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Die Another Day
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UK/USA, 2002. Rated PG-13. 132 minutes.
Cast:
Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, Toby Stephens, Rosamund Pike, Rick Yune,
Judi Dench, John Cleese, Michael Madsen, Will Yun Lee, Samantha Bond,
Colin Salmon, Michael Tsang
Writers: Neal Purvis & Robert Wade, based on characters by Ian
Fleming
Music: David Arnold (score), Mirwais Ahmadzaï (theme song) Michel
Colombier (theme song), Madonna (theme song), Monty Norman (Bond theme),
Paul Oakenfold (Bond theme remix)
Cinematographer: David Tattersall
Producers: Barbara Broccoli, Michael G. Wilson
Director: Lee Tamahori
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and beautiful, willing and pliant, Bond Girls have been part of the Bond tradition
for forty years. To play them, talent has never been a requirement beyond the
ability to camp it up (how else to explain Denise Richards or Tanya Roberts?),
and the actors who play them often sink back into the obscurity from whence
they came. Remember Maryam D'Abo from The Living Daylights? No? She recently
appeared in a straight-to-video Christopher Lambert feature called The Point
Men, helmed by her former Bond director John Glen.
Of course, some have survived having "Bond Girl" on their resumes, a few were
already established stars, and two have even gone on to collect Golden Globes
and Emmys--Diana Rigg (On Her Majesty's Secret Service) and Jane Seymour
(Live and Let Die). But one award, the Oscar, has never been associated
with a Bond Girl. It would be Wrong.
Yo, Carlo, what about Kim Basinger?
She doesn't count. Never Say Never Again was not an official Bond film.
A comeback vehicle for Sean Connery, it was never approved by the Bond producers,
the Broccolis. Besides, that Oscar for L.A.
Confidential, came over twenty years and a half-dozen Razzie nominations
later. 
Anyway,
no actor who has already won an Oscar would dream of playing a Bond girl.
Oscar winners choose Important Films after they win. Even Basinger made that
ponderous atrocity, I Dreamed of Africa.
Now, reigning Best Actress Halle Berry has changed all that.
Dude, she just won that Oscar in March. There's no way she knew she was
going to win an Oscar when she accepted the Bond film. Besides, Berry is hardly
the first to drag her Oscar through the mud. Look at Angelina Jolie.
Shut up, I'm on a roll. Don't interrupt me with the facts. My point is that
Berry, for her first performance after being anointed with the Oscar, has chosen
to kick butt, recite corny double-entendres, and rise out of the North Atlantic
wearing an orange bikini (in an obvious ode to Ursula Andress in Dr. No).
That scene was in the Caribbean.
Wrong. The Cuban scenes were shot in Spain and in England. North Korea? Shot
in England. Iceland? Mostly England. Almost the whole film was shot in England.
The palm trees are digital. The ice is digital. Even the damn sunshine
is digital. Part of the pleasure of a Bond film has always been to visit exotic
locations all over the world. Bond was a globetrotter. Now he barely leaves
his own backyard.
Bond is keeping up with the times, and the times dictate that he must compete
with the likes of Vin Diesel. Die Another Day delivers surfing, short-attention-span
editing, and copious digital effects, most of which are not too credible. The
most shameful example is the second surfing scene, in which Bond rides atop
a monstrous wave created by a sheet of falling ice. I was reminded of Terry
Gilliam's rudimentary old Monty Python cartoons, in which he would cut out figures
from drawings and photographs and paste them together. Another overly silly
item is Bond's nearly invisible car, which makes the Roger Moore-era gadgets
look plausible.
Hey, you rated this movie a B-, and now you can't stop bitching about it.
Says here that a B- is "good but uneven." You wanna tell us what's good about
it, or what?
Right. Sorry. Ahem. Though Die Another Day does not live up to the first
two Brosnan films, it is on the whole a net improvement over The
World Is Not Enough, a dreary sleepwalk through the 
Bond
formula brightened only by inadvertent camp queen Denise Richards and the first
appearance of John Cleese, the late Desmond Llewellyn's successor as 'Q.'
It's not that the plot is any more comprehensible (it isn't, and all you need
to know, all that you ever need to know, is that demented people want
to blow things up), or that the stunts are any better (they aren't, and they're
too fake, with the notable exception of a rousing sword fight). It's that the
cast performs better overall.
Though he pales by comparison to villains of the past, Toby Stephens' millionaire
Gustav Graves is a better and more appropriate Bond villain than Robert Carlyle's
morose Renard, bringing far more panache to the table. The Bond girls, Halle
Berry as U.S. agent Jinx and Rosamund Pike as British agent Miranda Frost, are
much better, too. Though she can be rightly mocked for taking on a Bond film,
Berry is almost as strong a sidekick as Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies,
while striking newcomer Pike is a more traditional Bond babe. Of course, when
there are two Bond girls, one of them usually turns out to be evil. Hm, which
one might that be?
The greatest improvement, unexpectedly, comes from Brosnan himself. In my review
of The World Is Not Enough, I wrote that he was an empty suit, too bland
and hesitant to take control of the role. Shortly thereafter, Brosnan showed
none of those traits as a nasty, ethically challenged spy in The
Tailor of Panama. Well, somebody involved with Die Another Day
must have seen The Tailor of Panama and told Brosnan to act more like
that--with some anger, with some magnetism. It's particularly necessary
for Die Another Day, because the conflicts are more personal than usual
for Bond, who has a falling out with 'M' (Judi Dench) and British Intelligence,
like in License to Kill.
Before this film was made, Brosnan talked about doing only four Bond films.
It seemed like a good idea because Brosnan didn't seem too comfortable as 007.
Now Brosnan says he wants to do one more. It seems like a good idea, now that
he's finally shown he has something to offer the role other than dashing good
looks in a tuxedo.
Review
© December 2002 by AboutFilm.Com and the author.
Images © 2002 MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
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