in an objective sense and can be shown without apology to people who have never seen the films before and have nothing invested in the character. The rest of them all have their moments, but are as you say to some extent interchangeable with their parodies.
OHMSS has the all time best one-liner (he had lots of guts!) Also best Bond Girl by a mile played by the irreplaceable Diana Rigg
Hollywood always gets tricked into thinking people want 3 hour movies. We don’t. “Wow, Titanic was a hit! If they think THAT was 3 hours — wait’ll they see Meet Joe Black!” Endgame was a special case — it was wrapping up 22 movies. Wonder Woman 1984 did not need to be over 2 hours. Maybe if this were the last ever Bond film you could justify that runtime. Otherwise, you’re making a big mistake.
If I’m going to the theater I have a bit more patience for it. If I’m streaming it then I know it’s going to take me three or four sessions to get through it and as a result probably won’t appreciate it as much due to the interruptions.What’s funny is once upon a time studios were getting shit for making 90 minute films that left people feeling ripped off (and allowing theaters to cram in an extra showing each day).
this is literally the only thing dimming my enthusiasm for this movie. I don’t like paying $15 to see a movie but giving me MORE of said movie will NOT make me happier, it will only damage my bladder.
Ben Hur [1959] is 3 hours 32 minutes but you do get INTERMISSION! [with trumpets].Did Kenneth Branagh’s interminable Hamlet have an intermission? I can’t remember. All I can remember is those long long LONG shots of the army in the distance getting supposedly closer. Wikipedia says that movie was 4h 2m but I reckon it was a lot longer…
It did have an intermission! (we saw it in the theater)
Oh, man. I’m so ready to see this and the thought of waiting who-knows-how-long until it’s streaming at home is making me crazy. I’m already off work next Friday when it opens and I’ll be a week past my booster shot. This just may be the movie that gets me back to the theater.
I wasn’t aware that this one’s villain was named “Lucifer Satan”. Oh dear.Obviously the Bond franchise has a history of silly character names but that indignity was usually reserved for “the girl”. Seems like a strange decision to bring that back and then apply it to a character who’s meant to be taken seriously.
Tell that to Auric Goldfinger.
wait you’re telling me the guy named Lyutsifer Safin isn’t the hero?
Really not sure why Craig bothered with this – isn’t he on record as saying he didn’t want the role anymore? Why did he come back for a fourth film if he’s spending it looking bored and like he’d rather be anywhere else?
So we’ve gone from Kinja not showing us links to where folks replied to Kinja not notifying us when we get our precious stars? Jesus Christ.
Never mind stars, Kinja also seems to be 50/50 on whether it’s going to even let you know about replies at this point. 🙁
I gave you a precious star for your comment which I wholeheartedly agree with. You’re welcome. 😉
What a shock that AV Club didn’t like it when most reviews have been very positive. Maybe if Radiohead did the theme song….
I’ve found all of Craig’s outings super fun, even Spectre! So I’m sure I’ll be a sucker for this. But I think looking back, taking a serialized approach was a mistake. Mission Impossible has done so well with episodic, self-contained missions. That’s what Bond used to be, and even though I can get down with the melodrama it’s not what audiences want and it’s not what makes the franchise great IMO.
These comments are so spicy, but for some reason I like to love every single Craig Bond movie. Yes, Spectre and Solace are a mess, but I still LIKE THEM. I don’t know. I think everybody has something they have a complete block for, and mine is the Craig Bond movies. I find them just endlessly rewatchable. I’m so excited for No Time to Die
Well, the Gizmodo review was favorable. So, awaiting Jezebel’s review, The Root’s review, Takeout’s review…But not Deadspin.
Only AV Club and i09 review movies I’m afraid.
Not true, but Jez (and the Root too, to some extent iirc) only reviews very occasionally things of narrow interest to their individual writers. And they are always, ALWAYS, 100% useless.
Without the comments section I have zero reason to read Deadspin
I love James Bond. At this point in the life of the series, i think the writers and directors should be able to set the movies whenever they want. I would kill for another 60’s set Bond, or an 80’s Bond.
I know you can’t always go by this, but the marketing for the movie is awful and it’s given me real trepidation. They’re almost marketing it like a cheap late 90s action movie and makes it feel like they have no confidence in the movie itself.Maybe they just ran out of marketing dollars. Maybe it’s good that they don’t know how to market it because it means it’ll actually be interesting. But a review like this definitely fits into those trepidations.Side note: As with other commenters, I don’t get the Skyfall love. I’d even argue Casino Royale is the only good film of the Craig era, so good perhaps that its goodwill extends over some of the sequels.
