Even at their most ludicrous, the evil plots of Bond villains follow a twisted logic. Moonraker's Hugo Drax wants to wipe out humanity, sparing a select few to create a new super race. Goldfinger's Auric Goldfinger wants to irradiate all the gold in Fort Knox to destabilise the world's economy and make his own hoard of bullion more valuable. Skyfall's Raoul Silva wants revenge on M, and stages a series of terror attacks to discredit her and MI6. Then there's No Time To Die's Lyutsifer Safin, played by Rami Malek, who wants to use an advanced nanotech bio-weapon to… kill lots of people? For some reason? So he can rule the world, maybe?
It's poorly explained, which is strange in a series famed for its villains outlining their schemes in excruciating detail. No Time To Die is a great James Bond movie, and the perfect end to the Craig era. But Safin is a weak villain, which slightly sours an otherwise fantastic film. It's a shame, because his first appearance is absolutely chilling. In a tense pre-title opening, we see Safin wearing an eerie Japanese noh mask and brutally murdering Madeleine Swann's mother. Director Cary Joji Fukunaga has a knack for horror, and he flexes it here to great effect.
In these moments, Safin might well be the scariest Bond villain yet. The combination of that uncanny mask, his peculiar body language, and the coldness of Malek's performance is quite striking. The stark, snowy Norwegian landscape also plays a part here, creating a powerful feeling of dread and isolation. It's just a great scene, and the fact that he saves Madeleine's life after killing her mother adds an interesting wrinkle to the character. He's a calculating, ruthless killer, but there's an intriguing flicker of humanity beneath that blank, emotionless mask.
Later, when he reveals himself to a grown-up Madeleine, Malek plays him with delicious menace. We learn that her father, Mr. White, killed Safin's entire family—poisoning them at the behest of Spectre—which gives the character some weight as an antagonist. All this stuff is great. There's something wonderfully unsettling about him and how he toys with Madeleine, staring at her with those wide, piercing eyes. For a good chunk of the film he has all the makings of a great villain, but this mystique fades away when Bond and Nomi infiltrate his island lair.
Suddenly, Safin becomes almost completely uninteresting. The character transforms into the kind of megalomaniacal, deluded, self-proclaimed genius Bond has confronted and beaten countless times before. He talks about 'tidying up' the world with his nanotech virus, whatever that means. He tells Bond that people don't want freedom: they want to be told what to do and then die. They want oblivion, and he's an 'invisible god' delivering it to them. In a flash, this interesting, layered, and unnerving character becomes just another crackpot for Bond to kill.
Safin's dialogue is presumably supposed to come across as enigmatic and poetic, in an evil sort of way. But it rings hollow, and only adds to the sheer incoherence of his master plan. There's also a moment where Safin tells Bond that they're working towards the same goal, they've just developed different methods, which is inches away from the old 'we're not so different you and I' Bond cliché—which you'd think being parodied in Austin Powers would have killed off for good. It's hard to believe this is the same person as the terrifying character we met in the pre-title sequence.
The Craig era had a great run of villains: from Mads Mikkelsen's quietly intense Le Chiffre, to the smirking evil of Christoph Waltz's take on Ernst Stavro Blofeld. So to end this arc with someone as ultimately forgettable as Safin stings extra hard. I don't think it's Malek's fault. He brings something special to the role, I just don't think he had great material to work with. No Time To Die is an excellent Bond, with a powerful emotional undercurrent rarely felt in the series. But if it had a better villain, with an evil plot that even slightly made sense, it could have been a classic.