REVIEW

‘NO TIME TO DIE’ Kills Off Daniel Craig’s Reign as 007 in Sullen, Disappointing Fashion

Name: ‘NO TIME TO DIE’ Kills Off Daniel Craig’s Reign as 007 in Sullen, Disappointing Fashion
Item: No Time To Die
Rating: 75
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · September 29, 2021

Where to watch: Streaming on Prime Video, or rent or buy on digital (updated October 2026)Watch on Prime Video · Rent or buy on Amazon · Buy on Blu-ray/4KAs an Amazon Associate, Silver Screen Riot earns from qualifying purchases.

With No Time to Die, Daniel Craig’s run as gentleman spy James Bond has reached its final stop. And it’s with a heavy heart that I tell you that Craig’s last turn as 007 is a lumbering swan song at best; a heaving disappointment all in all, lacking in wit, memorable spectacle, even semi-logical villainy, and sensical plotting. For a near-three hour capstone to the Daniel Craig era of James Bond, No Time to Die is both overly-plotted and undercooked, too short on whizzbang set pieces and long on trying to tie up all the loose continuity of his run. It is, in a phrase, more than past the moment to let this particular iteration of the character go. It is indeed time to die.

Of the seven actors who have portrayed James Bond, Craig’s reign has been the longest, lasting a total of 16 years over the course of five films, short of both Sean Connery and Roger Moore, each who played the British Secret Service agent a total of seven times. As the times changed, so too has Bond, his mannerisms and vices reflecting the eras he found himself in. And no actor so drastically altered the aura of Bond than the sandy-haired Craig. Some vices remained intact – a boozy beverage was never far from the grasp of Craig’s Bond – others were whisked away – the abject womanizing and chain-smoking a relic of a bygone era. He was a changed man, in stature and societally both.

Looking back now at the entirety of Craig’s reign, these were movies that tried to frame James Bond in a real-world setting, a post-9/11 playground where having a license to kill actually took a toll on Bond’s trigger-not-so-happy soul. The raw brutality and relative realism of Craig’s 007’s origin eventually gave way to a hardened exterior and with it a reintroduction of the more silly side of the franchise: the deus-ex-machina gadgetry, the kooky MI6 gang, the cars gilded with all varieties of hidden weaponry. While Craig’s run of 007 films tried for the first time to be both serialized and self-contained, the attempt to tell an overarching story sometimes soared, but too often fell short. Particularly in its final stretches.

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What started with the excellent franchise-launching Casino Royale, slipped with the decent but definitely underrated Quantum of Solace. Skyfall, what with its stunning, series-capping cinematography from Roger Deakins and standout villain in Javier Barden’s Silva, revitalized the Craig run before Spectre came along and overcomplicated everything that came before by twisting in into logical nooses, offering up unwanted legacy characters, head-scratching “checkmate” manipulation, and piles of kitsch in place of sensical narrative and good writing.

No Time to Die movie still

With No Time to Die, the challenging task of sorting all that came before into a satisfying bow – Bond’s lingering wounds from Vesper Greene’s betrayal, his professional friendship with American counterpart Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), his complicated relationship with underwritten flame Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), and the weird familial Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) angle of it all – proves a mission too impossible for the team assembled here and makes its own kind of noose. Even with all the time in the world at their disposal, No Time to Die is a dissatisfying logic pretzel that tries desperately to present its silly plot as complex 4D chess. It’s one thing to be serious and somber, it’s quite another to also be so silly and witless about it.

Working from a screenplay he co-wrote with series regulars Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, as well as Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge, hired on to inject a female perspective into the proceedings, Cary Joji Fukunaga approaches Bond from perhaps too deferential an angle. His action choreography arrives relatively stale; lacking in crisp definition and standout moments. Even Spectre boasted that electrifying opening sequence in Mexico City whereas No Time To Die comes up short on defining action set pieces – the kind that stick to your ribs and linger in our collective memory. If pressed to recall one particular sequence here and what made it pop, I would have startling little to say. It’s strange to realize that Fukunaga once concocted an action sequence (on the small screen) that’s superior to anything offered here: True Detective’s infamous six-minute tracking shot. That scene trumps just about everything here and was executed on a fraction of the budget.