Whenever marketing relies on past films (last Hobbit, Rise of Skywalker) I assume the film is going to bomb.
i think that mostly has to do with them having to market it for like 2 years longer than they expected.
Hmm… nanobots are a disappointing threat since they already did that in Everything or Nothing.
I like Daniel Craig as an actor; he seems well on his way to being the first Bond since Connery to establish himself as a leading man outside the franchise. But oy veh, it’s time to call it a wrap on this iteration of Bond. The whole, “let’s have the hero constantly moody and pensive over his traumas” trope was never anyothing more than an attempt to align Bond closer to the Bourne movies, which were still being talked about as new and innovative in 2006, when Casino Royale came out.And while we’re on that topic, it’s worth mentioning that at about 15 years, the length of Craig’s tenure has exceeded Roger Moore. Arguably, the world has changed far more dramatically in those years than it did over Moore’s: In 2006 Bush was president, the UK was still part of the EU, nobody had an iPhone yet, and Donald Trump was hosting a TV game show.
Current events have never really been Bond’s forte – when the series does attempt to incorporate them it usually feels more like a gimmick than a real improvement (looking at you, Man With the Golden Gun and your energy crisis McGuffin). However, I would argue that the Craig Bonds, with their emphasis on soap opera style storylines about 007’s life, loves, and losses, feel less grounded in anything approaching present reality than anything in the series has since the cold war ended. And remember, this was a series that needed to be rebooted after featuring an invisible car. So that’s saying something.
Arguably, the world has changed far more dramatically in those years
than it did over Moore’s: In 2006 Bush was president, the UK was still
part of the EU, nobody had an iPhone yet, and Donald Trump was hosting a
TV game show.
When Moore started in 1973, nobody had a home computer and VCRs were generally only found in TV stations. When Moore left, home computers like the Apple II and Commodore 64 (and in the UK various machines like the Sinclair Spectrum and BBC micro) were in millions of homes and even more people had VCRs. I’d say that was a far bigger cultural change than just a different Republican being US president and a fancier cell phone being available. The UK being part of the EU and then not I’m sure was important to non-UK EU citizens living in the UK (and UK citizens living abroad like the large UK retirement community in Spain), but not so much to other people.
Brosnan has kind of done this, he’s never really outdone James Bond but he’s been prominent in some hit films since then.
Tomorrow Never Dies’ Bond teams up with Chinese spy in a new era of Sino-Anglo cooperation to combat… media disinformation/information monopoly(!) had an incredibly short shelf life and is aging worse by the day.
Let’s celebrate 1997’s beginning to 50 yrs of Hong Kong autonomy and freedom, oof.
Casino RoyaleQuantum of SolaceSkyfallSpectreis not just ordered by release date
The really enjoyable Bond movies all have one thing in common: They make you want to travel the world. You can take 30 minutes of footage from the movie, add a Rick Steves voice-over, and have a really compelling travel show.That’s why Casino Royale and Skyfall work, whereas Quantum of Solace and Spectre don’t. (Spectre does have that great Italy sequence, but otherwise not enough good location shots.)
The really enjoyable Bond movies all have one thing in common: They make you want to get loaded and blow something up.
I don’t know.
QoS goes to Haiti, Bolivia, Austria, Siena, and another location in Italy I can’t recall.
Spectre and Skyfall do hit a few different spots but both suffer from too much London/UK. I’d argue Spectre mostly escapes/explores enough, but Skyfall not nearly enough.
Oh, they all go to great places. The question is if they make those places feel like glamorous, attractive places to travel to. QoS in particular resolutely fails in that regard.
There are three things that made Sean Connery’s James Bond work so well that are largely absent in the post-Moore James Bonds:
1) Actual spying. There was tons of secretive stuff in Sean Connery’s Bonds, and countless examples of where he used social engineering to get into places he wasn’t supposed to get into. The newer movies just seem like an endless baragge of action set-pieces and glitzy locations.
