In the Daniel Craig era, there’s no sense of unconscious or excess expression-it has been digitized out along with any intentional humor. On the other hand, the series’ essential virtue was always its extravagant exaggerations-it was gloriously ridiculous and gloriously lacking in self-awareness, its macho ribaldry invested with absurdly high purpose. The most recent and final Craig film, “No Time to Die,” directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, is in that sense a culmination of the series’ necessities, with the boardroom and the writers’ room virtually taking the place of any cinematic action.
Together, the Craig films interconnect to form a sort of Bond cinematic universe whose parts slot all too neatly into a series, with all the dramatic engineering that it implies.
The feeling that what’s onscreen is inseparable from the demands of the balance sheet has never been absent from the Bond market, and the five entries starring Daniel Craig have only intensified it. The appealing predictability of familiar characters and the excitement of seeing variations on their themes has always gone hand in hand with a sense of overmanagement-of the strings being pulled by some puppeteer far from the set. For those whose cinematic consciousness predates “Star Wars,” the James Bond series may be the primordial experience of franchise films, with all the pleasures and limitations that they entail.
