Bondificating: No Time To…

Later this year I want to do something Craig-era related to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Casino Royale. I have written and spoken so much about that movie that I do not know if I can add anything more.

The Craig-era movies were recently added back onto Netflix and I found myself circling back to No Time To Die.

I had not watched this movie in the theatres so I decided to run a little experiment. I had no intention of sitting through the whole thing. Instead I wanted to test a theory I had:

That there is a fully functional Bond movie within No Time To Die - you just have to know when to check out.

I want to be clear - as regards the ending of Bond 25, I do not care that Bond died. I do not think it is a betrayal as an idea, but a failure to execute an idea.

I always felt that the chunk of the movie from the opening until Bond leaves Cuba was more functional and frankly enjoyable than the rest of the film.

Through this lens, I was shocked at how well it worked.

It is not perfect, but as ‘Bond gets his groove back’, No Time To Die Part One is great.

The flashback to Madeline’s childhood is a well-directed, atmospheric little chiller. It helps that the film grounds us in the child’s POV (it also shields the viewer from hearing Rami Malek state his full name).

Even the early interactions between Bond and Madeline feel more elegiac.

The first set-piece is a great throwing-down of the gauntlet.

The segue into the titles, as the familiar dots cross the screen and Cubby Broccoli’s name appeared onscreen, I was overwhelmed by the finality of it all.

This feels like the last Eon movie.

I have no idea if the producers truly meant this to be the end, but it feels like it.

Every scene feels so energised, but it is the electricity of a closing act, the final play of the game.

The transition from Daniel Kleinman’s titles to the London skyline remains breathtaking - even my brother pointed it out.

I remember disliking David Dancik on my initial viewings, but he is so much fun as the clumsy evil scientist (“I like animals!”).

He adds an offkilter take on the comic evil sidekick.

Billy Magnussen is also fun as the superficially charming Logan Ash.

Lashana Lynch is a great addition to the franchise - in this chunk of the movie, she acts as a fine foil for Bond.

She becomes less interesting the longer the movie goes on, but that is a conversation for another day.

The climax of this abridged cut is the high-point of the film: 

Ana De Armas’s Paloma is great as Bond’s plucky non-romantic mission partner. If you take this section of the film as it’s own story, her appearance can be seen as a counterbalance to the distrust and heartbreak of his romance with Madeline.

Bond’s infiltration of Blofeld’s birthday party also takes the film back to the weirdness the franchise has more or less ignored since Craig’s predecessor - the bizarre touch of Blofeld viewing the show through a detached cybernetic eye on a platter carried by a waiter adds to light, slightly macabre tone. We even get one final cameo from producer Michael G. Wilson.

This was the last sequence shot and it feels like it has been worked on the most. There is an energy and sense of ease to the scene, like the team rallying for one last goal.

Bond succeeds in his mission and flies away, mojo restored.

It is tight, inventive and fun - it is also the last point where main villain Safin’s motivation makes sense (or anyone else’s).

One day I will watch No Time To Die in toto, but I do not think it will get better than this.

Craig’s first and last movies have the feel of different segments pieced together: Casino has the action-packed first act, the low-key gambling drama of the middle, and the tragic romantic thriller at the end.

No Time To Die has a similar sense of disjunction, except the through-line is muddled, and the romance the film wants us to hang the story on lacks chemistry between the actors.

For now, I’ll leave the review on a high note - Bond flying off into the sunset, seemingly at peace.

OUT NOW: Disclosure Day (Steven Spielberg, 2026)

As the world spirals toward nuclear armageddon, a rogue scientist, Daniel (Josh O’Connor), is on the run, determined to blow the lid on the activities of an unscrupulous corporation, Wardex. 

Wardex has hidden evidence of extraterrestrial life, and has used the alien race’s technology for its own ends.

When a local TV reporter, Jane (Emily Blunt) starts speaking in an alien language on a live broadcast, Margaret can understand what she is saying.

Drawn by an unknown impulse, Jane seeks out Daniel, and they head to Kansas City where a secret group of ex-Wardex employees are developing a plan to share Wardex’s secrets with the world…

Before I had a moment to sit with Disclosure Day and how I felt about it, I heard a voice from the back offer a short condemnation:

“That sucked.”

I felt both a desire to solidify my own reaction, and a sense of hopelessness - that dismissive voice sounded young.

The movie has not failed - and box office success is not the arbitrator of quality.

But I still feel a shade depressed.

DId I love the movie? No.

But it did something most movies these days do not.

It sat with me. 

Its desire to find hope, to believe in the collective good, that mankind can save itself from the oncoming forces of environmental decline and fascism - there was something powerful there, something that deserved more consideration than “that sucked”.

Disclosure Day sees Steven Spielberg returns to the themes of his earlier works about alien beings, E.T.and Close Encounters of The Third Kind, but by way of the encroaching cynicism of his latter films.

By the end of the film, Spielberg ends on a sequence foregrounding a renewed sense of empathy.

You feel a filmmaker seeing the encroaching calamity of contemporary life - and for most of the runtime, you might think he has been subsumed by it.

