"Now your weapon is on the run and nobody seems to know who has it. So you can imagine why I've come back to play."
— James Bond reminds M why he's returned to MI6.
No Time to Die cranks up the action sequences as a last hurrah for Daniel Craig's take on the character. And it does not disappoint.
All spoilers on this page are left unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
- As a small child, Madeleine ambushes Safin and guns him down. Too bad he survived.
- The Matera sequence justifies its status as the longest pre-titles scene in Bond history with several awesome action beats:
- When he gets attacked by Spectre agents on the bridge, Bond gets winged in the shoulder with a bullet and barely reacts.
- Bond pulling off a motorbike ramp jump, the "ramp" being the sloped side of an old stone rampart's entrance.
- Seeing the iconic Aston Martin DB5 in action as part of a car chase, not just as a Mythology Gag as was previously the case in Daniel Craig's Bond films. One scene has Bond and Madeleine surrounded by mooks trying to gun them down while in the car; but the DB5 is protected with bulletproof glass, and we find out it has now been retrofitted with miniguns concealed inside the headlights, and Bond starts making good use of them in circular motion.
- The Cuba sequence is a frenetic showdown between four different sides with competing goals, as Safin, Spectre, MI6 and the CIA all put their plans into action.
- Bond is completely outwitted and set up to be killed by Blofeld, who has arranged the theft of the Heracles nanobot virus and Bond's assassination with it from a secure cell in Belmarsh Prison. However, Safin manages to out-gambit him in turn, subverting his plan to unleash Heracles on Bond via having it reprogrammed to wipe out all of Spectre. All of them deserve it, even if it's horrific to look at and Safin is far from a saint himself.
- What Ana de Armas' character, Paloma, is capable of is a sight to behold. She fires a handgun and a submachine gun at the same time, fly-kicks a mook and resorts to using the guns to bash more mooks when running out of ammo, all while still wearing her party dress, without ever using predictable She-Fu. Consider how she excitedly says that she's only had three weeks of training before being sent on this mission, likely sending Bond and the audience into Oh, Crap! and This Is Gonna Suck mode as it seems she's less than properly prepared. Then we see her kick all kinds of ass and we realize, there was a reason why she's on this assignment despite three weeks of training. She probably meant "CIA training" and likely trained for combat long before that.
- Bond himself kicks ass in that scene as if it's been five days since he's been on a mission instead of five years. He obviously kept himself in better shape than he did during his Faking the Dead retirement back in Skyfall. His rough brawling style contrasts nicely with Paloma's more graceful movements, proving that there's still a place for a "blunt instrument" like him. The two work seamlessly together, even having time to stop for a quick drink in the middle of the fighting.
- Nomi proves to be a very clever Combat Pragmatist, allowing Bond and Paloma to tire themselves out fighting Spectre and/or Safin's Mooks before she swoops in to capture Obruchev while they are distracted. In turn, Bond proves he hasn't missed a step by shooting and cutting down her zipline as she tries to escape.
- Paloma catches Obruchev by ramming her car into some scaffolding that he is standing on, sending him crashing to the ground.
- As Bond storms out of M's office, he pulls off his pass badge and tosses in right into the small bin next to Moneypenny's desk without looking or breaking stride.
- Bond choking Blofeld and indirectly poisoning him the process, while menacingly whispering, "Die, Blofeld, die".
- When Bond drives into the forest while trying to escape Safin's men, he hands Madeline his gun without a second thought or even looking at her, wordlessly showing that he knows he can trust her to have his back. Indeed, she saves him and Mathilde by doubling back and shooting one of them, then guns down all the mooks after her and her daughter. They only get captured when she runs out of bullets.
- Bond takes out Logan Ash's entire SUV/motorbikes force in a foggy Norwegian forest with a stolen assault rifle and grenade launcher and the winch of a crashed truck, culminating in crushing the bastard with his own car in revenge for betraying and murdering Felix.