2) Entry into a forbidden location. Think of the Star Wars gang running through the Death Star in the first movie. There were tons of these secret bases and whatnot that Sean Connery stormed, to the point of being parodied by Dr. Evil. These kinds of scenes of being where you’re not supposed to be and any detection equalling death are difficult to pull off, but immensely satisfying when done right. Spectre made the stupendous mistake of not making that hideout the place of the final showdown, instead of taking the action to London for a rather unsatisfying coda. Ditto on the scene with the secret meeting. Why so short? Why have Bond be detected right away? So much more could have been done with it.
3) Memorable henchmen. The quiet and terrifying supporters of the main baddie. Where’s Jaws or the guy who throws hats around? Spectre did have that guy who casually bashed the other guy’s head at the meeting, but he was criminally underused and should have been there at the final showdown.
I think once or twice Brosnan did some spying and used a fake alias. Which quickly got blown. Otherwise they basically come in with a sign saying Kill Me I’m a Spy for the British! We know Craig can do an American accent, why didn’t they do more disguise plots?!
We know Craig can do an American accentCitation needed.
Star Wars 7: He cameos as the stormtrooper Rey mind-tricks
1) I think they’re worried about the actual spying being boring and mundane because…actual spying tends to be boring and mundane. So much fieldwork and tradecraft has been transposed into things like SIGINT and immense amount of data analysis, that the halcyon days of late WWII and the Cold War where dead-drops and disguises in the middle of Berlin and Beirut are long gone. Further, for a modern Bond, I think audiences would find attempts to do that, ironically enough, more unbelievable than Bond surviving 100ft plunges into water, explosions, gunshot wounds with depleted uranium bullets, collapsing buildings, and the like.
2) Similar to above, but the central conceit of these secret meetings is that they’re secret. This means that the hard part is finding out about them, not getting in. However, when we have scenes that show how Bond, with help from Q, M, Moneypenny, Felix, and others find out about these meetings, the actual hard part is over. I think the writers are torn on how to show this, because if they leave out those fact-finding scenes, then people will complain that Bond is simply getting lucky and stumbling into these major important meetings without doing any work. If they show the background, then it lowers the significance because he doesn’t actually have to sneak in.
3) Henchmen just don’t work anymore. The thing is, with Bond, the henchmen were all designed to show how much more clever and smart the big bads were. That’s why almost all the henchmen were mute or semi-mute brutes, save for the memorable Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint and Baron Samedi. Also, many of the henchmen were used as a way to show that either the Soviets or the other bad guys were up to no good by using steroids or genetic manipulation to produce walking superheroes, compared to Bond who, in past movies, wasn’t built like a brick shithouse. That went out the window the moment that Craig’s Bond stepped out of water in his swimsuit built bigger than most of the henchmen he’d face (save for Dave Bautista in Spectre).
I think the Bond movies could benefit from reintroducing more escapist fun and a charming, devilish lead, a mix of the best of the Connery and Moore eras.
After reading the comments here…. I forgot how hipster and minutely contrarian everyone on this site sometimes can be.“Skyfall is a terrible movie and is stupid as balls! Casino Royale is meh! (sorry I enjoy them and think they’re a bit sophisticated)” “Roger Moore was my favorite Bond! (Roger Moore was one dimensional and slept-walked through the last four Bonds that he was in. My least favorite Bond and I think he sucked)” “A.A. has low standards for movies! (whatever man)” I miss the good old shitposting days (where we could joke about SPECTRE stealing from Goldmember’s plot), and I’ll hopefully enjoy Craig’s finale whenever I get the chance to see it.
More importantly, what is the WORST Bond film? We often default to Moonraker or A View to a Kill, but I’m not sure that’s the case.
Also, I’m here to go to bat for Timothy Dalton. He wasn’t not the tank that is Craig, nor the suave playboy that was Brosnan, nor the goofball that was Moore, nor the full brute that was Connery. Dalton was a nice mix. He was satisfied the need for edgy takes in the 80s.
The Living Daylights is pretty solid overall. License to Kill is a fun watch, but I think it might be the most outright mean bond film, even taking into account the Craig films. LTK just has an unrelenting nasty streak that isn’t helped by the pseudo-Miami Vice setup.
Both aren’t great movies but I enjoy them, it’s not a chore to put them on. Die Another Day is really bad but also pretty hilarious in its badnessI’d say Quantum and Diamonds are forever are generally unpleasant, so I’d put them on the bottom.
Tomorrow Never Dies: the one Bond without any redeeming features. Dull, forgettable, preachy and self-important in all the worst ways.
