**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, Toby Stephens, Rosamund Pike, Rick Yune, Judi Dench, Michael Madsen, Samantha Bond, Colin Salmon, Will Yun Lee, Laurence Makaore, and John Cleese
Directed by Lee Tamahouri & written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, based on characters created by Ian Fleming
2002 PG13
An art professor of mine once compared Dutch still life of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to James Bond movies. He said, once you’ve seen enough of them, they all start to run together. Tee hee. I guess you had to have been there.
Because they are so much alike it’s hard to rate individual Bond movies. Recurring elements include: 1) plots to take over or destroy the world, or at least steal a lot of money, 2) power-hungry and usually insane villains, with hyperbolically vicious henchmen, 3) beautiful dames, usually mixed up with the villain and in need of Secret Agent 007’s intense masculinity to put them back on the straight-and-narrow, 4) elaborate and often implausible action sequences in exotic locales that would probably make good vacation spots, or in hidden fortresses, submarines, undersea bases, etc., and 5) completely implausible gadgets for Bond to use, like a car with machine guns or a wristwatch with a laser attached to it. Key to Bond movies is the high level of absurdity peeking out from behind every corner, while 007 and everyone else play with straight faces.
Of course there’s British secret agent James Bond himself (originally Sean Connery, then George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timoty Dalton, and now Pierce Brosnan), elegant, suave, personally amoral but ruthless and exacting when it comes to larger ideas of justice. The actors playing Bond always hold themselves a little apart from the absurdity. Like Buster Keaton Bond is seldom all that impressed with anything going on around him (unless it’s wearing a skirt). Even if he’s just caused some Rube Goldberg-style plan to execute perfectly, he is at most only mildly satisfied. After that he usually makes a dry quip or two and finds a drink to be had and a woman to bed. In the same way that soldiers about to go off to war can be forgiven for a little promiscuity, Bond is always on the verge of being sawn in half by a laser beam or run over by a tank, so we’re sparing with our condemnations of his sexual antics.
My favorite Bond films are “Goldfinger,” “The Man with the Golden Gun,” “Tomorrow Never Dies,” and “The Tailor of Panama.” Off the top of my head, my favorite 007 theme songs are Garbage’s “The World is Not Enough,” Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die,” and Duran Duran’s “A View to a Kill.” My favorite villains are probably Oddjob, Christopher Lee, and Jonathan Pryce, and my favorite Bond girl is Pussy Galore, for the obvious reason. My favorite Bond is probably still Connery, but Brosnan is superb and at least as good as Moore, and wears the role like a comfortable dinner jacket just back from the cleaners.
It’s hard to say why “Die Another Day,” while still fun and worth its share of laughs, is not quite as satisfying as most Bond movies, including Brosnan’s own “Goldeneye” and “Tomorrow Never Dies.” The variations on the Bond premise aren’t especially inspired but certainly not inadequate. Bond girl Halle Berry, as an American spy named Jinx, is what I would call adequate in about a thousand different senses. The villains are just fine, including a young billionaire who doesn’t sleep and a Korean spy with diamonds stuck in his face; the gadgets are pretty nifty, including a car that can turn itself invisible and a ring that emits a high frequency squeal in order to break glass; and the locales for 007 to smash to pieces include an awesome palace made entirely out of ice (Bond himself is so unfazed by this amazing piece of set decoration that he can only ask its bartender for a drink with a lot of ice, “if you can spare any”). If “Die Another Day” can be faulted for anything, it’s the same fault of “The World is Not Enough,” which is that the energy of both movies goes in fits and starts. Bond movies have always been paced differently than other action films, but these last two seem to move then stop, move then stop.
The plot of “Die Another Day” is the usual nonsense about a wealthy madman out to blow up or rule the world, whichever comes first. Gustav Graves, played by Toby Stephens, is a rich young twerp with a sycophantic grin and a satellite that can focus light from the sun into a very belligerent laser. There are probably a billion things that would make such a device impossible in the real world, but Bond movies have always been strengthened by their fallacies rather than weakened. He is aided by a murderous spy named Xao (Rick Yune) who, because of an earlier encounter with Bond, has a half-dozen diamonds lodged in his face, although why Bond never tells Xao “you still have a price on your head” is anybody’s guess. Graves’ other chief henchmen is a dreadlocked giant (Laurence Makaore) who introduces himself by saying “I am Mr. Kill,” to which Bond responds “there’s a name to die for.”