It seems that almost all of the great and successful movie franchises have a creative life span of one, or at best, two films. The remainders become a massive shadow of the first success. When the marketers move in, there’s no more real room to be creative or different.

Daniel Craig takes himself very seriously in No Time To die. This is a sad Bond from start to finish, almost as if Craig was depressed about leaving the franchise. (In TV interviews, he said he was happy to move on.)

The movie has a funereal feel to it, perhaps because this is the last one in the Craig series.

This is the gloomiest Bond yet. Craig barely smiled once,  was too busy shooting people to toss out those cool and witty one-liners. Even when he did smile, there was nothing remotely funny about the moment. Saving the world is a serious thing, to be sure, but most Bonds never believed for a second that they couldn’t handle it.

They always had time to get laid, drink a martini, and play some cards. In No Time To Die, Craig evokes that feeling but doesn’t really believe it. He is retired her, disgusted with M and the service, he wants no part of it.

If you are prone to sore asses in movie theaters, be aware that No Time To Die runs for 163, time for Bond to slaughter about ten thousand mostly faceless bad guys.

This is not just a good-guy bad villain movie; there are a lot of weighty themes to wade through.

The also very gloomy villain (Rami Malek) follows the competing Marvel storylines and wants to wipe out much of humanity; he reminded me of “Thanos” in the final Avenger movies. The movie is much closer, in fact, to the Marvel plotlines than the more sophisticated and less grandiose espionage genre.

Is it my imagination, or did Dr. No have a blast scheming to ruin the world? You might love this movie, but it is about as much fun as a pandemic vaccine.

The plot seemed off-kilter to me.

This movie is more like a broody cartoon than a spy story.

Bond is channeling Iron Man or Spider-Man mixed with some Oprah Winfrey bathos. Because of political correctness, villains can no longer be black, Asian, Muslim,  Latino, or gay. Think how many talented actors get screwed by that.

The result is a sort of hybrid evildoer of unknowable ethnicity or familiarity.( I don’t know what color this bad guy is, I don’t recognize the shade.)

The Bond series has always been about exaggerated fantasy. There never was a real spy named Bond or anything like him,  and it’s been decades since the British Secret Service was called up to save the world. But the series has often been fun, in large part, because the actors never took themselves or their moves all that seriously.

Sean Connery, David Niven (1967), and Roger Moore (1973-1985), and lately, Daniel Craig (2006-2021) always laughed a bit at their own expense. There was nothing dangerous or sorrowful about them.

They had all these fantastic toys to play with, which in 1962 seem exotic. They sent little boys and aging men into an orgiastic frenzy of envy and awe.

Times change, but as they do, marketing departments tend to take control. They only change to make even more money.

Almost up until the end, this film fit almost perfectly into the general format that Sean Connery launched – the settings are fabulous, the fight scenes are spectacular, the movie is, in every way, larger than life. Most men would cut off a hand to be James Bond and mix saving the world with sleeping with an endless array of gorgeous women, who always seem to be inspired by the presenters on contestant TV competitions.

Director Gary Joji Fukunaga took some stabs at changing. The cocktail waitress villains are gone, and in their place is a new 007,   Naomi Harris and  CIA Agent Paloma, both of whom kick ass alongside Bond as this tangled and heavy drama unfolds.

But the diversity is purely pictorial. The film never suggests how these two remarkable and very skilled women of color came to shoot to the top of the Bond franchise or the dangerous espionage world in which it operates.

There’s a new Bond in town, and she is a woman and tough and black. Bond’s love affair is deep, agonizing and unrelentingly wrenching, and emotional. Lea Seydoux is in tears for more a least a quarter of the movie. She is the woman he finally comes to love. (In this movie, Bond visits the grave of Vesper Lynd, the lover who died in Casino Royale in 2006.

“I miss you,” he says, kicking off the movie’s serious preoccupation with sad memories and painful separation. They might have titled the movie The Long Goodbyes.

This is the last Bond film starring Craig, and that is the overwhelming narrative that shapes and shrouds the movie, along with those gorgeous Italian towns and mountains. Fukunaga wasn’t into e new age or breath-catching tech devices.

He was more tuned into emotions. I wanted to see more stuff, not old stuff.

Fukunaga brought out the old Astor Martin and, for the most part, ordinary machine guns and pistols. Bond no longer has to make phone calls; he has stuff in his ear that connects him to M and his colleagues.

What struck me again and again in this costly and lumbering movie is that the producers’ idea of creativity is changing the color of the stars rather than re-thinking their role in these movies, or, God forbid, the movies themselves.

The world is very different from 1961 when the franchise began.

Britain is not even a superpower any longer. And spies, like journalists, work computers much more than gun battles and car chases. Diversity feels like a marketing change, not a heartfelt one, more like tokenism than a new reality.

The Bond series always were an unapologetic fantasy and didn’t hide it. You were supposed to go home feeling good and light.

The Bond stars laughed at their jokes.  They were their jokes. But the jokes are mostly gone, along with the entertaining and engaging perspective behind them. This franchise can no longer afford to laugh at itself. There’s too much money on the line.

I liked some parts of this movie; it is entertaining and exciting in parts. You’ll get just what you expect to get, no more, no less.

It is fun to see in many ways, as always. It is also a franchise getting too big for its britches, struggling to outdo itself again and again. For me, they didn’t do that.

No Time To Die seemed out of control, a huge movie for the sake of bigness, and an emotional film for the sake of faking emotion, a heavy and diverse film for the sake of ass-covering rather than conviction.

This great franchise deserves more than that. I hope they have something else up their sleeve.