2021 - NO TIME TO DIE, hopefully the final Daniel Craig Bond film

This James Bond film, supposedly the last one with Daniel Craig had a lot of production problems.  The film lost it's original director Danny Boyle who left the project over the usual "creative differences." The replacement director Cary Joji Fukunaga who was brought in faced the task of trying to get a decent screenplay out of the 7 different writers that took a pass at the script.

Daniel Craig hurt his ankle during filming which required surgery.  The film's original composer was replaced with Hans Zimmer who contributed an unmemorable score with the highlights basically reused bits from old John Barry/Bond films.  The film was further hampered by the Covid  panademic which had it's release date pushed out 3 or 4 times.

This is another James Bond film that runs over two hours and in this case almost topped 3 hours, that's a lot of time for any film much less a James Bond film.  The film tried to tie together plot threads from the previous Craig/Bond films but this just seemed to muddy an already confused mess of a storyline which has Bond mad at his current girlfriend for some reason.  Throw in final and gratituous appearances from Bond characters Blofeld and Felix Leiter and the film ends up with an overstuffed approach to this Bond adventure.

 

As far as the cast goes, frankly Daniel Craig always seemed to play the character as a street thug instead of Ian Fleming' gentlemen secret agent.  Attempts to update the Craig series always had a kind of desperation about them.  Q is now gay and Moneypenny is black.  The only character that received any kind of positive comments was Ana de Aramis as the CIA agent Paloma, she's the one person who seems to be having fun because Craig isn't a who lot of laughs.

 

The film has a couple of plot twists that don't really work and frankly the action has a kind of been there done that feel to it. 

The mess of a screenplay was credited to Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Cary Joji Fukinaga and Phoebe Waller-Bridge but there were clearly others involved.  The running time is a deadly 163 minutes.