No Time to Die

Daniel Craig's final outing as the iconic 007 definitely could have had a better send-off. The show starts off strong, no doubt. With the introduction of a mysterious masked gunman seeking revenge for his family's death, we enter a bone-chilling sequence of hunt-and-shoot! A mother is brutally put down, with a curious absence of blood before her daughter manages to escape. In a surprising turn of event, the little girl's saved by the assassin, for God-knows-what-and-why reason even after the film ends. She grows up to be Dr. Madeleine (Léa Seydoux), our protagonist's spouse-to-be. What is this secret waiting to ambush a retired Bond this time is for us to find out in a bloated runtime shy of 3 hours.

Of course, the length of a film isn't at all a problem since it all depends on the writer if he / she knows how to fill it with engaging content. In the case of No Time to Die, the makers made sure they took their time to slowly kill us with an absolutely generic action feature! The severe lack of stakes and vivid plot goal after the beginning credits is appalling! You'll notice right past the midpoint after Madeleine explains to Bond who the primary antagonist is, in other words, what the goal actually is, the plot improves tremendously! Doctoring this script during or before the pre-production would have helped eviscerate every irrelevant event that comes in between these two checkpoints, not to mention drastically cut down the runtime as well. Past antagonist Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), Ana de Armas' cameo and the death of Felix (Jeffrey Wright) - a character we know little to nothing about that results in failing to evoke any emotion from us are simply pointless meandering!

Here's the sad part though. Knowing this is definitely Daniel Craig's final film as the iconic legacy character, the makers made a bold choice to do something no other films in the entire James Bond franchise thought or dared to - to kill him off. It's a ballsy, fantastic move that would have felt earned and impactful had the movie was anywhere near stellar. There's a huge untapped potential in this story, with Bond having a daughter of his own. And him transforming / learning from being a lonely man-on-the-run to family-man father would have been a terrific arc, with the tragic ending to sweeten the deal! The final conversation between the couple is heartbreaking nevertheless.

Vehicle chase at Southern Italy, motorbike reaching an elevation vertically, hired guns absolutely laying on Bond's Aston Martin with the hero doing absolutely nothing before returning the favor with his car lamp turret, boat struggling in midst of fire, one-take climactic staircase shootout and the foggy forest warfare are truly entertaining stunt episodes! Visual effects for a Bond's title song this time is otherworldly, followed by a seamless transition into 5 years later! Magnets for elevator landing, watch used to burst off an enemy's eye and the winged planed that transforms into a submarine are truly cool gadget and tech additions this time around! The locales, ranging from the glacier field to The Poison Garden, are impressive.