No time to lie about a movie

I saw this:

Very late - ‘No Time To Die’ Is Garbage https://t.co/y33fCQaZkQ

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) July 7, 2022

I'm thinking, in quick succession, "Hmmm, there's a new Bond movie", then "I wonder if it's as bad as Harsanyi makes it out to be?"  

Then it occurs to me "Didn't I just see a new Bond movie?  Just the other night?  In fact, that one?"

Well, yes I did see a new Bond movie in the past ten days.  And in fact it was No Time to Die.  As bad as Harsanyi claims?  Perhaps not.  But also, perhaps.  Spoiler alert!

Lots of action scenes of course.  But in trying to reconstruct the story line, it takes me a while to bring the main elements together.  In doing so, I remember the little foolishnesses.

Bond is retired and his replacement is . . . A black woman!  Britain is 3% black.  What is more insulting?  The naive and lazy Wokeness?  The statistical improbability?  The incoherent importation of American Wokeness into a different cultural tradition?  The clumsy homogenizing rebuilding of narratives?  I registered mild irritation at all of them during the movie.  

Bond is no longer the lounge lizard womanizer of earlier movies.  It's not that he is now a soy boy but there is a pathetic desperation with the introduction of an old girlfriend and an unknown daughter.  From roguish lounge lizard to deadbeat dad in one movie.  Such a treat.

Then there was the narrative disjoint when new black female 007 humiliatingly hands back over to old white male 007 to actually accomplish the difficult outcome.  It was as if the writers wanted to pay homage to wokeness without actually understanding it.  

Then there is the killing off of Bond at the end.  You are left assuming, given their marketing and ideological childishness, that they must be clearing the decks for a newer, better, more marginalized, less white male Bond.  

But I know there were other elements of this story.  Which I saw within the past ten days.  It kind of says something that I am having such a hard time reconstructing the story arc. Harsanyi's piece is helpful.  I keep going "Oh, yes, there was that scene."  The set pieces did follow one another but they never really created a story.  The ingredients were there, not the spark.  

I go to Wikipedia and that helps.  But only somewhat.  It was a rambling disjointed story line trying to get a boost from past themes, while signaling its Woke bona fides, with an almost incoherent story line.  Daniel Craig does good action scenes, but it would have been nice had there been an actual storyline and especially nice had it not been so laden with Woke virtue signaling.  

Other than not remembering the movie at all until strongly prompted, it was sort of alright.