When I sit down to watch a James Bond film I do so knowing that the film requires my full attention otherwise I'll miss something small that matters hugely in a later moment. However, when watching "No Time To Die" I felt like I must have missed something that was to be resolved later on...all the way through the film. There were several issues that should have been used for much more yet which were given cursory nods and nothing more.
When your main villain looks so interesting, then re-emerges looking like he's wearing make-up you had better wipe that shit off at some point before the film ends. They already had that moment in Skyfall though, which begs the question why design a baddie that is a composite of other better baddies in the first place? They gave him almost no backstory and made no effort to flesh the character out in other ways. He was introduced as evil and appeared occasionally only to be slightly more evil than Blofeld...which in itself doesn't really do anything for anybody. The entire series of films was used to build towards Blofeld for fuck's sake...now he's killed off indirectly by "some guy".
That's the main failing point for this series of films, and this film in particular. It builds magnificently towards the film Spectre, then resolves it and yet decides to continue on with a film which kind of spits right in the face of everything you have learned about this iteration of the character so far.
This Bond is a frazzled sociopath from the ground up...he's a fucked up kid who grew into a fucked up man and he's absolutely not the sort of guy who would even want to know he had a child and certainly not the sort to have that child used against him at crunch time. What this Bond becomes by the end of this film is a total convert and martyr to a cause that he has never fully believed in but who's cynicism could not trump his sense of duty. No I'm not talking about National Service, I'm talking about family.
There is a lot to complain about with this because it's a character piece that kills off everything I loved about the character...
They took the best part of "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" and ran it into the ground twice purely to drive the point home that Bond was now capable of love...they stole the motivation from "License To Kill" by fucking with Felix just to churn out the only truly great line of the film yet which still feels pretty cheap to me. They even made sure to turn Q gay and introduce a black female 007 who had all of the charm and grace of Brie Larson's Carol Danvers... She wasn't bad actually, at least she was great in the physical scenes after seeing Ana De Armas flying around like a telescopically zoomed Tinkerbell kicking shit out of hitmen...
Don't get me started on the inclusion of the child nor of the multiple red herrings, at one point I think Bond is actually carrying one on a hook just to really keep you on your toes. Though now that I think about it maybe it was a red snapper so even the red herring is a red herring...
It just doesn't really make sense overall...the plot itself is pretty good actually if massively derivative and the whole missile silo's in the island base thing is just mind bogglingly on the nose in 2021...but it's the ending that really REALLY fucked me off.
Up to that point this would be a 2.5-3/4 film because the action is about as well shot as you can get, it actually reminded me of the later Mission Impossible films with how brilliantly done the stunts were, but that ending totally wrecked my suspension of disbelief...
You see Blofeld die about twenty seconds after nano bot exposure earlier in the film. It's a pretty odd moment because they sort of throw it away in the context of the series, I mean it's a huge moment and they just pop it right in the middle of the film and race on from it immediately after barely acknowledging it...however the point I'm getting to is that James Bond gets nano-botted at the end and then spends minutes not dying...
This is the world's most deadly weapon apparently...enough to kill a terrorist mastermind in seconds....but Bond has to wait until it rains missiles to actually die.
....and that's another thing! The missiles blowing him to bits at the end were far too abrupt and visible. You don't show James Bond getting vapourised at the end of a goddamn Bond film you fucking heathens.
FUCK!
