Blah. James Blah

I’d be fine if ‘No Time To Die’ was the last 007 flick. But it won’t be

There is a scene in the latest James Bond movie No Time To Die that is good, old-fashioned 007 fun.

On the hunt for a deadly bioweapon in Cuba, retired secret agent James Bond joins forces with a CIA agent named Paloma, a beautiful, enthusiastic rookie who turns out to be pretty good with a machine gun. The pair infiltrate a party thrown by SPECTRE, the secret society dedicated to world domination who love a fancy social event that features a henchman carrying around a bionic eye on a pillow so that their leader, the imprisoned Blofeld, can see who is in attendance.

What happens next isn’t as important as how enjoyable it is — Daniel Craig’s Bond and Paloma, played by Ana de Armas, have real sexual chemistry. Their characters enjoy drinking on the job and perforating henchmen with bullets. The action is, for a brief moment, naughty fun, like sneaking a smoke with your cousins at a family funeral.

The mayhem is exciting and I like to think James Bond does what he loves for a living. If you were to ask him during a job interview what his passion was, he’d respond, “Killing bad guys and unprotected sex with multiple partners.”

He’s a sadistic son of a bitch with a positive attitude, end of story.

The rest of the movie, unfortunately, isn’t as snappy as that scene. There are plenty of breathtaking stunts and well-choreographed car chases, but none of them are as joyful. Do you remember in Thunderball when Connery’s Bond escapes with the help of a jetpack? He’s having a good time.

No Time To Die is almost three hours long but it is rarely boring. It’s basically the most serious breakup movie of all time. I won’t spoil what happens at the end but I would have applauded if Craig had turned to the camera with his icy blues eyes and started singing a melancholy a capella version of Carly Simon’s Nobody Does It Better.

Daniel Craig’s Bond started out as a ‘blunt instrument’ in Casino Royale and ends his run as a hero who needs a hug.

The returning cast, including Raph Fiennes as “M”, competently reads what’s written in the script. But as the newly instated 007, Lashana Lynch is cocky as hell and is given the best quip before killing a villain in the movie. Bond’s love interest, Léa Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann, isn’t given much to do except look stressed out.

It’s good to see Jeffery Wright return as cigar-chewing CIA man Felix Leiter, the closest thing Bond has to a friend. As for the main baddie, Rami Malek’s Safin is a soft-spoken, scarred mess. He’s driven by vengeance (aren’t we all?) but his motivations are a little murky and I spent most of the movie wondering how he was able to afford a secret bunker on an island in the Pacific. This was also the first Craig-era flick that made me wonder, during climactic shootouts that begged for my attention, what an evil toady makes in salary and benefits. There are dozens of dudes happy to die for Safin, and, like, he’s not an inspirational thought leader, you know? His plan to poison the world is a little grim. So, like, do these flunkies get dental?

Speaking of villains, Christoph Waltz’s Blofeld is wasted.

Director Cary Joji Fukunaga has the unenviable job of wrapping up Daniel Craig’s 16 years run as James Bond, a job that requires he deliver an action-packed blockbuster that respects the past, bows to the fashions of the moment, and, most of all, makes tons of money. To Fukunaga’s credit, he understands the assignment, as they say on social media. He crams it all into No Time To Die: deadly gadgets, lush, sweeping vistas, escapes and fistfights, and a secret island lair where a villain plots the end of the world.

But there’s also plenty of what has distinguished Craig’s Bond films from all the others: glumness. It’s a shame really because anyone who has seen Craig in Steven Soderberg’s country-fried Ocean’s 11, Lucky Logan, or in Rian Johnson’s hit murder-mystery Knives Out knows that the musclebound Craig can be very funny, silly even. He’s a charming bruiser and you’d never know that watching his Bond, a self-loathing sadsack who longs for the quiet life, which is odd since he is obviously a sociopath with a weakness for cheap patriotism.

James Bond isn’t just a character, obviously. He’s the patron saint of white masculinity, a hero born after the allied victory against fascism and during the birth of a new war fought in the shadows, and in small poor countries, between two superpowers, the capitalists and the communists. He is a Playboy-era dream, a hero who can fuck and kill all he wants. The last five Bond films have desperately tried to update the character, transforming him into a sulking, broken-hearted romantic hero, but there is no escaping the truth that James Bond has always been, and will always be, a sophisticated weapons system, like a drone that strikes whoever and whomever he’s told to strike by people far away and if the innocent are killed, oh well.

If there’s a melancholy subtext to Bond, it’s not that he’s a grief-stricken loner who secretly wants a wife and kids, it’s that men like Bond, white men, aren’t nearly as important to civilization as we like to think.

I hope No Time To Die is the last James Bond movie, but I know better. This billion-dollar franchise is bullet-proof. Bond is the grandfather of Hollywood intellectual properties, a pair of words that conjure other words like “luxury” and “exotic” and “adventure” in the minds of tens of millions of people. He’s like an R-rated Mickey Mouse. There will be more movies that feature new Bonds. Let’s not forget Amazon’s recent purchase of MGM Studios, and the James Bond franchise, which means we have years, decades, of streaming shows about Young Bond, and Q and Moneypenny.

When they inevitably relaunch Bond, again, I’d like the series to be set in the 1960s. I want a James Bond period action movie because the best spy stories are Cold War stories. But that’s just me. I want poison-tipped umbrellas and Soviet super assassins and cigarettes that can fire mini-missiles. I will settle for, however, a Bond who is more true to Flemming’s chauvinist, colonialist vision, a sort of man out of time. Imagine the reverse of Marvel’s cornfed, all-American do-gooder Captain America. Bond is a pig, but he’s our pig, a one-hog-army. I think that’s why Judi Dench made such a cracking good boss.

And the conversation about who should play Bond next is officially tedious, I don’t care if they cast a woman or a man of color or a woman of color. I would prefer, however, that Hollywood greenlight new characters who better reflect the times or, at least, make a sequel to Charlize Theron’s bone-crunching 80s spy flick Atomic Blonde. Damn, that was good.

I know there are dudes out there who demand Bond stay white, British, and armed with a Walther PPK and a big, ‘ol dick. I know it’s hard to be a white man in modern society but buck up friends, if our grandparents stormed the beaches of Normandy, we can handle some changes to our favorite make-believe characters. We have so far.

But as I mentioned, I don’t care. I like Bond movies. I grew up with them. I’ll keep watching and Bond’s producers know this. It’s a habit and a fairly harmless one, comparatively.

No one asked but: my favorite Bond is Sean Connery, the street-tough trained by MI6 to wear a tux. Next, Roger Moore, who played Bond like a horny little devil, winking and kissing and causing chaos on behalf of the Queen. I love Pierce Brosnan, who combined Connery’s physicality with Moore’s playfulness. I’m a fan of George Lazenby’s one performance as Bond in Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and I think he should get credit for the most human 007. And then there’s Timothy Dalton, who plays Ian Flemmings two-dimensional pulp fiction spy as if he’s Hamlet. I sort of love all of the Bonds, actually, including Craig, even if he’s blah.

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• I wrote this a while ago, back when news that a woman of color would be playing 007 in No Time To Die. It’s about James Bond as a symbol and if you liked this review, you may enjoy this essay: