I didn’t think the Bond movies had it in them any longer. After his sensational debut in 2006’s Casino Royale, Daniel Craig starred in two catastrophic duds by anyone’s reckoning (Quantum of Solace and Spectre) and Skyfall, which I found lugubrious but most of the world did not. So the news back in 2018 that he had teed up his final Bond pic, No Time to Die, with the Oscar-winning Rami Malek as the villain, did not fill me with anticipation. And I didn’t care that it was postponed and postponed and postponed by the pandemic, because I was expecting some kind of Quantum of Spectrefall.
That didn’t mean I didn’t want to see No Time to Die. There have been 25 Bond pictures released over the past 59 years, which makes this the longest-lived franchise series in motion-picture history....