Review of No Time to Die (2021) by Jnr — 19 Oct 2021

Tl;dr: If you are a fan (or even simply liked) previous Daniel Craig Bond films, you won't be disappointed. I liked this movie. It had a lot of work to do; close out the Daniel Craig films and multiple storylines which previous films (Spectre, specifically) attempted to do somewhat clumsily.

There is a LOT in the film, with additional callbacks to very early Bond films while at the same time updating Bond and the other characters to the times. The action is fantastic and the gadgets (like in most of the Craig films) are featured without crowding out the characters and dialogue.

RM as the villain reminded me of a Ferrari in traffic; he's a great actor who had to work with limited time and material (which was a reasonable choice for the filmmakers, there wasn't a lot of room for development when there was so much to get through).

There are other departures from the series for this film which I won't spoil. In the end I gave it a 9 in large part because they did a great job for a film that had a very high degree of difficulty. It's not Skyfall or Casino Royale but the fact that it was closer to those films than QoS is a really impressive feat imo.