Daniel Craig manages to end his run with a film that’s better than Spectre but despite sequences threatening excellence and co-stars delivering energy absent from the lead performance, as a body of work it never manages to elevate itself into something noteworthy. There's no doubt it's entertaining, but its blatant plagiarism of Avengers: Endgame is a shameless attempt at yet again defining the Craig run (which aped Bourne early on) in the terms of other franchises’ successes. Despite offering a risk-taking take on Mallory (whose immorality never comes with a price), Lashana Lynch as 007 (never given enough screen time), Ana de Armas stealing every scene she’s in with a truly joyful performance, and Ben Whishaw’s Q having an offscreen boyfriend and the big shock of Jeffrey Wright’s Leiter’s murder, this fails to cohere into something distinctly Bond or even coherent enough to tie off this 15 year-long arc successfully. The bioweapon is a tired device and its introduction is needlessly cartoonish, Rami Malik’s Safin doesn’t stand out as the towering villain promised, his plan is convoluted and motivations even more annoying than Silva’s in Skyfall or Blofeld’s in Spectre. Blofeld is of course here, one of numerous deus ex machinae and Easter eggs in a film that very much hints that not just Craig’s era is done but that the franchise itself has closed. But these additions don't add anything to the story, the script already desperate to please everyone and everything takes forever to get to the point. I'm all for adding to the screen time for character work to actually hit, but the transformation of Bond into the family man that OHMSS denied him comes at such a later stage it's unconvincing. One minute Cary Joji Fukanaga's film tries to be the Spectre follow up so deserved after the deeply flawed previous 007 outing, (which it often succeeds at), but it then adds epic ambitions, which seem to serve Craig more than character. Bond's demise doesn't have zero impact, but the changes rapidly overcoming the character feel contrived and his acceptance of his imminent death feels a bit lost in Safin's completely unintelligible plot. There's schmaltz instead of heart, if Waller-Bridge script doctored to **add** humour, I can't imagine how dour the original screenplay was, and the script's amble through themes of love, loss and legacy is just clumsy. I’d question their necessity here, at least presented as pompously as Fukanaga does. That said Craig is clearly happier than he was in Spectre, the widescreen cinematography is occasionally superb, the action in Italy is deeply impressive and the potential in Loshana Lynch’s 007 is unlimited. It’s such a shame she relinquishes the moniker back to Bond, no doubt to add to the heart strings pull of the final act, and I can only hope Nomi gets her own show but I bet she doesn’t. Naomie Harris, Loshana Lynch and now Ana de Armas - all introduced with the clear ability to guide this tired franchise somewhere new, but discarded into bit players once again for the straight white male saviour again to save the day - this time with added Jesus complex. It’s a film that absorbs (with that running time there’s no choice) and Cary Joji Fukanaga allows time for character development but it never consistently hits. Bond comes to terms with Vesper's loss at last in the opening act, but his death in a trajectory of his losses is downplayed, and Craig isn't really given the opportunity to explore it. His love is dead, his best friend and mentor - there's no shame at this point in him joining them, but the agent facing his Wrath of Khan moment has just spent what felt like half an hour shooting people on a stairwell, in the name of selling the inevitable computer game. The evocation of OHMSS is in itself worthy, but the film **as a whole** comes across as pompous, half-baked and doesn’t tie his iteration of 007 off any more fairly than the overall worse script in Spectre. As much as I can see how Bond couldn't have had a happy ending (if one was truly needed), lifting the plot from another movie surely wasn't the way to go about it. Daughter? Five year gap? It's so obvious it's painful, and Safin fails to land adequately as a villain, both in performance and role in the plot. Purvis & Wade's run has been distinguished by truly awful villains, indeed this one's backstory is told only in exposition, and his the relevance of his connection to the still dull Seyroux is never adequately explained. Yes it's better overall than Spectre, but the emotional punches I'd argue aren't even needed, fail to land with the resonance they needed, the film tries to be all things to all people and as a result ties off Craig's era unconvincingly.