No Time To Die’s Ending Takes On A Dark Meaning With Amazon Owning James Bond

If you take a look at the Rotten Tomatoes page for “No Time to Die,” you will see a solid “certified fresh” rating of 83%. But if you look closely at the positive reviews, quite a few of them aren’t exactly glowing. In his otherwise favorable review, Peter Travers lamented a “sappy ending that surprises in all the wrong ways.” Writing for the New Yorker, Anthony Lane admitted the movie is “often exciting” but added that “there’s something inward and agonized about the thrills, and the insouciance of Connery’s epoch, for better or worse, seems like ancient history.” Justin Chang’s NPR review claims that watching Craig is “a poignant pleasure […] even if the movie around him is seldom as good as he is,” while in his “Fresh” Rolling Stone review, K. Austin Collins writes, “As a movie, Bond-related or otherwise, it’s just fine.”

All of which is to say that while “No Time To Die” clearly has its adherents, it was hardly the triumph that Craig deserved for his final outing — and judging by the negative takes, a lot of that has to do with the mawkish sentiments of the movie, which are ultimately crystalized in that final, grandiose death scene at the end of “No Time to Die,” which seemed so at odds with how Craig’s tenure started out. As Richard Brody wrote in his “No Time to Die” review for the New Yorker, “Craig’s distinctive persona suggests pathos that the series doesn’t allow; instead, he’s merely used as a Bond-piñata, a straining for an element of realism amid stunts that, in their grandiosity and their excess, preclude it.”

But now we know Amazon is in control of Bond moving forward, thus bringing an end to the EON era, perhaps that mawkish ending is a little easier to take. If I were handing a British institution off to Jeff Bezos and his streaming company I’d blow him to smithereens before I handed over the wreckage, too. While it doesn’t necessarily make “No Time to Die” a better movie, the elaborate climax is perhaps a little more fitting considering it wraps up not just Craig’s tenure, but the age of Bond that gave us Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Craig himself. Whatever comes next might well turn out to be better than expected, but it will undoubtedly be a new age of Bond. 

As such, EON ending their run as emphatically as they did suddenly starts to seem less like an egregious transgression against the very substance of the character, and more a defiant statement as Bond heads into a new world.