Bond 25

I recognize that for many, the long-term storylines of the five Daniel Craig Bond films have been one of the series' assets, but this long-term structure doesn't really work for me. I know these actors have been in Bond films before, but I'm looking at Léa Seydoux and Christoph Waltz and Jeffrey Wright (and Eva Green's picture), and if I'm honest, I can't remember who any of them is. James, Moneypenny, Q: these people are people I know. The rest of these characters? No clue. Of course, they're archetypes too, just as much as Moneypenny and Q are. The woman Bond loves, the friend he trusts, the woman he gave up, the supervillain. I think the weird thing for me is that Cary Joji Fukunaga's film just behaves as though I have feelings about all of these characters, and I don't have a single feeling about any one of them.

No Time to Die is a long business. And there are way too many feelings in it for my taste (I had the same problem with Casino Royale if I recall correctly). I like my Bond movies high tech and shallow with a cool villain who wants to destroy the world in an intriguing way. (The destruction of the world in this film is plotted in an intriguing way, to be fair.) But mostly this film just sort of plods along. There is a very exciting sequence with Ana de Armas in Santiago de Cuba. I enjoyed that a lot. And the first sequence in the Mediterranean was also very fun. Pio Amato (from A Ciambra and Mediterranea – both brilliant films) even makes an extended appearance! It's still a Bond film, and some of it is very cool.

But this film's villain is Rami Malek, and he is boring. He's a sad, lonely man who just wants to be loved. He's not really nefarious and evil, just sort of pathetic. It isn't even fun to hope Bond beats him; he's already such a loser.