No Time to Die: Why Craig is the best Bond ever

Daniel Craig brings a sense of finality to No Time to Die, which speeds along like a Q-designed Aston Martin. There’s a particular calmness to this Bond, a stoic acceptance of the inevitability of life and death and everything in between.

Daniel Craig as James Bond in No Time to Die. Picture: Nicola Dove

No Time To Die (M)
In cinemas
★★★★

Let’s not beat around the bush: No Time To Die has the most consequential, most staggering twist of any of the 25 James Bond films to date. If what appears to happen at the end does happen, it alters the 007 world forever.

While we are not mincing words, Daniel Craig is the best Bond, the one closest to the secret service agent created by Ian Fleming, and this is his finest performance in the role.

It’s been well publicised that this is Craig’s fifth and final appearance as the saviour of shaken martinis. He reportedly was offered $US150m to do two more films but said no.

He brings a sense of finality to this 163-minute movie, which speeds along like a Q-designed Aston Martin. There’s a particular calmness to this Bond, a stoic acceptance of the inevitability of life and death and everything in between.

This mental space – mental peace? – shows in a mesmeric scene where he sits in that bulletproof Aston Martin, barely blinking, as baddies hit it with a hailstorm of bullets.

At one point, he notes 007 is “just a number”. This is James Bond at his happiest and saddest. He is impenetrable until he is not. This overlapping emotional state comes with a deadpan humour that will have audiences laughing out loud.

There are lots of lines to choose from but let’s go with the moment he meets MI6 quartermaster Q (Ben Whishaw) at his Q-like flat and sees his hairless cat. “You know, they come with fur these days.”

Craig’s explosive yet subtle performance is steered by director Cary Joji Fukunaga, new to the franchise, and an expanded writing team that includes Fleabag creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

The director is best known for the 2015 African war film, Beasts of No Nation. He also directed season one of the landmark TV series, True Detective.

He does not hold back on his license to thrill. There are car chases, gun fights, trapped-underwater scenes and villains with prosthetic body parts, as one expects in a Bond film. Early on, there’s a breathtaking motorbike chase in Italy which should go for longer than it does.

Lashana Lynch stars as Nomi and Daniel Craig as James Bond in No Time to Die. Picture: Nicola Dove

Yet there are also some Bond tropes that are missing. This director has made the film his way. There is a huge revelation about Bond’s personal life, and that comes before the even huger twist near the end. This is a Bond film like and unlike all its predecessors.

When the story opens, Bond is no longer 007. He is retired and in love with psychiatrist Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux). They are holidaying in Italy and she tells him to visit the tomb of his former lover, Vesper Lynd. “As long as we are looking over our shoulder, the past is not dead,’’ she tells him.

He agrees, visits the cemetery and it goes very badly. He assumes he has been betrayed by Swann, as he was by Lynd. There’s a droll link to this later when Eve Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) is reminded she shot Bond (in Skyfall). “Everyone tries at least once,’’ she replies.

We move forward five years to the present setting of the movie. Bond is living alone in Jamaica. He is coaxed out of retirement by his CIA mate, Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), to help him track down an MI6 scientist (David Dencik) who has been kidnapped by the evil group, Spectre. This puts him at odds, initially at least, with the new 007 (Lashana Lynch, who is excellent).

The scientist has developed – at MI6’s request – a new bioweapon that targets an individual’s DNA and is harmless to anyone else. “A clean, accurate shot every time,’’ says MI6 boss M (Ralph Fiennes).

He says that ruefully, because, as one would expect, the new bad dudes, badder than Spectre, have manipulated the virus into a potential weapon of mass destruction.

They are led by Lyutsifer Safin (Oscar winner Rami Malek, a perfect choice), who sees himself as a killer and a hero. “I could be speaking to my own reflection,’’ he tells Bond.

Fukunaga says Safin is “more dangerous than anyone Bond has ever encountered”. Tell that to Mads Mikkelsen, who took a knotted rope to Bond’s testicles in Casino Royale. Yet the point, I think, is that blurring of the line between hero and villain.

Safin has a connection to Swann, who has a connection to Spectre founder Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), who is held, Hannibal Lecter-like, in London’s Belmarsh Prison. A scene where he is interrogated by Bond is another moment that throws out the rule book.

