As Daniel Craig’s final Bond film hits small screens, investigate cinema’s other brilliantly aloof spies and private eyes, from Sam Spade to Jason Bourne
During much of the pandemic, the repeatedly delayed release of the new
James Bond film was held up as some kind of Covid-era holy grail: each time it got booted to the next season, it seemed a renewed marker of when things might be “normal” again. The film’s eventual big-screen release two months ago was no cure-all; for anyone still wary of heading back to cinemas, the recent VOD release of No Time to Die is surely the more notable event. Does this big, brash, handsome entry in
British cinema’s most long-in-the-tooth franchise lose a little something on a TV screen? Perhaps. Does it work grandly enough just the same? Certainly.
The great appeal of the Bond films is that, give or take the odd plot pivot – and there’s certainly a large one here that I didn’t see coming – you more or less know what you’re getting each time, and that kind of comfort viewing will always be well suited to the couch. With its balletic succession of neatly choreographed action set pieces, all assembled with sleek brushed steel, Cary Joji Fukunaga’s film might be the most elegant of the Daniel Craig era, if not the most propulsive. It’s classy comfort alright, though I was most excited by an emergent perverse streak in its apparent business-as-usual approach: it gives us a Bond less capable and less unflappable than usual, working towards a plot twist that actually exposes the superspy’s limitations.