Friday started out with two unheard-of, and very complicating, events. One was that my alarm clock didn't work, for the first time ever, and the other was that I slept late, which I more or less never do. The result of these two almost unheard-of things, that happened at the same time, was that I missed my 5:10 AM flight to Massachusetts. I took off for the parking lot to get the shuttle to the airport anyway, and called jetBlue, to see if anything could be done, and before I passed 826, I realized I forgot something, so I had to go back home. But the jetBlue agent set me up with another flight at 11:00 AM, so I had time to go home, get what I forgot, get to the parking, and get to the airport in plenty of time.
I got myself settled, and was waiting for the flight to board, when I noticed a woman wearing a teeshirt with the old/original New England Patriots logo. I asked her if it was a really old shirt, or were they still printing them with the old logos, and she said they had stopped for a while, but resumed (presumably because there are a lot of people who very much dislike the new logo as much as this woman does, and I do). She and I agreed that people just like to change things, and she agreed with me that most often, when someone changes or "improves" something, it makes it worse. Anyway, this wouldn't be a very relevant conversation if it were not an introduction to something else during the flight.
The featured movie was "No Time to Die," which is a 2021 James Bond movie starring Daniel Craig. I had never before seen this movie, but I had flight time to kill, so, since watching the movie was free, I thought I'd go for it.
There have been several actors who have played James Bond. I have never heard of anyone who disputed that the first -- Sean Connery -- was by far the best. Connery was magnificent as Bond. I think I may have seen some of the others, but they don't hold a candle to Connery. Daniel Craig has played Bond in the last few Bond movies, and I saw him in "Casino Royale." It's frankly boring to watch James Bond movies with anyone but Connery playing Bond. I thought boring was as bad as it got.
"No Time to Die" was, I would have to say, as bad as it gets. It's probably as bad as it could get. Craig was awful, and the script was not good. The soul of James Bond was missing from this movie. Bond is inept. He actually falls in love. There was the bevy of "Bond girls," of course, but they were moving, and substituting, so fast, that it was hard to keep track of them. Bond fathers a daughter with one of them. But he dies in the end. (I really hope this means the James Bond catalogue will be historical, and no one will feel a need to resurrect Bond, as BrambleWitch and I agreed Guy Ritchie should not have felt a need to resurrect Sherlock Holmes. Although Holmes didn't die. Well, he did, but Doyle himself killed him and resurrected him, as only Doyle had a right to do.) But Bond? No. He must now be laid to rest.
There were so many things wrong with this movie that there was almost nothing right with it. It turned out that Bond/Craig had retired, or somehow been replaced, and in the spirit of political correctness, 007 was no longer a "white guy." 007 was now a black woman. So, there were sort of two 007s in this movie. It was hard to tell if they were competing or cooperating. They seemed ultimately to be on the same track, except that Bond/Craig died at the end, and the black woman didn't.
How could that possibly not have been the worst of it? The second named lead in this movie (after Craig) was Rami Malek. I saw Malek in the Freddie Mercury movie, and I thought he did a good job. In this movie, he could not have been worse. It may have been the worst job of acting I have ever seen. And if the evil organization was called Spectre, Malek himself looked like a spectre. He was pale, vacant, had some sort of weird accent, and was as ghostly as he was ghastly. He ought to have been more evil, and threatening. Even the actor who played the series-long (25 Bond movies, the last five starring Craig: I looked it up) Ernst Stavro Blofeld was empty.
And now, they had some strange character called Q, who was some sort of techie nerd, and who somehow couldn't keep up with what Bond was doing, even though his job was to guide Bond. His place in this movie made no sense. The movie seemed to try to make its living on special effects and CGI.
At the beginning of the movie, some young girl is present when her mother is shot to death by a guy (Rami Malek, as it later turns out) with a machine gun. The girl runs away, over a frozen lake, on which the ice is cracking. Malek comes after her. Somehow (who on earth knows how), she has a gun, too, and she shoots him repeatedly until he falls. Dead? It seems so, but he then gets up, and resumes following her over ice that's too thin to hold her, but apparently not too thin to hold him. (Oh, please.) She falls through the ice (he doesn't), and he starts shooting at her. With his machine gun. Repeatedly. But she somehow doesn't die. But now, she's under the ice, in frozen water, not having been shot by the machine gun (who knows how), and the next thing we know, she's back as an adult whose only problem is that her mother was killed. There's some question as to whether she, too, is working for Spectre, but I couldn't figure out if she was, or she wasn't.
The end of this movie was the destruction, by rocket-bombing, of some bizarre post-apocalyptic hatchery/farming operation, that produced what I think was chemical weapons. But it was really hard to tell.
It was way too much stuff -- way too many disconnected stories -- executed exquisitely poorly, and with no real coherent theme. At one point, Bond and M (Ralph Fiennes) were talking about how good things used to be. In the past. Yeah, they were sure right about that. If people really roll in their graves, I'm sure that's what Ian Fleming and Sean Connery are doing.
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