When Bond has to save a major character from drowning, there’s an eerie similarity to that moment where he tried to – and couldn’t – save Vesper from her suicide in 2006. Swann’s own personal history is deeply tangled up with Safin’sįrom then on, the throwbacks keep coming thick and fast.
Later, when she takes down three heavies soundtracked by a salsa-inflected version of the Bond theme, you can’t help but wonder where the James Bond who used to drown people in bathroom sinks has gone.
And about midway through the film, Ana de Armas steals an entire crazy sequence in Cuba as an ingenue CIA agent named Paloma (“I’ve done three weeks’ training!” she tells Bond, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed) who takes Bond to the world’s most 12A orgy. Entirely disarmingly, Hugh Dennis – as in, from Mock The Week – pops up as one half of a double act of government scientists alongside Industry’s Priyanga Burford. Elsewhere, Fukanaga leans heavily into the comedy side of Bond (not a problem in itself, of course) and cheesy Russian accents abound.
No Time To Die features a gas attack on a black-tie event that is oddly free of tension, as well as a brief chase that functions more as a Range Rover advert than a sequence loaded with any true peril. Tonally, there are some moments that don’t quite jive.