I think the next Bond movie needs to start over, literally, and be set in the 1960s. Forget about trying to make Bond “relevant” in the modern world. He’s not. Embrace it, get back to basics and dive into the iconography of old school Bond.
There’s also the retrofuture approach that Archer has- sometimes modern references and technology or even futuristic ones, but it looks like the 60’s/70’s and the Soviet Union still exists.
While I think that approach can work well with the right property, like “Batman: The Animated Series”, which looks like it’s set in a noir/Deco retro time period but with technology that borders on sci-fi, or, as you point out, “Archer” (which could get away with almost anything given its tone), I think that would be a tougher pill to swallow in a live action movie, at least in one that is part of a long-running series like “Bond.”
Not a word of how Emmy winner Phoebe Waller-Bridge was supposed to interject some Fleagbag/Killing Eve wit and energy into the tired James Bond franchise? Guess PWB’s 15 minutes really are just about up.
I have nothing against Craig but I can’t say I’m gonna miss his take on Bond. Casino Royale and Skyfall were good – flawed but good – but the turn the franchise took was not for the best IMO. The films were clearly inspired by the Bourne movies, which is a good franchise but also kind of a generic one. And going the Batman Begins route and re-introducing everything (like Moneypenny, Q, Bloefeld and Spectre) was kind of annoying. As for Craig himself, he’s a solid actor but he was never the way I imagined the character (which I must confess is based on how Connery portrayed him).I wish the franchise took itself less seriously but apparently some people want the character to be “important” so I’m guessing I won’t get what I want.
Skyfall was incredibly bad. It seemed apparent to me that Sean Connery was going to be in the film and then bailed last minute. The film is completely nonsensical. And I really like the other Craig Bond films.
What would Chris Nolan do if offered the chance to do the next Bond? Why did Danny Boyle leave his Bond project? Sam Mendes’s two Bond movies were so meh they ruined the franchise for me, and I’ve watched ALL of them in the cinema. I don’t have high expectations for NTTD, which I will see later today, but I’m hoping it can’t be worse than the previous one, despite the lackluster reviews it has been getting in the last couple of days…
Having seen Tenet (a straight F of a film), Nolan should not be let anywhere near an action franchise.
His Dark Knight trilogy was well done, and he sure has a better batting average than most directors of his generation.
Even TDKR was decent, by no means as good as the first 2 but not a dropoff like X-Men or Spider-Man 3 was
I think this is going to be the last Bond, and you’re going to see more movies like Jack Reacher taking his place. Audiences and Oscar are sick of Bond and their confusing plots
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Can we get the fun, slightly camp, spy adventure James Bond back? You know, before the series went all grimdark?
I really think we will for the next one. The Bonds always seem to swing back and forth between camp and serious.
I saw the movie last night. Can confirm that the serious Bond films are probably done for a while but you’ll have to see the movie to understand why.
If they do decide to to that direction, I hope they give Tom Ellis a look as the next Bond. Though honestly I think he could pull off the dark and serious tone as well as the suave, charming Bond.
Completely agree. I’ve enjoyed some of Craig’s Bond movies, but the darkness wears on you a bit. Particularly in the last two where the antagonists goal is to turn Bond into an empty shell and strip away anything and everything he cares about. Not about killing him, just about destroying him. That’s pretty dark. How about the days when the villain explains the plan and develops an interesting way to kill Bond instead?
Daniel Craig will always be my first “big boy crush” (he and I are the same age) followed by George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Stephen Colbert.
Just saw the film and good things about the film.It exists.They are ending creditsAnd that’s about it.
I’d say this was a pretty enjoyable B.If you don’t like Bond films where the love interest is half of his age and you don’t like Bond films where the bad guy’s plan makes no sense and you don’t like Bond films where the action is unconvincing and stagy……which Bond films do you like?
Wow you gave Chaos Walking a B- and this a C. We have really different tastes in movies. The last A you gave was the Climb in 2020.Agree to disagree here.
I think it slots in #3 in the Craig era. It’s an entertaining movie, but not a great one. I think it wasted Fukunaga, too, although he has credits for story and screenplay too so I can’t let him off the hook. It definitely felt like a script with 5 credited writers, though it was obvious (and usually funny) when I’d recognize what had to be contributions from Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I’d strongly disagree on Ana de Armas being a second-tier Bond girl, though, for two reasons:1) She’s Ana de Armas2) that dress
Definitely feel the “written by an entire room of people who did not all make it through the movie’s completion and who were not all there from the beginning.”
