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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nBond (Daniel Craig) makes an effort to retire from spy work and settle into married life with wife Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux), but their honeymoon gets interrupted by the remnants of the evil SPECTRE organization. He accuses her of setting up the attack, which hurts her emotionally, and ultimately puts her on a train out of the country with the intention of never seeing her again. We cut to five years later (reminiscent of \u201cEndgame\u201d) when Bond\u2019s CIA friend Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), accompanied by State Department liaison Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen), lures him out of retirement to try to stop SPECTRE. He\u2019s joined by rookie agent Paloma (Ana de Armas) and in many ways the mission is more successful than expected, but in others it\u2019s a total disaster that puts the fate of the world at risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bond has to go back to work for MI-6, meaning that he gets to meet up with old friends M (Ralph Fiennes), Q (Ben Whishaw), and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), as well as Nomi (Lashana Lynch), a younger agent who has been assigned Bond\u2019s old 007 number. He interrogates arch nemesis and former SPECTRE head Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), who indirectly directs him back to Madeleine, who is the key to Safin (Rami Malek), the mastermind of a DNA-based plot to kill millions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe the biggest disappointment of the film is Malek\u2019s villain. He\u2019s a frightening force in an early flashback scene, but once he\u2019s unmaked (literally), he\u2019s just another stock villain who insists that humanity can only be saved if he kills a great deal of it. He also likes to tend to his garden, in case the parallels to Thanos weren\u2019t blatant enough. He controls a trump card that gives him the upper hand on Bond, and he foolishly throws it away after an annoyance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The good news is that the scene I was most anticipating certainly delivers. The \u201cKnives Out\u201d reunion between Craig and de Armas is filled with fun chemistry and action. I can\u2019t see de Armas in another movie soon enough, and if casting directors weren\u2019t breaking down her door before, they will be after her action scenes in this movie. The problem is that what the scene delivers in quality, it lacks in quantity. This movie is 163 minutes long and de Armas isn\u2019t in it for more than ten. But those less-than-ten minutes are the highlight of the film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Back in 2012 I wrote that the best thing about \u201cSkyfall\u201d was James Bond\u2019s vulnerability. It was nice to see a more human side of the character. But with \u201cNo Time to Die,\u201d I feel like we\u2019re getting too much vulnerability, like he\u2019s so emotional throughout the movie (and granted, he has a lot to be emotional about) that he\u2019s no longer a recognizable version of the character. This will be Craig\u2019s last turn as James Bond, and it feels right. Five movies is a satisfying number, and the series can only play the \u201cpulled back into action after he tries to retire\u201d card so many times before the trope is overdone. Maybe this last entry would have been disappointing if it had opened on time, maybe it falls short of expectations because of the 18-month wait, all I know is that I\u2019m underwhelmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grade: C<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNo Time to Die\u201d is rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, some disturbing images, brief strong language and some suggestive material. Its running time is 163 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Bob Garver Last spring, the James Bond movie \u201cNo Time to Die\u201d became the first movie to be pushed back because of the pandemic. The subsequent 18-month delay… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":50876,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[771],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50875"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50875"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50877,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50875\/revisions\/50877"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}