No Time To Die: Daniel Craig's final James Bond film receives glowing reviews
The new James Bond film No Time To Die has been met with rave reviews and deemed a "fitting end" to Daniel Craig's time as 007.
The long awaited film will be released to the public on 30 September after being postponed three times due to the pandemic.
And it was worth the wait, according to reviewers.
The Times awarded the film five stars.
Reviewer Kevin Maher said No Time To Die is “magnificent” and delivered on the potential Craig’s first Bond film Casino Royale teased in 2006.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Robbie Collin also gave No Time To Die a glowing five-star review.
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He praised the “sensationally thrilling and sinister prologue” and described the film as “often very funny indeed”.
Collin wrote: “The mood is often closer to the perkier passages of the Connery films, and the humour feels contemporary and British: the Phoebe Waller-Bridge script polish evidently yielded the desired result.”
Another five-star review came from the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw.
Craig’s final Bond outing is an “epic barnstormer”, the reviewer said, with director Cary Joji Fukunaga delivering the film “with terrific panache”.
Bradshaw compared No Time To Die to the Marvel and DC superhero films, adding: “No Time To Die is startling, exotically self-aware, funny and confident, and perhaps most of all it is big: big action, big laughs, big stunts and however digitally it may have been contrived, and however wildly far-fetched, No Time To Die looks like it is taking place in the real world, a huge wide open space that we’re all longing for.”
The Sun’s Dulcie Pearce gave No Time To Die four stars out of five.
She said Craig “exits the franchise with a bang”, reserving special praise for the “simply spectacular” stunts.
However, Pearce found fault with the film’s run time of two hours and 43 minutes, writing “there are times you want get a defibrillator out and give it a much quicker pulse”.
She added: “The storyline feels like there were too many cooks, but it still tastes familiar enough to be craved.”
Empire magazine also gave No Time To Die four stars.
Reviewer John Nugent wrote: “This is a Bond film that dutifully ticks all the boxes – but brilliantly, often doesn’t feel like a Bond film at all. For a 007 who strived to bring humanity to the larger-than-life hero, it’s a fitting end to the Craig era.”
However one review said the film was "uneventful".
Writing in The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey gave the film three stars out of five.
She said: “What’s most disappointing about the film is how uneventful the whole thing feels.”
Remi Malek’s performance was underwhelming, according to the review, which states the Oscar-winner “gives almost nothing to the role beyond his accent and stereotyped disfigurement makeup”.
But Craig’s performance was a fitting end, Loughrey wrote.
She said: “He is brilliant in No Time To Die, in a way that outshines everything around him. His granite-carved features crumple in just such a way, always at the right moment – his Bond contains an ocean of battered emotions trying to reach the surface.”