In Long Shot, Seth Rogen dives out of a second-floor window, crashes into a parked car, gets up, groans and runs down the street like it’s next to nothing. In No Time To Die, Daniel Craig, tethered to a rope, leaps off a medieval Italian bridge, falls 80 or 90 feet, slams into a wall, gets up, groans and shakes it off. Roberto Rossellini would have heartily approved.

I despise cyborg action sequences because they remove any sense of vulnerability, which is (profuse apologies for mentioning this) a factor that we all contend with daily.

If there’s one basic law that present-tense action directors despise, it’s the one that says “humans are not T-1000 mechanisms but flesh, blood and bone.”

Bond films respected this basic fact during the first two or three installments, but that was all but out the window by the time of Diamonds Are Forever. And then audiences fell too hard for the T-1000 action aesthetic with the release of James Cameron‘s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (’91).

I for one continue to pine for the physical realism of Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire (’12), but an overwhelming majority has said “no” to that aesthetic.

Otherwise No Time to Die seems, to paraphrase Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, like “good Bond movie bullshit.”