This weekend is nothing to write home about in terms of quantity, and honestly, the quality was not much better.
Now, I say the James Bond film, No Time to Die, which has finally hit theaters after being pushed for a year and a half, was sub-quality and that’s sort of a lie. In terms of action, this thing really brought it! But as far as where it lands in the deck of Daniel Craig’s James Bond films, it’s staunchly in the middle of the pack. I assume most people would argue it’s not better than Casino Royale or Skyfall, but almost certainly better than the disappointing Spectre (seriously, Christoph Waltz was your bad guy! Do better!) and the forgettable Quantum of Solace. With that, this film will probably fade out of my memory as time passes, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it in the moment!
In this iteration, Bond is “retired” (ha!), until he’s hunted down and almost killed in Italy. It’s there that he knows he can’t trust anyone, including his true love, Madeleine. So he ships her off and promises she will never see him again. Of course, that would have made this a very short movie, and I assure you that the run time is just 17 minutes shy of three hours. This film ups the ante by sending two bad guys Bond’s way: Bloefeld and Safin. Now, I was tickled to see that they were going to try and redeem Waltz’s villain arc, and anything Rami Malek does I’ll watch (excluding Dolittle, because why put myself through that?). I also think he makes an excellent villain. But, despite all of the minutes this film could have used to flesh out his character more, they just…don’t. Am I disappointed? A little. Especially because this film did drag in the middle. All that being said though, I quite liked the action, all of the i’s they dotted and t’s they crossed, and Ana de Armas was the most fun to watch for sure. I mean, if you’ve stuck with Craig’s Bond this long, you owe it to yourself to see it through.
In comparison, Netflix’s adaptation of the book of the same name, There’s Someone Inside Your House, should have been a fun and scary romp, but instead it felt rushed and boring. That really sucks because the book was pretty darn entertaining! I will give them credit for incorporating a lot of major elements from the book, but the film was so short that I hardly felt connected to any of the characters, including the lead Makani. I didn’t really care when someone died because I didn’t know them other than the bad thing they did. Which sure, for the first couple kills you don’t need to know them, but once it starts getting personal wouldn’t it help to know more about our main cast?
Most of the film follows a group of friends who are trying not to become the next victim of a killer who has a penchant for big knives and wearing a mask meant to look like your face. That was a cool deviation the film took from the book, but again, there just wasn’t enough time to care about anyone. The kills were gruesome, and that’s fun, but that’s really all this film felt like in the end. My sister, who has never read the book, agreed that the movie was pretty surface-level in terms of storytelling. You could also tell they were trying to weave in some current elements but they just never went further than a sentence or two. Perhaps the only redeeming quality of this movie was that Zach Dawes of Mini Mansions and The Last Shadow Puppets was in charge of the music! Otherwise, skip this one.