James Bond’s Heavy Heart in “No Time to Die” (2023)

A big welcome back to 007. The news is that nothing much has changed, and all the fixtures and fittings are in place. The license to kill, and the supple deployment of weaponry. The occasional whip of a wisecrack. The prime spot in the cockpit of an aircraft. The Aston Martin. The dress sense. The knockout shades. No question about it: she’s the right woman for the job.

As we are reminded by the latest chapter in the franchise, “No Time to Die,” 007 is not a person so much as a designated slot. Once vacated, it fills up like a parking space. Thus, when James Bond (Daniel Craig)—male, pale, and staled by years of trouncing megalomaniacs—goes off the grid, his prized 00 number is taken by Nomi (Lashana Lynch), who is proud, Black, younger than springtime, and much amused by the autumnal state of her predecessor. “You get in my way, I will put a bullet in your knee,” she says to him, adding, “The one that works.” Harsh.

They meet in Jamaica, whither Bond has retired. (Lord knows what he does all day. Maybe he sets off with a pair of binoculars, a packed lunch, and a copy of “Birds of the West Indies,” by James Bond, the American ornithologist from whom Ian Fleming, another Jamaica resident, pinched the name.) Nomi is on the trail of villainy, and Bond has been asked to follow the same scent—not by the British government but by the C.I.A., in the person of Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright). Who’d have guessed that the cream of Her Majesty’s spies would end up being milked by Uncle Sam? Is that why the opening credits show the symbolic figure of Britannia, with her trusty shield, falling into a giant hourglass and slipping away into the sands of time?

The film, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, runs almost two and three-quarter hours. That’s a lot of movie, longer than some recordings of the St. Matthew Passion, but Fukunaga has a lot of ground to cover. He begins, if you please, with a flashback to the childhood of a secondary character—not, alas, the infant Q, solemnly building particle accelerators out of Lego bricks, but a young French girl who will grow up to be Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), the heroine of the previous Bond adventure, “Spectre” (2015).

We now learn that Madeleine, as befits her doubly Proustian name, was marked for life by a potent early experience: the slaying of her mother by Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek), who has a scratchy voice and an unfortunate skin condition. Later, fulfilling the standard brief of a Bond baddie, Safin will occupy an island lair and hatch plans to dominate the planet. Needless to say, if only our leading nations had clubbed together to buy him a pot of moisturizer, the whole crisis could have been avoided.

At the conclusion of “Spectre,” Bond beetled off toward Big Ben in his Aston Martin DB5, with the adult Madeleine at his side. The new film finds him in the same car, with the same passenger, in a slightly trickier environment: a hilltop town in Italy, with his enemies circling and his bulletproof windows starred but not yet broken by incoming fire. It’s the perfect moment not just for Bond to ask Madeleine, whom he suspects of betraying him, what the hell’s going on but also for Craig, in his last bow as Bond, to demonstrate what he has brought to the role. Relaxed under pressure, and pressurized by the need to relax, he has the action man’s dread of inactivity. Suits and tuxedos don’t really become him, even if they fit him, until they are bloodiedand torn. Craig has been the right Bond for our times, grudging with his charm—barely a virtue nowadays—and nourished by a steady supply of traumas. He has a sense of humor, yet one-liners embarrass him, for the world is too laughably treacherous to be fobbed off with a joke. Even love seems to toughen him up.

To whom or what, then, can Bond be true? To his country? Returning to M.I.6, he is obliged to give his name at security and is handed a plastic nametag. On the way out, in the office of Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), he tosses the tag into the trash: a bitter coda to the memory of Sean Connery, deftly lobbing his hat onto the hat stand. Worse still, Bond learns that M (Ralph Fiennes), usually the solid soul of wisdom, has overseen a secret project called Heracles, which will allow Britain’s foes (unspecified, but possibly the European Union, in a war over sausage exports) to be targeted with nasty nanobots. Safin, naturally, gets hold of Heracles, and prepares to unleash it everywhere. It’s up to Bond—with a little help from Q (Ben Whishaw), the Royal Navy, the loyal Nomi, and, yes, a submersible glider—to save the day. Plus, if possible, himself.

