Five years from initial development to cinematic release, a star who’d famously claimed after the last movie that he’d rather ‘slash my wrists’ than return to the role and a hasty change of director following the exit of Happy & Glorious director Danny Boyle. Could No Time To Die ever hope to live up to the expectations of fans and the legacy of the franchise, and, asks Greg D. Smith, would this really be the last time Daniel Craig would put on the famous tux?

I’ve often thought that part of the reason Skyfall was quite so beloved by everyone was down to how uncertain the future of the franchise looked before it finally hit cinemas, perfectly timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the EON franchise. I wondered after seeing No Time To Die at the cinema whether or not a similar effect would happen, after six years of waiting and the hardships of a global pandemic which shut the world away and stopped cinema releases even being a thing for such a long time. Indeed, I wondered if it was that very fact – this being one of the first movies I had been to see at the cinema post-lockdown – which had influenced my own, viscerally positive reaction to the thing. Now I’ve sat and watched it for a second time, I can happily confirm that it did not. This stands on its own, possibly as the strongest entry in Craig’s tenure, if not one of the best entries in the franchise, full stop.

Let’s start, as ever, with that pre-title sequence, the longest in Bond history and one which crams in an awful lot of stuff which is even more relevant to the film as a whole than it might first appear. First, there’s the flashback to a young Madeleine and her mother, in which we learn the shocking truth behind an apparently throwaway line from the character in Spectre, of her taking a hidden gun of her father’s and shooting an intruder who’d come to kill her family. Here, we see that the killer was not entirely unsuccessful, murdering her mother before she shot him, and then – bizarrely – saving her from drowning in icy waters as she ran from him. Fast forward to just after Spectre and Bond has officially retired and is living a peaceful life with Madeleine travelling the world. She intimates that she will tell him all her secrets once he has forgiven Vesper by visiting her grave – linking the film all the way back to this iteration of Bond’s origins – and then, well then things go a little sideways. Explosions, breathless pursuits, creative stunts and a sense that Cary Joji Fukunanga really wanted to pull all the stops out in bettering previous sequences in the Craig era.

The fact of the sequence taking place directly after the ending of Spectre feels especially relevant here. Many bemoaned Quantum of Solace following directly from Casino Royale – this had never been done before in Bond, the films were supposed to stand alone. But Spectre had finally cemented the desire to jump on the cinematic universe bandwagon with Craig’s Bond, and with the actor so insistent that this really was the last time he’d play the role, it felt appropriate to have there be this strong narrative thread to the thing. After all, how can one have an ending to something which has no clear beginning and middle?

Onto the opening credits then, and even these signal early on what we might expect from the ending of the movie. The graphics both hearken back to Casino Royale and display a kind of maudlin aspect, buried statues and drowned cars providing the visual backdrop to Billie Eilish’s haunting title track. That track, wrapping up Craig’s tenure as only the second to reference the movie’s title in its lyrics, feels consciously moulded to echo Sam Smith’s ‘Writing’s on the Wall’, with a similar chorus structure and melody as well as the general, downbeat quality of the lyrics and tone. It’s another rather understated masterpiece which is still bouncing around in my head a full twenty-four hours after watching the movie.

Continuing the movie’s run of firsts. Léa Seydoux marks the first instance in the franchise of a female lead returning in a subsequent movie. It feels doubly sad to me that Madeleine’s part is quite so muddled in Spectre because here, between script and actress, we get a whole other level to the character. Her coldness and reluctance to trust are explained perfectly by her life experiences. Her shocked acceptance of James’ harsh farewell in that pre-title sequence becomes all too explicable knowing her history. Madeleine here is a complex character, by turns fragile yet strong, but overall absolutely fierce in her loyalty to those she loves, whether they know it or not, and willing to go to almost any lengths to protect them. Whether she’s facing down an indifferent James, shooting her way out of trouble in a forest or desperately trying to save her daughter from the clutches of a madman, Seydoux delivers here a real and believable portrait of a character moulded by the most incredible circumstances, and almost but not quite broken by them.

But what’s really refreshing for the series is to see that we are allowed more than one woman with agency and purpose. Lashana Lynch’s Nomi, Bond’s literal replacement as 007, is a fantastically well-rounded part, and a character I’d happily see more of in the future. Competent, cocky but with just a hint of insecurity hiding beneath the surface, Nomi is a fitting equal partner to Bond, albeit one who is slightly more likely to stick to the rules than he ever did. Their back-and-forth verbal sparring is always entertaining without ever feeling it’s getting overdone or nasty, and it actually does make sense towards the end of the movie when Nomi requests Bond be re-designated 007.

Naomie Harris returns once again as Moneypenny, and though she doesn’t get the largest part, once again at least she isn’t hopelessly swooning over our hero romantically, but rather trying to help out a friend in whom she still firmly believes, regardless of what anyone else might think. Harris’ version of the character has easily been my favourite, because she’s retained that independence and competence throughout, and avoided ever becoming a punchline.

And then there’s Ana De Armas’ Paloma. We get maybe fifteen minutes with her but what a quarter of an hour it is. From her bubbly declaration of having had three weeks training through her horrified reaction to Bond’s assumption she’s trying to bed him when she takes him into a closet to change his clothes to her cheerful yet lethal progression through a series of action sequences. De Armas shines, and gives us a character I want to know an awful lot more about. Bond’s cheerfully surprised reaction to her unsuspected lethal competence really does add the cherry on top.