Agree that Ana was awesome. I didn’t really need more of her character, but I think the movie definitely needed the bit of her that we got. I’d love for her to reprise the role in another movie and keep the character for another five or six.
Having to write the Quantum of Solace script while shooting the movie clearly broke Craig. He has not given a shit in any of the movies since… and when someone is just collecting a paycheck it really shows. Casino Royale was great and each one has been varying flavors of bad and trend chasing since then.
Craig is hands down my favorite Bond. There’s something about his ice-cold demeanor that really sells how he would kill a man, and then bang that man’s wife while the corpse was still warm, with equal dispassion, as long as it meant getting closer to completing his mission.
It’s a different than the cocksure bravado of Connery, Moore or Brosnan. Craig’s Bond is obviously damaged, probably long before the events of Casino Royale but most certainly exacerbated after. There’s some level of self-loathing that adds a layer of complexity – which is also due to the more modern films being interested in that complexity, whereas previous eras of Bond movies weren’t.
Casino Royale is my favorite Bond film, but as with most Bond actors’ bodies of work, I find diminishing returns in each installment. I didn’t dislike Quantum of Solace as much as most, and while Skyfall was visually gorgeous (that’s Sam Mendes for ya) the story was getting further and further away from the realism that I loved about Casino Royale. I haven’t even seen Spectre yet. From the sounds of it, this one is about on that same level. I wish Craig had a better send-off, but I’ll probably get around to seeing these last two eventually just because he’s great in them.
What was with that gigantic hole in the Middle East
Still find myself annoyed at what they did with Moneypenny in Skyfall. Spent the opening segment of the movie turning her into an appreciable badass in her own right, then they end the film with her going “Nah, I’d rather be a secretary.” Like…. what.
I re-watched OHMSS, this afternoon. Okay. George Lazenby isn’t great in it, but for someone of his, well, relative lack of experience- he’s really not _bad_, either. His natural charm, easy physicality and obvious enthusiasm are, frankly, quite appealing- after Connery’s increasingly bored Bond. The thing you get- right away- is that this is a more open version of the character, more imediate and reactive, less closed off and calculated.The thing that really got to me, however, is how much time they spend building up Tracey. Building her up and building up that relationship. Taking that _seriously_. His mission to deal with Blofeld is not _nearly_ as important- though it plays well.Bond rescues Tracy at the start of the movie. And, rather than being the grateful rescued damsel, or the easily charmed socialite? She’s pissed. And- feeling in his debt for saving her- turns it into the sort of cold blooded transaction that Bond usually prefers.He saved her life. He expects gratitude- none here. But here’s my body if it will settle my debt. Ice Cold.Which- naturally- captures his interest. Tracy isn’t hard to get. All he has to do is turn up. But she’s impossible to get, emotionally. Basically- she’s Connery Bond right back at Lazenby, and it stymies him, interests him. Slows him down long enough to actually get to know her. Between Lazenby’s cheerful, earnest Bond and Diana Rigg’s flinty, flirty, can take care of herself Tracy- it becomes a believable romance. Bond more or less falling for- and rescuing, emotionally, himself.Who’d a thunk it.And the whole thing is _much_ better than anything we have seen since, as far as providing a plausible romance for Bond. Which makes her death all the worse for us to take.
And when Lazenby sits in the car, nuzzling his dead wife, killed by a man he thought he’d beaten?
GodDAMN, it’s hard to watch. Lots of people have talked- ever since- how much better this would have been with Connery playing Bond. I have never agreed. Connery was _great_ as the unstoppable engine of cold destruction. He gave good quips, did well with all the running and punching. But he would never have been believable as Bond who could fall into anything but lust.Casino Royale came close to duplicating this- by giving us an earlier version of Bond, a less Connery influenced cold quipping killing machine, and by making Vesper much the same sort of flinty, no need to be rescued character as Tracy. But even then… Not quite as powerful.