- When Safin discovers Bond and Nomi have infiltrated his base, he demands a direct audience with Bond, using Mathilde as leverage. Bond unhesitatingly agrees to confront him, and tells Nomi to blow the whole facility to hell if he doesn't make it back. note Nomi: We don't have enough explosives for that.
Bond: Yes, but they don't know that. - Bond and Safin's face to face meeting has a few:
- Bond calls Safin out on his bullshit when he tries to give him the standard "Not So Different" Remark.Safin: I've made you redundant.
Bond: No. Not as long as there are people like you in the world. - More so than killing Bond, Safin's greatest villainous accomplishment is breaking his dignity, being the only Bond Villain to make 007 fall to his knees and beg his forgiveness, to keep his little daughter from being harmed by the mad poisoner. Until he's revealed to have been faking it.
- This is also one for Bond, who whips out a concealed pistol during his staged grovelling and shoots all four of Safin's guards dead in the blink of an eye.
- Bond calls Safin out on his bullshit when he tries to give him the standard "Not So Different" Remark.
- Nomi finally has enough of Obruchev when he starts ranting about how the nanobots can be used to "wipe out your race."Nomi: Do you know what time it is?
Obruchev: What?
Nomi: Time to die.
[Nomi kicks Obruchev off a catwalk and into the pool of nanobots below.] - Madeleine escapes captivity all on her own by pretending to be scared and stalling on drinking a toxic tea, getting Primo close enough to force her that she can hurl the cup in his eye and run out the door.
- The final battle, where Bond goes One-Man Army on Safin's men. As fitting for Bond's Last Stand, here are the highlights:
- When Safin's men in the control room prepare for a firefight with Bond, he simply takes them all out at once by detonating the explosives he had Nomi plant there earlier.
- At one point, one of Safin's men ambushes Bond from behind while he walks down a dome-shaped corridor. Without missing a beat, Bond turns and fires, killing him while perfectly recreating the famous Bond Gun Barrel sequence.
- Bond takes out mook after mook as he climbs a stairwell, starting by throwing back a grenade that gets thrown his way, continuing with a single unbroken take which includes a sequence where Bond uses a mook's shadow on the wall to find his position and ambush him and then uses his corpse as a human shield like in Skyfall, and culminating with his fight with Primo, where he uses Q's EMP watch to blow up his bionic eye inside his head. To top off a breathtaking scene, Bond drops one of his best Bond One Liners ever.Bond: [To Q] I just showed someone your watch. Really blew their mind.
- Safin, over the course of one movie, decapitates Spectre's leadership, kills Blofeld, and (indirectly) causes Bond's death, rendering him perhaps one of the most effective Bond villains ever.
- Mathilde channels both of her parents in the way she gets free of Safin. Biting his hand to free herself from his grip, Safin angrily says that she's free to leave but only if she's willing to give up his "protection". Mathilde just turns and runs off without a word.
- Bond, despite having been shot multiple times still managing to overpower and cripple Safin, then going to the silo room to reopen the blast doors and finding the strength to climb out so as to get a good enough reception to bid farewell to Madeleine. Then he contemplates the missiles in the sky without fear and dies in a blaze of glory. Doubles as a major Tear Jerker, of course...
- Listen carefully to what Bond asks Q—"How do I get it off?", referring to Heracles. That means that despite how badly he was injured, he was still determined to find a way to escape and get back to his family and it's only when Q reminds him that the Heracles is permanent does he resign himself to his fate.
- Bond updates himself for the modern era without being preachy about it - he simply accepts that neither Nomi nor Paloma has any interest in having sex with him and doesn't try to push the issue.
- Similarly, compared to how the novel's version of Bond had attitudes towards race, homosexuality and women that were (at best) old-fashioned, this Bond has no problem with the fact that this version of Q is gay or bisexual, and ends the movie working as equal partners with Nomi.
- Safin manages to get multiple legs up on Blofeld, from subverting his plan to release a plague on Bond via having it reprogrammed to wipe out all of Spectre, to having Madeleine go to assassinate him via the same plague. It might not work as intended thanks to Bond, but it still works.