It’s also an absolute joy to see Jeffrey Wright return as Felix, genuinely missed in the previous two movies and also marking a first as the only actor so far to reprise the character three times. Though Wright never got a huge amount of screen time, the chemistry between him and Craig was always excellent, and their farewell here as Leiter dies in Bond’s arms easily surpasses the similar scene between Bond and Mathis in Quantum of Solace. Bond’s brutal murder of Logan Nash, forcefully recalling Moore’s version’s killing of Loque in For Your Eyes Only, also importantly feels absolutely heartfelt, as Craig utters the predictable but pitch perfectly delivered line ‘I had a brother. His name was Felix Leiter.’

Speaking of Craig himself, it’s difficult to imagine that he could have asked for a better swansong for his time with the character. Getting to portray the full gamut from happy, secure Bond to damaged, broken Bond and then stone-cold killer before circling back to happy and finally emotionally devastated but at peace with his final choice, Craig never misses a single beat. He’s playful when needed, but absolutely dead-eyed and cold when the role calls for it – if there’s a better screen interpretation of Fleming’s character than we see here, I’ve yet to witness it. Gone is the slight disdain which couldn’t help creeping in from time to time in Spectre, this feels like Craig really throwing in everything to give the character the send-off he felt it deserved, and he nails every line.

A shame then, that he can’t quite be matched by Rami Malek’s Safin. It’s such a quality setup as well, this idea that Safin is just another product of the tangled web of deceit and murder spun over the years by SPECTRE, and that fate would bring him back into the picture at the worst possible time. The unbreakable bond which exists between him and Madeleine, how this will impact hers and Bond’s own relationship. There’s poetry there waiting to be written.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t really do a lot with it. Safin gets more screen time than Blofeld did in Spectre, but Malek’s performance feels too removed and slightly odd to properly land. It makes things worse that his scheming initially actually saves Bond, at the party designed to be his doom, with the assistance of rogue scientist Obruchev, only for them to become adversaries later on. When Blofeld dies, it makes no sense that Safin would continue to pursue Madeleine or her daughter, though it makes perfect sense why Bond should pursue a madman with a weapon of mass destruction.

Then again, why does Safin want that weapon? His personal grudge against SPECTRE and Blofeld has been settled, and we never get an adequate explanation from the script as to why that vendetta mutates into a desire to cull large parts of the global population, save that it gives him the chance to compare himself favourably to Bond and his own methods. It feels like a late game attempt to make the character a dark mirror of Bond, but it fails because we know Bond by now, his pain, his origins and why he does what he does. Safin’s motives in the wider parts of his scheme are left oddly mysterious by comparison.

In fairness though, this never really feels like anything other than Bond’s movie, and a weak villain does nothing to detract from the solidity of that. This is the story of a man who’s lost most of the certainties he thought he had, adrift in a world which no longer seems to need the sort of man he’s grown to be, and reluctant to try anything new after too many personal setbacks. Watching him slowly find his way back, not to the violence, but to the ability to open himself to the life he thought denied him, is the arc of the movie. His real nemesis is his own inherent distrust and cynicism, his toughest opponent his pain. It’s a terrible and genuinely emotional irony that when he finally conquers both, it comes just that little too late, leaving him the choice of continuing to live in a world where he can never risk being near the two people who have dragged him back to life, or dying to ensure they are protected. That he chooses the latter is no surprise.

The other main character of note is M. Ralph Fiennes is of course a superlative actor but it’s always rather felt like he’s never quite been given enough in the role. Here, all that changes. M here is a man seeking redemption in a way Judi Dench’s version never was. He’s made errors, and he’s not happy about being confronted on them. If the movie’s A plot is Bond’s personal journey, then one of its significant side-arcs is M’s own. That journey takes him from wounded fury at Bond’s questioning of his judgement to slow but genuine acceptance that Bond may have a point, albeit not quite for the reasons he might think.

Set piece-wise, the film is a masterclass in what can be done with the franchise. The car chases are visceral and intense, the fight scenes feel genuinely impactful and the stunts all look as realistic as these kinds of things ever can. Nothing is left on the table, again feeling fitting as a goodbye to this iteration.

And finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention the call-backs. Oh so many call-backs. If Skyfall felt like an ode to the fiftieth anniversary of the character on screen, this feels like a teary-eyed farewell not just to Craig but perhaps to this way of doing Bond at all. The repeated use of We Have All the Time in the World – both musically and in dialogue – forcefully recalls On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and the painful lessons Bond learned the last time he opened himself to the possibility of a conventional life. The way in which Nomi removes her wig, the portraits of previous Ms in the halls of power, the return of Dalton’s Aston Martin V8 Vantage, complete with the same registration plate – it’s a veritable Easter Omelette of a thing for Bond aficionados, albeit somehow managing to cram in all these references without any single one feeling forced or out of place. It’s an exercise in nostalgia done right – something other franchises could stand to learn from in the modern era.

And so there it ends. Bond dies for the first time in the series’ screen history. An unexpected end to perhaps the Bondiest Bond to ever Bond. Daniel Craig gets perhaps the best send-off of any incumbent of the tux, neither too old nor too worn out for this sort of thing, and with a script, direction and cast all pitched to perfection.

It feels, unmistakeably, like an ending. A final note on not just Craig’s version of Bond, but perhaps on the wider EON imagining of the character, from 1962’s Dr No through to now. It leaves the audience pondering just exactly what those infamous words, ‘James Bond will return’, tucked right at the very end of the credits like an MCU sting, might actually mean for the future. Small wonder that the speculation on who might next inhabit the tux has felt even more feverish than usual, while the studio itself remains firmly tight-lipped.

If anything, this feels like Craig’s Logan moment – an ending which feels like it should have had more and better movies preceding it, all of which I would have loved to see.

It’s been a rocky road with some good, bad and ugly entries, but what a beautiful and fitting way to close an era. Here’s to you, 007, saving the world in style one last, unforgettable time.