Movie Review: No Time To Die

8 min readOct 15, 2021

This James Bond film is the 25th in the Eon canon and the last for the actor Daniel Craig. But this is not the end of the almost 60-year film franchise. It is an above-average James Bond flick and an immensely satisfying conclusion to Daniel Craig’s tenure as Bond. (No spoilers)

I walked into the movie curious about whether it was missing a comma: “No, Time To Die.”

Why? The title seems to be a play on the interchange between James Bond and his enemy Goldfinger:

“Do you expect me to talk?”
“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”

No Time To Die: Satisfying

This is the first Bond film to be done in IMAX and 3D (in select countries.) It is the first film to lure me back to the cinema since the COVID-19 lockdown started. Several things made this $250M film so satisfying:

Cinematography: lush, evocative lighting, great action sequences, and terrific set-pieces. CGI by Industrial Light and Magic.
Sumptuous locations: Norway, Scotland, Italy, Faroe Islands, England, and Jamaica (one-time home of Bond author Ian Flemming, and locale of the first Bond film “Dr. No.”)
Music composer: by Hans Zimmer (Gladiator, Inception, Dunkirk, Sherlock Holmes, Pirates of the Caribbean, Dune,…)
Title song: by Billie Eilish, won a Grammy Award long before the movie came out. But there weren’t so many movies released during the COVID-19 lockdown.

However, contrary to several recent adolescent reviews by some:

It is not “the best Bond film ever.” That’s Goldfinger.
Nor is this even “Daniel Craig’s best Bond film.” That’s Skyfall, with his Casino Royale a close second.
Nor is Daniel Craig “the best Bond ever.” That’s Sean Connery, the original and still the best.

I say adolescent because many younger reviewers have lived with only Daniel Craig as James Bond over the last 15 years. That’s all they know. They may have seen a few Roger Moore or Pierce Brosnan Bond movies and found the special effects “hokey” by today’s standards. But that’s just it: back then, these were state-of-the-art FX, but younger reviewers have no historical…