No Time to Die (5/5 Stars)

 

James Bond was never intended to be the adult in the room. The early films are exercises in juvenile wish fulfillment, specifically those of white boys. Imagine being a very important person (agent of a world superpower government) possessed with extraordinary skills and intelligence in exceedingly dangerous (see exciting) situations that will never have to actually deal with any of the repercussions. The cleanup is another department. As a bonus to all of this, as a very important person dealing with the less civilized parts of the world, you are offered exotic women by the local power brokers, and if other situations, the women just naturally flock to you because you are more handsome, wealthier, the plot calls for it, etc. I like the old James Bond movies, in particular I recommend “You Only Live Twice” but I will admit they are a guilty pleasure, you know like pornography.

I bring this up in this review for “No Time to Die” because it is quite extraordinary how grown up the franchise has become. With massive popularity comes responsibility (via criticism) and the James Bond of 2021 is more an elder statesman than a juvenile delinquent. What is even more amazing is that the quality of the movies have not diminished. “No Time to Die” is just as entertaining as “You Only Live Twice.” Indeed, “No Time to Die” retains many of the old James Bond tropes: exotic locales, gorgeous women, a disfigured villain in an island fortress, but the mood and tone are of an entirely different genre. “No Time to Die” is like a great cover version song of an old classic. You know the song, but you had no idea it could work so well in such a completely different way.

This is Daniel Craig’s fifth outing as James Bond. The story picks up right where “Spectre” of several years ago left with the hopeful retirement of James Bond with Lea Seydoux, that gorgeous French woman. This one is directed by Cary Fukunaga (True Detective Season 1, Sin Nombre) who also shares a writing credit with the duo of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. (Purvis and Wade, IMDB relates, have written the last seven James Bond movies dating back to 1999’s “The World is Not Enough.” They are getting very good at it.) The retirement does not last very long though as Lea Seydoux’s past comes back to haunt her with James as the collateral damage. This movie is two and a half hours long, its locales span continents from Italy, to Cuba, to Sweden, to Japan, the main villain’s plot, and even his identity, comes quite late, yet it never moved slow and I never felt restless. I was in good super competent hands.

In particular, this movie is a course in actions sequences that work. Unlike the digital acrobatics of Marvel blockbusters, the stunts in “No Time to Die” have a down-to-earth visceral feel to them. It looks like that car really crashed and rolled, that the telephone pole fell down on a live set, that the stunt man really did drive that motorcycle up the side of that Italian building (wow!). At one point, in an extended one shot sequence, Daniel Craig shoots and fist-fights his way up a crowded stairwell. Whatever they are doing, it is just so much better than “Shang-Chi”.

A good James Bond movie is a series of fun set pieces, strong men, and beautiful women. The opening car/motorcycle chase with Lea Seydoux through the Italian village is great. So is the spy mission in Havana, Cuba with Ana de Armas as sidekick. Finally the infiltration of a villain’s island fortress with Lashana Lynch. In between there is humor deftly brought to the fore by wisecracking Ben Whishaw as Q and Naomie Harris as Moneypenney and the classic James Bond score providing the punctuation. In the villain department, Christoph Waltz reprises his Spectre mastermind Blofeld now locked away in a maximum security prison while outside a new threat in the form of Rami Malek.

It is the villain subplot that is finally where this movie comes up short. The danger is real enough. The British government was secretly developing a type of airborne weapon that attacks certain genomic sequences. In this way, the government could conceivably release the virus in a room and it would only kill one person, the intended target. Of course, this weapon is stolen and repurposed so that it may attack whole groups of people with similar genomic sequences, maybe an entire race of people. Evil enough, but the movie does not actually go so far as to suggest what group of people the bad guy is interested in killing. The bad guy’s island fortress is located between Russia and Japan and a simulation of the weapon seems to mainly central Europe. Noone in the movie is from Central Europe. Perhaps the franchise felt that to actually pinpoint a target was not necessary given that the members of the audience could all agree that the idea is nefarious supervillain territory regardless of what group is being targeted. Still, the lack of this detail, harms the viewer’s ability to understand the motivation of the villain, which in turn harms the drama. A minor quibble. Otherwise Rami Malek with his creepy delivery and bug eyes are classic Bond villain.

At the end of this movie, you may come to the realization that this really will be Daniel Craig’s last dance and that the franchise will have to turn to a different actor in any new installment. So who should it be? Well, I think whoever it is, they should redo the entire feel of the franchise, taking it perhaps down a few notches from the stripped down, brutish, and semi-seriousness of Daniel Craig. How about Dev Patel and, please, more irresponsible sex. Being responsible is great for a few movies, as a change of pace, but overall, James Bond should be having more fun.

