Daniel Craig ends his 15 year journey as James Bond with an enjoyable and perfectly solid entry, if not a bit long and lacking the emotional heft it strived for. NTTD is firmly the 3rd best of the Craig Bond films, reasonably summing up the totality of the run while trying to round out the character arc of 007.
I don’t have a ton bad to say about this film, other than it is a tad overly long (it’s almost 3 hours, unnecessarily), the aim of the villain is at once unclear (he wants to kill everyone, or make money selling it, while kidnapping the adult version of the girl he saved or maybe just her daughter? Just lay out what this character wants instead of “keeping him mysterious”) & up-the-ante cartoon villainous (a secret island compound where he serenely desires to kill...everyone I guess? Remember when the first bad guy of the series was trying to rig the stock market to make a few million?), and the catharsis for the character/series isn’t the emotionally resonant tidal wave that I believe the film desires. In these ways, it does tend to be a bit like some other Bond films; extravagantly styled but emotionally neutered (yes, that is harsh, but this is only a general consistency).
The action tends to be a bit ‘jarring Bourne-cam’ but the set pieces are splendid and fun to watch. Our new femme fat--scratch that--ASS KICKERS are the highlight of the entire thing; Lashana Lynch’s Nomi was a classy cool forward-looking addition to the mythos and Ana de Armas’ Paloma is a sexy spunky injection of pure pleasure - its too bad neither of them are in the film as much as they should be. Craig also brings the most rounded and poignant Bond, delivering pathos to the star-crossed killer (though his bond did descend into the invulnerability of his predecessors with this one...to a point).
It does conclude as a satisfying resolution to this era and a decent film overall. Active, exciting, intentioned and definitive. Not amazing but not bad.