Trying not to spoil anything for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. I just watched it today and I’m still processing the emotions I feel from it, and I’m sure my opinion will change overtime as it has with all of Craig’s films. I don’t know where this film ranks in my tier of Craig Bonds just yet, but I do know I was left pretty devastated by the ending to the point that I don’t know if I can ever watch it again. I don’t mean devastated in a let down, disgusted way, just in the way that Daniel has been in our lives as Bond for so long, and he had what I thought was a pretty perfect send off in Spectre (again, the ending, not the movie as a whole) that it’s just hard to say goodbye. I’m a romantic and an optimist by nature so I am a sucker for happy endings, pure and simple. It was much easier for me to wish Daniel farewell at the end of Spectre. No Time to Die does not deliver that. And not only does it NOT do that, they stick you with a double gut punch to make it hurt more. It just sucks. Apparently the ending was Daniel’s one demand for coming back for another, so much so that the reported reason Danny Boyle left was because he refused to go along with Craig’s demand. And I guess it’s fair to say that Bond as a character across all 25 films never REALLY gets to be happy. Maybe in time the knowledge that this is what Daniel wanted will make it easier to swallow.
I will say about the film itself, there were two things I noticed constantly. One was it is for sure too long. There were whole scenes that as soon as they were over I thought “that didn’t need to be here”. There’s a whole lot of “telling” rather than “showing”. The other thing is that this movie just isn’t as… beautiful… as the others. Just the way it’s shot. Fukunaga is super talented but Skyfall had Roger Fuckin Deakins and Spectre is gorgeous. There’s a clarity and vibrancy that I felt was missing.
I echo a lot of the sentiments of the other commenters in this conversation. I think for sure Casino Royale is the best Craig movie and for my money it’s the best Bond movie period. I think Skyfall is overrated and steeped in melodrama. I am in the minority in that I think Quantum of Solace is an underappreciated wall-to-wall 90 minute revenge thriller banger more akin to Death Wish than Thunderball. I love it. I watched Spectre last night before going into this and I had not seen it since it was released in theaters (also I weirdly own it on physical media? I have like 10 dvds and one of them is Spectre lol). I maintain that Spectre is actually pretty great. It does a great job at balancing classic Bond tropes like humor and gadgets with Craig’s intensity. I think Blofeld-not-being-a-big-deal is a little nitpicky. Plus, Bautista’s Mr. Hinx rules.
A few people have commented in this thread that Léa Seydoux’s Madeline is paper thin. I personally never noticed that, and that’s probably because Seydoux is such a good actor. But I do think she is among my favorite Bond girls. She’s so beautiful and you can totally see why she would disarm Bond in the way she does. I thought her character and Seydoux’s performance in NTTD was heartbreaking. That said, Ana de Armas has basically an extended cameo and totally steals the movie. If this was a standalone adventure and she was the sole female she could have really been among the very best.
My gut tells me that in time No Time to Die will slot probably third or fourth on most people’s list. I think for me it’s going to fall fourth after Casino, Quantum, then Spectre.
I really hope this comment makes it through Kinja hell, because I went ham on most of the Bond related stuff in the last week and 90% of my comments never did.
You are so spot on with most of your takes, I feel the same way.
If Danny wanted to nix this ending and was tossed out on Craig’s demands that it remain I would’ve loved to see Danny’s movie. This ending, if it sticks as delivered into the next movie, really screws with the whole franchise in that it makes Daniel Craig’s Bond more special and completely separated from all other actors before. Babs (and Michael G?) has already been reported over the years to listen to Daniel’s input in the decision making more than any other previous actor and this would just ratchet that up ten notches. Unless they go full nod to the literary You Only Live Twice when they return with the next film (which I would be fully behind but I imagine it would get panned by the vast majority, and I’m hoping you know what I’m referring to as I’m trying to remain spoiler free as well) then this ending will cement Daniel Craig’s Bond as set apart from all others and reinforce this “for whatever reason he’s more special than the five actors before him” which I think would be a massive massive disservice to the franchise. Bond is supposed to be special, and the actors are supposed to show us how and why, not the other way round. I can’t decide how worried I am about this. Coming out of the theatre I felt very confident this was a great ending and also wouldn’t end up being quite what it seems and that surely Broccoli and Wilson would be wise enough to find their way through to the next actor and film, and then after a few days of thinking about it I’ve begun to worry that there’s no reason to believe this at all lol. Cubby seemed to have clearly known that the character was more important than the actor and that’s exactly why the franchise panned out the way it did (with each iteration making some sort of small nod or recognition to the character’s past from previous actor’s films.) As we moved through the Daniel Craig era I thought it seemed Barbara and Michael simultaneously understood this the same way and found a smart approach to relaunching the series. But slowly it seems that maybe Daniel was thought of too highly with a role too connected to direction and now I’m not sure what we’ll get next. I’ll be going to see NTtD again later this week to see if I can regain some perspective.