Bohemian Rhapsody (3/5 Stars)

A movie with a Queen soundtrack is automatically good.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” belongs to that relatively new subgenre of movies, the musical biopic. These movies trace the life of a famous musician with the help of a greatest hits soundtrack. This subgenre has its pluses and minuses. The pluses are the guarantee of a soundtrack that is composed of great songs, a must have in any good movie musical, and an existing fan base that can guide the creators to the important much loved milestones/controversies of the musician’s life. The drawbacks is the inborn sense of responsibility to the musician’s brand, which can gloss over certain unsympathetic events (say the omission of multiple children by multiple women in the movie Ray while the musician was married) or act as an excuse to put the plot of the movie on autopilot. There are great movies in this genre that use the pluses and avoid the drawbacks. Ultimately they can do this by not making the musician the hero of his story, but as a means to explore deeper themes. Amadeus has a Mozart soundtrack but is ostensibly about a less famous rival of his, Salieri, and his envy. Very good movies like Get on Up and The Doors do not treat their musicians sympathetically at all and act more like cautionary tales about fame and/or drugs. It is rare that a musical biopic can have it both ways: an exception would be What’s Love Got to Do With It, which believably portrayed Tina Turner as the hero of her life without provoking the usual cynicism.

Bohemian Rhapsody belongs to the middle-of-the pack biopics that herald a great soundtrack, make sure the fans get all the milestones/controversies they came to see, but ultimately fails to connect the music with a unique story. This movie follows an autopilot plot of early and unlikely success, large success marred by egotism, a break-up, soul-searching and an ultimate reunion for one last concert. You’ve seen this before. The music is probably better this time, but that is because Queen is a special band, not because the movie is a special movie.

Having said that, I enjoyed the entirety of the movie. How could I not? They were playing Queen the entire time and some of the cliché scenes were rendered enjoyable simply by the truth of it all. Did a producer really drop Queen after hearing their magnum opus album “A Night at the Opera” because he did not like/understand “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Yes, apparently this happened. The recluse Mike Myers drops in for a cameo scene as the clueless producer in order to milk this scene for all its worth. When the band exits the producer’s office they warn that the producer will be always be remembered as the man who lost Queen. This is the type of movie that has no qualms about unfairly utilizing 20/20 hindsight. Still its enjoyable because its true. What a dolt.

Bohemian Rhapsody may be notable in that its autopilot plot noticeably avoids a take on Freddie Mercury that would plausibly argue that he was a great figure in a continuing cultural battle. Freddie Mercury was gay at a time when he could not be open about it. However this biopic is not all that concerned with any prejudice Freddie Mercury may have encountered (his rift with his parents is much broader than sexuality given that they are conservative Zoarastrians from Zimbabwe) and portray him as a figure fighting for gay rights. In fact, his first wife is glowingly portrayed while the character the movie decides to make its villain is Freddie Mercury’s first gay lover and his gateway into the homosexual lifestyle of the late 70s and early 80s. It is there through debauched partying that Freddie contracts AIDS, a truth that the movie does not describe in detail and does not ask the audience to sympathize with in any particular way. The story ends with the LiveAid concert for Africa wherein a healthy and robust Freddie strutted and performed before an audience of one billion people. His death a mere five years later is not shown. I wonder whether had this movie been made ten or twenty years ago perhaps this part of Freddie’s story would have had a more central importance to the movie. Now that the cultural argument seems to have been all but won in favor of homosexuality, perhaps we will see the argument sidestepped more often and even more villains garbed in studded leather jackets.

Freddie Mercury is played by Rami Malek, a decent casting choice. Rami Malek and Freddie Mercury both look vaguely foreign in the same unique way that it almost seems like Bohemian Rhapsody was a movie waiting for Rami Malek to become famous before it could get made. Rami Malek does a fine job in performing Freddie moves on stage. However, there is a slight problem here. Rami has to be about five or six inches too short and it apparent in several scenes where he is sharing a stage with other actors who should be the same height or shorter than he is. It is possible to heighten an actor in a movie. Steven Spielberg somehow plausibly grew Daniel Day-Lewis by seven or eight inches to play Abraham Lincoln. Bohemian Rhapsody fails to perform the same magic with Rami Malek and this hurts his ability to project Freddie Mercury’s stage presence. You can look at a YouTube video of the LiveAid concert alongside the movie’s shot by shot performance of the same concert and see what I mean. At the end of the day, Rami Malek falls short of Freddie Mercury.

The director of this movie was Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, X-Men) who has done some very good movies in the past. Apparently he was fired half-way through for allegations that have not been fully revealed but seem connected to the #MeToo movement in a Kevin Spacey-like way. Dexter Fletcher took over and made a safe mediocre movie. I’m not sure what Bryan Singer was doing, but I bet it wasn’t too much different than the world that Freddie Mercury was apart of for awhile. A more ambitious movie may have explored that a little further, but perhaps we are not ready for that yet. It certainly wouldn’t fit the operatic bouyant eminently entertaining music of Queen all that well.