Review: 'No Time to Die' ends Daniel Craig's run as James Bond on a high note, and suggests possibilities for a franchise-era future

James Bond has fought and conquered the Soviets, gold-greedy thieves, monomaniacal villains bent on destroying humanity, global criminal conspiracies, the disco era, corporate greed, and someone giving the title “Octopussy” to one of his 25 movie adventures.

In the latest Bond movie, “No Time to Die” — the fifth and final outing for star Daniel Craig — Bond may finally have met his match: True love.

That’s how the movie starts, with Bond on a lovely Italian honeymoon with Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux), the psychiatrist with whom he rode away in 2015’s “Spectre.” This is a first for Bond — starting a movie with the woman with whom he was kissing at the end of the previous movie. This is an indicator of how the Broccoli family, who have been in charge of the Bond franchise since 1962’s “Dr. No,” has learned to adapt to the age of movie franchises and continuity spanning across movies.

“We have all the time in the world,” Bond tells Madeleine as they drive on a winding road. Tellingly, that was the last line Bond (then played by George Lazenby) spoke in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” after he married Tracy di Vincenzo (Diana Rigg), and she was assassinated by supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld. So the current director, Cary Joji Fukunaga (“It: Chapter One,” “Beasts of No Nation”), and his writing crew know their Bond lore well.

Of course, they don’t have time — because someone has found the couple in this idyllic Italian town, and is trying to kill him. He survives, through some breakneck car chases and the franchise’s always-audacious stunt work, but the relationship does not. Bond believes Madeleine, the daughter of a deceased Spectre assassin, has somehow betrayed him, so he puts her on a train and they part ways.

Cut to five years later, and another evil plot is afoot. Someone has broken into a biological lab in a London skyscraper, stolen a deadly and secret technology, and kidnapped a Russian scientist, Valdo Obruchev (David Dencik), who knows more about the big, bad biological weapon than he’s letting on.

It turns out that M (Ralph Fiennes), the head of the British spy agency MI6, also knows more about the biological weapon — and something called Project Heracles — than he is telling. For awhile, M stonewalls not only Bond, who has retired to a peaceful life in Jamaica, but the current holder of the 007 number, Nomi (Lashana Lynch).

Bond is coaxed out of retirement by his old CIA friend, Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright), to go to Cuba, where they believe Obruchev is hiding out — and where a meeting of all of Spectre’s top agents are gathering. With the help of a local operative, Paloma (Ana de Armas, Craig’s co-star from “Knives Out”), Bond infiltrates the shindig, which isn’t at all what it appears to be.

Eventually, Bond must confront the real bad guy of the film, the mastermind Lyutsifir Safin, played by Remi Malik. But to get there, Bond must cross paths with two figures from his past: Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), and the only person Blofeld will speak to while in the prison Bond put him in — his psychiatrist, Madeleine, who turns out to have some history of her own with Safin (as seen in the movie’s prologue).

That’s a whole lot of synopsis, and I barely scratched the surface of this sprawling, nearly three-hour movie, which hops from Italy to Jamaica to Cuba to London to Norway to a few more stops. But globe-hopping is as much a part of the Bond tradition as the stunts and car chases, and Fukunaga — rewriting a script by Bond veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, with more writing from British comedian Phoebe Waller-Bridge — doesn’t skimp on what we like about these movies.

Malek makes an odd choice for a Bond villain, and he brings an unsettling stamp to Safin. He’s more comfortable telling Bond about his madman plans for world domination, and finds parallels between himself and Bond — both killers in the name of improving the world, Safin says, though his way is “a bit tidier.”

There are plenty of solid action pieces, though the most fun is when de Armas’ Paloma dispatches a foyer full of gunmen while wearing an evening gown. Thankfully, Craig’s is a Bond who’s secure enough in his manhood to let Paloma or Lynch’s Nomi shine — and strong enough to bring some emotional weight, and even tears, to 007’s world-saving mission.

Craig has made it clear this is his final go-round as Bond, and the movie leaves little room for doubt that the franchise will have to retool to continue. But the credits of “No Time to Die” end as all Bond movies do, with the words “James Bond will return” — and, whoever takes over the role, Craig has set a high bar while also leaving plenty of possibilities for what that return might look like. 

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‘No Time to Die’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 8, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, some disturbing images, brief strong language and some suggestive material. Running time: 163 minutes.