November 22, 2002 | Wonder why it’s taken so long — three years since The World is Not Enough — for James Bond to renew his license to kill? Simple: During the opening scenes of Die Another Day, the latest in the long-running spy-movie series, Her Majesty’s most famous secret agent has his cover blown (an occupational hazard, I would think, for any secret agent who is so bloody famous). He winds up spending 14 months in a North Korean military prison, where he’s forced to endure fiendish tortures, injections of scorpion venom, and long-term exposure to Madonna’s techno-pop title song. It would take anyone, even the immortal 007, a long period of R&R to recover from such a debilitating ordeal.
Indeed, by the time Bond (once again played, gamely, by Pierce Brosnan) is released in a prisoner swap, our hero is a beat-down, bearded and bedraggled shell of his former self. Worse, his superiors – including the purposefully stern M (Judi Dench), who really should know better by now – suspect that our hero cracked during interrogation, and fingered a fellow agent. Maybe they heard the Madonna tune, and decided that something so obviously in violation of Geneva Convention restrictions must have ultra-efficient brainwashing properties.
In any event, 007 is stripped of his Double-0 prefix — and, presumably, demoted a couple of pay grades — and ordered to remain under medical observation while other British Intelligence agents, along with some Yanks from the National Security Agency, sort out the mess he allegedly made. It takes Bond about, oh, I dunno, 15 seconds to decide that he’s not going to take any of this lying down.
It takes the movie only a bit longer to devolve into something at once wearily routine and desperately fantastical. Which is a shame, because, for the first 45 minutes or so, Die Another Day promises to be one of the better recent 007 extravaganzas, complete with spectacular stunt work, clever high-tech gadgetry, prodigious globe-hopping – Hong Kong, Cuba, Iceland and Korea’s DMZ are included in the itinerary – and, best of all, a totally babe-o-licious “Bond girl.”
Halle Berry is drop-dead gorgeous and ultra-deadly efficient as Jinx, an American superspy who makes a spectacular entrance in a clingy bikini, emerging from the ocean just like Ursula Andress in Dr. No (1962), the very first 007 picture. The image is one of many visual and verbal allusions to earlier Bond movies scattered throughout Die Another Day, in-jokes aimed primarily at hard-core fans of the franchise. Readers of the original Ian Fleming novels will be especially amused by 007’s fleeting perusal of Birds of the West Indies, the legendary ornithological guide whose author – James Bond, of course – provided inspiration while Fleming was seeking a name for his fictional hero.
Of course, it’s probably not a good idea to remind audiences of the Fleming novels, in which Bond is a more cold-blooded SOB than Brosnan – or, for that matter, Sean Connery — has ever dared to play him on screen. (Of all the actors ever Bonded for movie spy games, Timothy Dalton arguably has come closest to rendering the character as Fleming originally envisioned him.) And it’s definitely a bad idea to include so many wink-wink, nudge-nudge references to past Bond movies, considering how many other elements of the “new” film are recycled from earlier episodes.
I mean, gee whiz, another seemingly hard-to-seduce beauty (a lovely but negligible Rosamund Pike) who beds and betrays Bond? And another villain (an underwhelming Toby Stephens) with another satellite capable of beaming another death ray at Earthbound targets? Wow, I wonder how long it took screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade to come up with those innovations?
When they aren’t busy sampling James Bond’s biggest hits, the screenwriters and director Lee Tamahori (The Edge, Once Were Warriors) attempt to up the ante – and, yes, compete with XXX, Spider-Man and other new-breed action-hero extravaganzas — with self-conscious, goose-the-action camera flourishes (lots of slo-mo and jump-frame activity) and an overabundance of CGI trickery. Unfortunately, much of the latter is conspicuously unconvincing. And many of the more outlandish effects – including an Icelandic luxury hotel carved out of ice and, apparently, carpeted with low-lying fog – push the movie beyond the realm of borderline sci-fi and well into ludicrous fantasy. The pacing is uncomfortably lethargic in the final half-hour, and the movie as a whole suggests the 40-year-old franchise is finally showing its age.
On the other hand, there are a couple of nifty car chases, some witty banter with John Cleese as weapons designer Q, and a genuinely exciting swordfight between Bond and his chief nemesis in a ritzy private club. (Madonna pops up briefly as a fencing instructor, but mercifully refrains from reprising that lethal theme song.) And if you’re one of those academic types who parse Bond movies for reflections of contemporary sociopolitical attitudes, you may be intrigued – or alarmed – to see that, for the first time in a long time, the antagonists are real-world miscreants (i.e., “hard-line” North Koreans) and not comic-book villains. At this rate, can we expect al-Queda terrorists in the next 007 epic?
