[imagesource: MGM / Universal]

Daniel Craig’s fifth and final hurrah as James Bond is here, with No Time To Die set to be released in the UK tomorrow.

Well, the reviews are in and suffice to say, they are all as stellar as can be expected from the Bond franchise.

Somehow 007 still manages to keep us on the edges of our seats, full of unexpected turns and nostalgic nods.

The Guardian and The Telegraph have both given the Cary Fukunaga-directed film a full badge of five stars, calling it a “weird and self-aware epic with audacious surprises up its sleeve” and “extravagant, satisfying, and moving” respectively.

Besides the obvious star of the show, Daniel Craig, the other actors really added weight to the “head-spinning world of giant plot mechanisms moving like a Ptolemaic universe of menace”.

Hats off to the performances of Lashana Lynch as new agent Nomi, Lea Seydoux as the complicated Dr Madeleine Swann, and Rami Malek as the new villain Safin.

The last chapter of the Craig era is, interestingly, quite telling of our current times, with the crux of the film centred on a man-made virus threatening to overrun the globe.

It is called Heracles, made up of DNA-hijacking nanobots designed for nefarious means.

But in this world, there’s Bond, and he’ll sort it all out no problem, all while Billie Eilish’s torch song plays in the background.

Here’s more from The Guardian:

Craig’s final film as the diva of British intelligence is an epic barnstormer, with the script from Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge delivering pathos, action, drama, camp comedy (Bond will call M “darling” in moments of tetchiness), heartbreak, macabre horror, and outrageously silly old-fashioned action in a movie which calls to mind the world of Dr No on his island.

Director Cary Fukunaga delivers it with terrific panache, and the film also shows us a romantic Bond, an uxorious Bond, a Bond who is unafraid of showing his feelings, like the old softie he’s turned out to be.

Over at The Telegraph, the review points out some of the notable differences between this year’s film and the predecessors, 2012’s Skyfall and 2015’s Spectre.

The first difference is that No Time To Die is surprisingly more colourful:

Thank La La Land cinematographer Linus Sandgren for some gorgeous dawns and dusks, plus the rich, sun-blush colours of an early action sequence in the sepulchral Italian hill town of Matera, replete with perilous motorcycle jumps and hair’s-breadth brushes with death.

It also has more moments of humour:

The mood is often closer to the perkier passages of the Connery films, and the humour feels contemporary and British: the Phoebe Waller-Bridge script polish evidently yielded the desired result.

Don’t worry, though, the gadgets are still very much present, and they are all as “improbable and outrageous” as ever.

Overall, the film is “gleefully spectacular”, with Craig, Seydoux, and Malik selling it so hard that you can see the fun everyone is having in this “gigantic piece of ridiculously watchable entertainment which feels like half its actual running time”.

Nice. Can’t wait for it to hit theatres here, which should be from October 1.

Here’s the trailer for another watch if you really want to get that adrenaline pumping before the big day:

In other related news, there are bets on who the next James Bond will be, with Tatler revealing all the possible contenders.

[sources:guardian&telegraph]