No Time To Die

I finally got round to watching the latest Bond film No Time To Die today - taking a cheeky afternoon off work, and the first time I've been to the cinema since the onset of the pandemic.  I kept my mask on throughout the film, and this cinema was located in King County - which meant that I had to show my vaccination card to be allowed in, which makes things feel a bit safer.  As for the film itself, I'm still kind of digesting it.  I really wanted to like it, a last hurrah for Daniel Craig as Bond.  But if I'm going to be honest, I didn't think it was all that.  There was actually a few times during the film when I "rested my eyes" - not exactly a sign that I was really invested in the goings on.  So it would be fair to say that I found the film kind of boring - it could have been more exciting or it could have been more darker, but it ended up being neither.  It made me pine for the old womanizing Bond - a sole love interest, complete with (MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT) a kid, is not what I want to see.  And (EVEN BIGGER SPOILER ALERT) neither do I want to see Bond unequivocally die - at least let him die with some ambiguity.  I feel like this film just tried to tick all the checkboxes for a Bond film (car chase, gadget use, one-liner, etc), but lacking that something special.  An unmemorable villain, an unmemorable chief henchman (or henchwoman), and an unmemorable love interest does not help.  I found the little easter eggs to previous Bond films to be kind of distracting.  But it does make me want to watch all the Bond films again, particularly Craig's Bond films because I don't think I've watched any of them more than once (though I feel that Casino Royale is by far the best of his).  I think this film is probably closest to On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which also saw Bond in love, and which happens to be a better film even if it has an inferior Bond actor.  I'm not going to give the film a rating just yet, it needs rewatching.  But reading what I've just written here, it definitely seems like a low to mid-table entry in the Bond franchise ratings.