Which one is this? The one where modern action-movie Bond reverts back to being stupid space-laser Bond.
Who’s who in this one? Brosnan (Bond); Dench (M); Cleese (Q); Bond (Moneypenny).
Where did you first encounter this one? In theatres, on release in 2002.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? Toby Stephens as Korean-turned-British-millionaire Rupert Graves, who wants to use diamond space lasers to blow up Iceland or something.
Who are the Bond girls? Halle Berry as Jinx, and Rosamund Pike as Miranda Frost, both of whom sound like third-tier Batman characters. Oh: and Madonna as herself.
Opening number? Unique in the franchise, in that the opening credits are part of the narrative – a stylized montage showing the passage of time as Bond is imprisoned for 14 months in a North Korean military base, all set to a diamonds / fire and ice theme. Madonna underscores with one of the weirdest, jitteriest theme songs in the series, heavy on the auto-tune.
What’s memorable about this one? The invisible car and how stupid it was. The Iceland space laser and how stupid it was. Madonna and a rapier. Halle Berry trying to replicate Ursula Andress’ emergence from the water, and being utterly pantsed at that very job just four years later by Daniel Craig.
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? 2. One of the worst of all time. So very close to being the actual worst of all time.
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? I might be charitable and up it to a 3 because I always enjoy Rosamund Pike so much.
I’ve jumped from 1971’s dreadful, diamond-related Diamonds Are Forever and landed in 2002 for dreadful, diamond-related Die Another Day. At least the title lends itself to in-franchise punnery, like Diamond Another Day or Diamonds Are Whatever. Oddly, both films also feature hovercrafts, although – as it does with everything else – Die Another Day has a lot more of them.
It’s hard not to see Die Another Day as emblematic of everything that was wrong with the Bond franchise, pre-Casino Royale. At the stale end of any Bond regime we always arrive at the same, predictable set of problems: an over-reliance on special effects instead of really being there; the omnipresence of stuntpeople over the real performers, particularly the aging Bonds; and puns and entendres so flabby that they belong in a Simpsons parody. It happened in the eighties with the dissolution of the original Broccoli era, and it happens again with Die Another Day, as the wind goes out of the Brosnan regime’s sails. Brosnan occupies a strange place in Bond history, connecting two larger, disparate ideas: the Cubby Broccoli package, with all its glamourous strengths and low-brow faults, and the current Daniel Craig (and beyond) franchise. Brosnan lives in the middle, as the series as a whole tried to recover from the end of the Cold War and figure out its place in the modern era of CGI blockbusters.
I said that I like all of the Bond performers, save one; Pierce Brosnan is the save one. He’s the only actor in the role who doesn’t bring anything to it. Brosnan delivers a faceless “Bondishness” of the type that tends to grace the covers of licensed video games and tie-in novels. He’s the generic, vanilla hero, which is perhaps what Bond needed during the transitional period described above; but it’s not entertaining to watch, and it takes no substantial risks with the character or the franchise. As becomes proof positive with Die Another Day, this was an unsustainable philosophy.
The film is ludicrously dependent on CGI to solve all of its problems – even a simple shot of Bond emerging from the water in Hong Kong is subject to a weatherman-level greenscreen backdrop. While the opening sequence is good, in which Bond breaks into, and then out of, and then gets imprisoned in, a North Korean military base, the rest of the film feels so plastic and manufactured that everything comes off as flyweight. It’s atrociously overproduced. “Jeez, can I just go back to watching Casino Royale again?” I thought to myself, as I watched Bond bed down with Miranda Frost in a glittering swan ice sculpture bed, surrounded by candles, in a melting villain lair in Iceland. Die Another Daywould play as caricature, if it weren’t so goddamned smug about everything.
The film was released as the celebration of Bond’s 40th anniversary, and is the 20th “official” film in the line, so there are enjoyable callbacks that resound across the series and beyond – the ’61 Bollinger, the museum of gadgets past, even a steel-coloured Remington shaver for Mr. Brosnan to use. As ice queen Miranda Frost, meanwhile, Rosamund Pike is more entertaining than the movie she’s in, coolly assessing her chances as the second female lead in a James Bond movie – “Sex for dinner, death for breakfast, no thank you” – before turning the tables on the agent and nearly getting away with it. The rip-roaring swordfight between Bond and Graves at the London Fencing Club is fun too, being one of the few moments in the film where the actors really seem to be beating the hell out of each other, instead of letting the stunt men do it. But these pleasures are few and far between.
In the principal female role, we have Halle Berry wandering around with a confused look on her face, completely unable to get her mouth around the double entendres or convince us that she’s an action star. We also have one of the series’ dumbest heavies in diamond-faced Zhao, who is little more than a makeup job, and not much of a makeup job at that. The movie is overwhelmed, too, by science fiction gimmickry: the space laser, genetic face-swaps, the holodeck at MI6, a fistfight in a room full of lasers, a finale on a disintegrating cargo plane, and Gustav Grave’s… uh… electro power suit. The movie would seem stupid and unbelievable even if it didn’t have awful CGI tricks like having James Bond parasail in front of a CGI laser from space while skimming a CGI wave and bouncing off CGI ice floes.
There’s something portentous about the decision to update the classic Bond gun barrel shot, here having a CGI bullet come roaring out of the screen from Bond’s gun, straight into us. 007 has shot us dead before Die Another Day even begins; how could it possibly get better from there?
From A to Bond counts down the Bond movies, in alphabetical order, every day of the week leading up to the release of Skyfall. If you live in Toronto, Die Another Day is playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on December 6. If not, the entire series is available on blu-ray.
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