As it feels like the film is heading for some kind of confrontation, the film counters - violence is averted, its energy dissipated.

The forces of mass media are redirected toward a moment of mutual revelation.

The cast are solid - I was particularly taken with Colin Firth’s villain, an obsessed CEO cracking under both the roll of the technology he abuses, the weight of the humanity he has given up to possess and hide it. 

There is a chilly resolve beneath the familiar voice, a directness to his stare - Firth feels genuinely unmoored, and it is a disturbingly effective casting against type.

The film features a few solid action beats - there is a great set-piece involving a crashed car against a train, and an extended one-take that was so effective I did not notice it until someone pointed it out on social media.

I have dismissed Spielberg’s recent work, and missed a good chunk of it. After Disclosure Day, I want to go back and make up the gaps.

He might not be the same filmmaker he was, but that is the nature of things.

On the evidence of Disclosure Day, he is not resting on his laurels or just keeping busy - this is a filmmaker who is still engaging with the world, and trying to create art that reckons not just with the world as it is, but as it could be.

Related

Jaws

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Raiders of the Lost Ark 

Temple of Doom 

The Last Crusade

Jurassic Park

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 

The Post

West Side Story (2021)

If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!

The James Bond Cocktail Hour: Fast Five (Justin Lin, 2011)

 Our hosts discuss the coronation of the Fast franchise with 2011’s Fast Five.

Check it out at the link below or wherever you get your podcasts.

Related reviews

The Fast and the Furious

2 Fast 2 Furious 

Fast and the Furious - Tokyo Drift 

Fast & Furious 

Fast Five

If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!

BITE-SIZED: Osiris (William Kaufman, 2025)

Kidnapped in the middle of combat, a team of special forces soldiers (led by Max Martini and LaMonica Garrett) find themselves defrosted on an alien ship being sent home as spoils of war.

With their captors hot on their tail, their soldiers flee through the maze of the ship, struggling to find a way out.

Will they survive? Can they get home?

I heard about this movie via the Action for Everyone podcast - I love a good genre hybrid (Predator, Horror Express), and this felt right in line with those films.

Sometimes you can tell a movie is going to work by its opening.

As the credits roll, we track the Voyager probe from Earth through the solar system until it is swallowed up by some kind of ship of unknown dimensions.

The fact this movie - a tight 108 minutes - takes the time to actually have a title sequence is notable. While it does convey a certain level of information with the final reveal, it is also an exercise in allowing the mood to build, and that final image of the probe being swallowed up is just vague enough in terms of showing the alien craft, that the viewer is barely in front of our heroes in terms of comprehending what has happened.

The camera plummets back to contemporary Earth; into a firefight involving our protagonists.

 

What I immediately loved about the movie was how earnestly mounted it is.

Kaufman is renowned for his focus on getting the basics of tactical action right, and that feeds into this film’s sense of virismiltude.

The action is clean and clear - you always know where everyone is, and the filmmakers do a good job of giving each character a sense of personality largely through body language.

While the film did not have a big budget, the action is varied, and takes place in a variety of environments (the best set-piece is a mid-film ambush in a maze of crates).

Osiris does not waste time introducing the aliens, but takes its time in terms of providing clarity about their motivations, and avoids showing them in full form for a while.

The film also manages to convey exposition visually, without info dumps.

Initially I was enjoying Osiris as a simple programmer, but it pulls off a few intriguing reveals about the situation which completely recontextualise our heroes’ plight - one being that the alien invasion was not just successful but was decades in the past.

It turns the team’s entire mission into a more existential conflict.

Boosted by an excellent cast (Linds Edwards is particularly notable as the most high-strung of the team), Osiris is a fine genre piece that deserves a look.

BITE-SIZED: Judgement Night (Stephen Hopkins, 1993)

When a group of friends (Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeremy Piven and Stephen Dorff) get lost on the way to a sports event, they end up getting chased by a local street gang (led by Denis Leary).

Judgement Night is the movie I thought Trespass was.

Like Trespass, it also had an extended gestation - it started out as an idea from a producer, with different scripts by multiple writers (including John Carpenter).

I heard it was meant to be something like an urban version of Deliverance.

 

As is, the film never seems sure of what it wants to be.

It took me a long while to figure out that Emilio Esteves is meant to be the reformed wild man of his friend group. And I spent the movie thinking Dennis Leary and his thugs were dirty cops.

When he mentions being in prison late in the piece, I realised how miscast he is. What is worse is that one of his thugs is played by Peter Greene, an actor who emits the kind of menace the film’s big bad is supposed to convey.

There are moments which work - his diplomacy with the younger gang leader is a great deviation from expectations - it also fits Leary as a guy who is too smart for the room. He just does not convince as a hardened criminal - he is too inherently square.

The one person in the movie who works is Jeremy Piven as the friend group’s resident bullshit artist.

While Judgement Night works up some tension, it is never as scary as it wants to be - and the attempt at a message (be a man?) is too basic to resonate.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!