No doubting her talent, why otherwise would she be headlining Glastonbury? I’ve seen all the recent Bond movies at the cinema and this was the one time the song didn’t carry enough power. I even thought Sam Smith did a better job in Casino Royale. I thought the opening sequence in No time to die was great prior to the song but it all went downhill from there. I thought the same thing about Spectre. On paper it had so much going for it with a superb actor in Christoph Waltz, it just didn’t have the script to back it up.
Skyfall didn’t have a big budget but it had script, wit and a great villain in Javier Bardem. The opening sequence when Naome Harris says ‘agent down’ and Daniel Craig falls from a bridge is how you start a movie.
[nb.: includes MAJOR SPOILER]
Skyfall did have a very impressive explosion (simultaneously demolishing a rather beautiful and elegant old Scottish building? ffs) but I didn’t find the plot memorable.
I’d say the actual plot (or
theme) of No Time To Die was indeed actually memorable. It tweaked the current pandemic story to envisage a DNA-specific virus which would be a better weapon than covid-19. The execution (big vats of gunk) was sloppy — no pun intended — and the narrative, the way they joined up the essential plot elements — was incredibly convoluted and largely ‘un-Bond -like’. The black woman did a reasonably good job, but the blonde wench was too tearful and the slick and sexy brunette assistant early on was rather derogatory, a not very convincing fighter or remotely oh oh anything. Wiping out a gang of hitmen Kung-fu -style (while wearing high heels?!) really wasn’t believable. A sexy, often brilliant woman is a Bond film ‘item’ — but hand-to-hand fighting with a bunch of highly trained male fighters? — not unless we have a quick dose of make-believe, and is that the sort of suspension-of-disbelief that really goes with a Bond film? I’m not sure that it is.
The drawn-out child scene at the beginning didn’t grab me. Nor was it joined up very well I felt. Was the grave of a 17yr old supposed to be fake? Is Bond supposed to have had an affair with a mother that somehow survived or the child that grew up to maturity? I expect it’s explained somewhere, but personally I don’t go to Bond films to watch a long, fairly irrelevant scene of a small child miraculously escaping blah blah sob sob wah! The car chase redeemed it but if they had to have a poor-little-baby ooo-you-killed-my-friend’s family silly subplot surely couldn’t it have been done quickly as a flashback?
It was a fairly good plot, a reasonably entertaining film: but overdrawn, over-long, and over-‘inclusive’.