Lea Seydoux was absolutely terrific in this movie and I think will go down as one of the favorite Bond girls right up there with Diana Rigg. The similarities between Madeline and Tracy are perfect and Madeline is a much better pairing for Bond than Vesper. Vesper now plays as that first love that really screws you up but probably wasn’t the best, before meeting Madeline which is absolutely the character that Bond is for. From that first opening pre-titles scene through the end of the movie Lea/Madeline is awesome.
Spectre’s retconning is always tossed out as a failure or an issue but the more I re-watch it and the previous three the more it works. There are some small issues with Skyfall and Spectre but they could have easily been avoided and don’t ruin the overall arc for DC’s run.
I would absolutely love Ana de Armis’ Paloma returning in subsequent films. She was fantastic and the way they introduced her would allow that character to grow while moving through future Bond adventures. She was great.
Sounds like a fitting sendoff to what has been one of the more forgettable Bond actors.
I kinda wish you guys either would let other people review these tentpole movies, or just not review them at all. While this wasn’t at the level of Skyfall or Casino Royale, it’s way better than a “C”. Sometimes it’s okay to like things.
they lost the thread of the plot at the point they killed blowfeld, which mind you, comes 2 hours into a 3 hour movie. They had a great action sequence in Cuba, they actually did a good job of explaining the virus, initially, until it became permadeath nanobots, maybe because of covid they changed it but making a virus that can be programmed to kill people worked well enough they should have left it there, besides why would you be working on nanobots in a viral weapons lab. The movie was doing a pretty good job of making james just 1 step behind the badguys until they just shove the new badguy in front and never really explain his plot other than “for some reason, I the badguy want to use this specific killing weapon to just kill a random assortment of people on the planet” then things got just silly. Like Spectre, they needed to fix up the last third of the movie, it felt like they ripped off hitman 3 more than anything else.
Why couldn’t he go back to Jamaica and hang out on the beach? Why did they have to kill him off just like Luke Skywalker?Why is nothing sacred anymore? I hate the new writers who think everything old is bad.
I would give the film an A-minus. The narrative meanders in parts. I am just now learning that there was not a completed script before filming? Wow. spoilers: I had completely forgotten that Madeleine was in the previous film, so at first I was struggling to figure out why this woman in particular was so special. A flashback would have helped for the uninitiated.
I have no qualms with Rami Malek as an actor. But in this film it seems he didn’t have much to do except to look and sound creepy. (I know that his name is a pun on “Lucifer Satan”; I never noticed a joke about it in-movie— no theoretical jab from Bond, “Give my regards to your namesake!” (pulls trigger/switch/final blow, etc.). I would have wanted Safin’s backstory explained further than the expository dialogue. So he was a child when his own parents were murdered? How old was he supposed to be when Madeleine was a child? That part I’m not quite getting.The Russian scientist seemed to be a throwback to Boris from Goldeneye. Maybe that was on purpose?
I don’t mean to be controversial, but when Q’s dinner with a friend was being interrupted, it was hinted to be a date, and with a guy; thus presumably Q is gay. I’m wondering if some folks see this as a kind of low-key “erasure” since Q’s friend is never seen and nothing is ever mentioned afterwards. At the same time, considering movie Q’s historical fussiness and in-the-moment quibbling, is it almost a cliche to have such a revelation about his personal life at this point?
I want the Nomi character to have her own films, or perhaps better, her own TV series, with 6-8 episodes per season, action packed. I’m sure Amazon wants more streaming content now that they have purchased MGM and have a relationship with the Bond producers now.
super spoilers—
Like Tony Stark in Avengers Endgame, Bond makes a heroic sacrifice at the end, while also leaving a young daughter behind. Had this film been released in 2019, I wonder if that aspect would have been critiqued more heavily?
Q being gay is kind of the same issue as LeFou being gay for me, or 3PO. they choose the fussy less masculine sidekick to be gay and then just let him fade into the background.
I liked it and was surprisingly emotional at the films finish. It’s like you didn’t even see the same film that I did. I am glad that I don’t have your job.