Bond is back in London with M’s approval. From here we have the old 007 and the new 007, “double 0 trouble”, as a colleague half-jokes, working to retrieve the scientist and the bioweapon and put a stop to Safin.

It’s an exhilarating experience, one that redefines James Bond and leaves viewers with even more questions to ask about the next 007 film.

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Eternals (M)
In cinemas
★★★½

Here are a few specks in the universe of questions asked in the new Marvel movie Eternals, in which the titular group of humanoid near-­immortals is ordered, by their godlike boss, to protect the human mortals on planet Earth.

Which Game of Thrones hunk is a better catch, Kit Jon Snow Harrington or Richard Robb Stark Madden?

Why does a 20,000-year-old alien speak in a Scottish accent? Why is Angelina Jolie so hot-headed with her fellow Eternals? Is it because, off screen, they are mere mortals?

Why, in 157 minutes that skip through time, space and place, is Australia, in its sole appearance, depicted as a desert hell hole?

It’s such speculations that make this movie highly entertaining and humorously self-aware. It’s too long – as is almost everything in the binge era – but it’s worth the trip.

Who is the funniest Marvel character? Chris Hemsworth as fat Thor is a contender, though Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool is the consistent card. All of the characters in Eternals join in the fun, making jokes about themselves, Marvel and its rival DC.

There are riffs about who will lead The Avengers now that Captain America and Iron Man are dead. There are snipes about Batman and Superman. “I don’t wear a cape,” sniffs the eternally vain Ikaris (Madden) when a boy mistakes him for the Man of Steel.

The funniest Eternal is Kingo (Pakistani-American comedian and actor Kumail Nanjiani). He is followed around by a human filmmaker cum butler (an excellent Harish Patel) and there are winks to Michael Caine’s Alfred in the Batman movies.

Ikaris (Richard Madden) and Sersi (Gemma Chan) in Marvel Studios' Eternals. Picture: Sophie Mutevelian

Most of the humour is deliberate and one of the people we can thank for that is the director and co-screenwriter Chloe Zhao, who won an Oscar for her 2020 film Nomadland.

Nomadland was a serious film, and so in its fashion is Eternals. While it’s an action-adventure with lots of cosmic detours and fights to the death, it does explore important issues, including ones that might have been on the table at the Glasgow Climate Change Conference.

Eternals is drawn from a Marvel comic first published in 1976. Zhao does not dwell on the backstory. In short, Eternals are synthetic humans created to save real humans from extinction, which is the aim of Deviants, creatures that look like giant, super hostile griffins.

The director picks various times in human history to show Eternals on Earth kicking Deviant arse, starting in Mesopotamia in 5000BC. However, she also shows humans kicking human arse, such as Spanish conquistadors slaughtering Aztecs and, in the most moving scene in the movie, the smouldering ruins of Hiroshima.

This goes to a challenge Eternals face. They have orders not to interfere in human conflict. Their only mission is to stop Deviants.

Yet their creator Arishem (voiced by David Kaye) is a devious higher being. Are Deviants who he says they are? And is he truly interested in saving humans and keeping their little blue bauble spinning? The latest crisis on Earth is set in the present day. Deviants are back and they have a plan. There’s a global earthquake, as a warm-up act.

Each Eternal has a unique super power, and a long past. Ikaris, we learn, has been hooked up with Sersi (Gemma Chan) for five millennia. There’s a love scene between them that nods to the famous one between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity.

However, Ikaris went away for a bit and she, working in a museum in London, fell for a human professor (Harrington). Which is it to be, immortal love or the regular kind? It’s a question Eternal inventor Phastos (Brian Tree Henry) also has to ask, in an interesting way. A brief kiss between Phastos and his other half has reportedly seen the film banned in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar after Disney refused to cut it.

Jolie is Thena. She jokes about dropping the A. She’s a loose cannon so is entrusted to the super strong Gilgamesh (Korean actor Don Lee) and transported to Australia. The other Australian connection is that this movie is coedited by former ABCer Craig Wood.

Salma Hayek is the chief Eternal, Ajak. The remarkable Barry Keoghan is Druig, who can read minds and thinks Arishem might be having a lend of them. And so rebellion brews.

With this terrific, ethnically diverse cast, playful, thoughtful director and eye-catching camera work by Marvel regular Ben Davis, Eternals, the 26th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, more than passes muster.