After a decade and a half of playing the iconic character agent 007, “No Time to Die” marks Daniel Craig’s last instalment as James Bond in the long-lasting franchise.

As the first James Bond movie I have ever viewed, my impressions of it are based on how the movie works as a stand-alone movie.

The movie has a lot of pacing issues and seems to rely heavily on the fact that you’ve seen most of the Bond movies before this one. The film starts out with horror movie vibes similar to a slasher— we meet a young girl who watches her mother die but is spared by her mother’s killer. The movie then abruptly flashes forward to five years before present day where the little girl grown up is now with James Bond.

The intro is very slow moving and then immediately goes from 0 to 100 within the span of a few frames, leaving the audience confused as to what exactly just happened. Then all the sudden we are given a “five years later” time jump and are now in what I assume to be the present day.

“No Time to Die” feels like a whole trilogy forced into a two hour and 40 minute run time. The main “villain” of the film is more of an afterthought, even in the final battle of the movie. The villian does not come across as a threat to Bond or his allies and ends up being more annoying than scary. 

The plot twist and surprises in the story were very predictable, even with limited foreshadowing. The only twist that truly got me was the ending of the movie— a very bold move for the directors to take.

Even with all the technical difficulties of the movie we still had some stellar performances across the board— especially from Craig and Lashana Lynch, who starred as a secret agent named Nomi. 

“No Time to Die” was about an hour longer than it had to be with useless subplots and action scenes. The story had the potential to be a very good film and an intriguing story, but so much was shoved into this film that it took attention away from the main story of the movie