A compelling mess: No Time to Die reviewed

These days, James Bond can no longer just be the main character in the Bond films. He’s also had to become a defiant metaphor for them. Since Daniel Craig took over the role, Bond has regularly been told that he’s badly outdated. Yet, by the closing credits, he’s once again proved how much the world still needs him.

That this has been reflected at the box office is, I’d suggest, largely down to one neat trick: Craig’s Bond films have thrown in just enough gruff emoting to get people to go along with the pretence that his Bond is a radical reinterpretation, while still essentially sticking to their trusty old-school methods.

And for a bit, this looks like being true of No Time to Die as well. Picking up where Spectre left off, it first shows us Bond enjoying a spot of gentle domesticity with his new love Madeleine (Léa Seydoux). Before long, though, he’s survived both an explosion and various machine-gun attacks, ridden a motorbike up some steep Italian steps, blown away several baddies with the guns from his Aston Martin and made an implausible leap to safety from a high bridge — at which point, cue the opening song.

From there we cut to five years later, when Bond has retired to Jamaica alone, having decided that Madeleine set all those now-dead baddies on him. He also seems to have accepted that the world may have changed since his day — until, that is, a sinister organisation of fantastic ruthlessness and reach steals a biological weapon with the apparent if unexplained aim of killing millions. And with that, as you might imagine, Bond comes out of retirement.