A much-too-quick stopover in Cuba which introduces Ana de Armas’ Paloma (a short-lived highlight of the film who’s soon-after unceremoniously dumped from the screen) offers the promise of loose, cheeky bullet-loosing that Fukunaga seems to be going for but even that scene fails to balance out the noise with moments of tension-building quiet. Any action sequence worth its salt should be shot like a joke – it should have a set up and a punch line – a series of physical beats that audiences can follow along with and digest like its own little story. Set up, punch line.

Conversely, action can be presented like a magic trick – the pledge, the turn, the prestige. What we expect to happen does not, but looking back, we see the trick all along. Think Indiana Jones, the Nazi bodybuilder, and the spinning propeller plane. There should be a grammar to it – a rhyme and reason. It’s why “Bayhem” is such synapses-frying overload. When everything is dialed all the way up, there’s no definition to the big moments. The basic principal of addition by subtraction implies that more is definitively not more. But Fukunaga too often dials up the shooting of faceless henchmen and fails to find the language of it all, to make the ordinary extraordinary. In too many ways, he loses the magic.

This too applies to the plot. We begin with Bond blissfully globetrotting with Madeleine, trying to soak up his overdue retirement but not before reckoning with demons, per his therapist girlfriend’s insistence. But a betrayal is afoot, with Blofeld somehow still masterminding events (through a bionic eye no less) in a “state of the art” prison facility that somehow can’t discern that a dude missing a half his face is lording over world events with an evil eyeball. Blofeld insinuates that Madeleine has set Bond up and the later buys this scheme without batting an eye, launching a hastily-sketched separation of the star-crossed lovers that makes little sense at the time and fails to pivot into something more believable as the plot drifts on.

Five years pass and Bond finds himself pulled out of retirement when he’s caught between the CIA’s Felix Lieter and MI6 compatriots old and new, including the newly-minted 007 Nomi (Lashana Lynch) and M (Ralph Fiennes), all of whom are on the hunt for missing biotech scientist Valdo Obruchev (David Dencik), who possesses a weaponized nano-bot system that can target specific DNA for quick, clean, undetectable assassination. His boss, Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), is evil in a nondescript way, face scarred up, avenging his dead family, rambling about some grand scheme to purify/save the world with a vague eco-terrorism plot that seems pulled from the Thanos’ playbook.

No Time to Die struggles terribly to fit this big bad into the mix. Despite appearing in the opening scene, Safin disappears from the film for nearly two hours and when he does finally return, his plotting, motivation, and overall masterplan are confusing and lazy, a painful realization that only adds to the character himself being stunningly dull and lifeless. For a series that so often is defined by the willy antics of its antagonists, No Time to Die makes the gruesome mistake of saving the worst for last.

Fortunately, it ends on a relative high note, and audiences are relatively assured to be blindsided by a “twist” ending that may make them forget the myriad stumbling blocks that come before. Craig too remains a consistent high note throughout, offering a steely but emotionally satisfying final turn as James Bond. His was a journey of overcoming stumbling blocks, from that very first scene in which he utilized parkour to track down a bomb-maker. In a sense, Craig’s Bond was always doing parkour – creatively endeavoring to get from point A to point B – but as the years weighed on him, the complexity and grandeur of the feat faded. While Craig’s arc is ultimately satisfying in a broad-scale sense, it’s impossible to ignore that these final pieces failed to coalesce into something independently meaningful. That what once smoothly navigated the challenges of reintroducing a new James Bond into an every changing world turned clunky, creaky, and tired with the years. And so the cycle shall begin anew. With fresh blood, fresh ideas, fresh faces. And it is time. James Bond is dead. Long live James Bond.

CONCLUSION: The forest overwhelms the trees in ‘No Time to Die’, where a lacking screenplay and unremarkable set pieces reveal a forgettable conclusion to Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond. Craig leads with admirable aplomb though, delivering just enough emotional moments to make this a broadly suiting – if ultimately disappointing – final chapter from Cary Joji Fukunaga.