(SPOILER ALERT)
Okay, I’ve seen the film and it’s… mediocre. An infuriating mix of things done right and things completely half-assed, like the writing.
For a start, who was the psychiatrist’s father? How did he react to the death of his wife? What was his fate? We’ll never know. Why does the Russian dude out himself to JB and his pal on the boat for literally no good reason whatsoever? Why is JB sabotaging 007’s attempt to get the Russian dude in the Cuban showdown?Let’s go to the main baddie. Why does he want to kill the whole world? He has an established grudge against spies and agencies, but against the whole world? Why does he go to the trouble of kidnapping the psychiatrist and her daughter, holding her hostage and then being all like, okay, you can go? Why does he take the trouble of designing a hatch that goes down in that conference room if things go south, but not to make sure everything remaining in the room dies? One of the most infuriating aspects is this rather weak characterization of the main villain, which is my biggest gripe with all Craig movies.
Oh, and let’s make the bumbling comic-relief of an Eastern European scientist into a raging racist to boot! Ah, the wonders of the politically correct era, where as more and more groups become off-limits for lazy stereotyping, the few groups that are still not off limits then have to bear the brunt of it!
OK, things I like: the action set pieces are largely pretty good, with a decent balance: car chase, secret gathering, fighting in poor visibility conditions and finally, storming a secret base. I liked Blofield, showing that Waltz was criminally underused in Spectre. I also liked the heightened emotional stakes of this movie.
Finally, I liked the ending. The reveal that the main villain infects Bond just before dying is extremely memorable and the final sequence of him watching over the silos as the bombs fall on hims is an incredibly iconic send off.
On the AV Club’s scale, I’d give it a solid B.
I finally saw it last night, and yes, it was ok. It was good, it was fine, overall nothing special Bond-wise. But OTOH, the use of OHMSS as a primary reference point, and not in a throwaway “wink-wink, get it” way (“Diamonds are Forever…yone, Mr. Bond”, anyone?), was brilliant, at least for me. As soon as he says in the beginning “We have all the time in the world”, while he’s DRIVING A CAR, we know something…different is going to happen. And the “New James Bond Theme” being used in one sequence, I loved that – it’s such a great piece of music, which vanished after OHMSS, which I always thought was a shame. And at the end, when she says it again to their daughter, and then the guitar chords kick in introducing the original Louis Armstrong song, which plays in its entirety!! Yes, sentimental, for sure, and Bond movies are never sentimental, or refer to the past, but all that made me very very happy. I’m a bit surprised that this aspect of the film hasn’t been mentioned more, but I’m also a bit pleased that those of us who know, know. TO me, it wasn’t an end to Daniel Craig’s Bond, but the end of James Bond movies as we know them in general, maybe. And that’s ok, even lovely.
Just saw this. I was super into it for the first hour or so, especially after the really fun Cuba sequence with de Armas. After that it started really unraveling. The new 007 was uninteresting, the villain was uninteresting, the love story was uninteresting – Craig had better chemistry with de Armas and Naomi Harris than Seydoux. Despite being 2 hrs 40 it felt like everything was pretty undercooked. And oh my goodness that ending was just so*extra* as the kids say (do they still say that?).Casino Royale let Craig play the lighter side of Bond despite an updated and dramatic story. No movie since did, and it was a big mistake, cause Craig’s got really good comedic chops. It’s a real shame he just broods through every subsequent movie. Hope the next Bonds have a bit of a lighter touch – not silly or campy, just with the understanding that this can be a fun character. I love Bond as much as the next guy, but I also don’t understand treating the character like something out of myth, which this movie did – he’s just a fun spy character, like Marlowe or Spade. The series needs to get over itself.Also big missed opportunity in this one – he’s retired so that makes him a valuable asset as a spy. But the Craig movies have pretty much abandoned the “spy” part of superspy.
All due respect, but I’d say the sequence with Ana de Armas in Cuba is easily one of the most fun parts of the movie thanks to her. Paloma is about the only character with any real sense of playfulness and manages to bring a little out of Bond. Her presence may not be consequential to the plot, but the film would suffer noticeably if she were “airlifted out”.
Delayed seeing this until now, and as it turned out, with good reason. No Time to Suck is more apt. Just make a James Bond film, not a James Bond-flavored statement about you do not know what. Ana de Armas was her usual charming self. Craig looked throughout like he could not believe that any of this was really happening. What was Snafu’s plan, again?