There are many surprises in “No Time to Die.” The major ones I would scorn to reveal, even if you trained a laser on my undercarriage or suspended me over a tank of unfed sharks. Less important, but equally unexpected, are the glitches in continuity: Bond driving directly from labyrinthine Italian streets to a railroad station, on the flat, in what looks like another town entirely, or emerging from a foggy Norwegian forest into a nice bright day. A happier shock is the disclosure that Q has a cat, of the hairless variety. (“You know, they come with fur these days,” Bond remarks.) Maybe Q had cats all along—pussies galore!—and kept us in the dark.

The plot, too, is crawling with twists, yet we soon grasp, all too clearly, where it’s heading: du côté de chez Swann. It turns out that Madeleine has a daughter, named Mathilde (Lisa-Dorah Sonnet). “She’s not yours,” Madeleine says to Bond, reassuringly, yet the kid does have blue eyes, like his, and he is so drawn to her that, in the heat of the finale, he—the sort of fellow who used to blow up a volcano before breakfast—pauses to retrieve her knitted toy, Dou Dou, and tucks it into his suspenders. Lucky for Dou Dou, of course, but what does this herald for the brand of Bond? Everyone agrees that the age of the ladykiller is dead, unmourned, but are we ready for Bond the babysitter?

Fans will fret, and, as if to assuage them, Fukunaga piles on the retro treats: a guest appearance from Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), for one thing, and multiple morsels of Bonds past. As in “Skyfall” (2012), someone is trapped under a frozen lake, and the bunker where Safin breeds his toxins resembles the mega-garage where the madman in “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977) parked his stolen submarines. In a tribute to “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), we get an Aston Martin DBS, a reprise of Louis Armstrong in the end credits, and, during a conversation between Bond and M beside the Thames, a gentle echo of John Barry’s electronic score. (How I miss Barry. Would the myth of Bond even have survived without him?) As a valediction to Craig, though, “No Time to Die” leans so relentlessly on his earlier Bond films that anyone who never saw them, or failed to take copious notes, will be stranded. You mean you’ve forgotten that Madeleine’s father was Mr. White, introduced in “Casino Royale” (2006)? Shame on you!

The problem with “No Time to Die” is that it’s all about itself, and the tug of its own origins. Such is the current mode: we live under the spell of long-form television, and of the Marvel universe, both of which woo us with recurring characters and reward us for the stamina of our emotional investment. You could argue that no form has been longer than Bond’s, but the changes of cast—the actors playing 007, M, Q, Moneypenny, and Blofeld—have refreshed the fun, and each movie, by and large, has stood alone. Not so the new film, which throbs with old wounds. It’s often exciting, but there’s something inward and agonized about the thrills, and the insouciance of Connery’s epoch, for better or worse, seems like ancient history. “No Time to Die” has a heavy heart, and right now, more than ever, we could use a light one. As we trickle back to cinemas, is it merely frivolous to hope that a James Bond flick should leave us feeling cheered up?

Still, let us give thanks for what we have. Listen to M, for a start, as he issues a command: “Q, hack into Blofeld’s bionic eye”—a strong candidate for the most Bond-tastic line ever spoken. (Top marks to Fiennes for saying it with a straight face.) Best and blithest of all is Bond’s trip to Cuba, where he teams up with a novice agent named Paloma. She is played by Ana de Armas, who is Havana-born, and who consorted so nimbly with Craig in “Knives Out” (2019). Now, in evening dress, and in extreme peril, Paloma and Bond have to shoot their way out of trouble, though not before pausing for a brace of vodka Martinis. Paloma drains most of hers in a single glug. Mid-mayhem, they pause again to refuel, with a quick tot of something at the bar, before getting back to work. What bliss: in the depths of a wry and disconsolate film, it’s like watching Fred and Ginger. “You were excellent,” Bond tells Paloma as they part. She smiles and replies, “You, too.” And so say all of us.♦