Die Another Day
Directed by Lee Tamahori
Written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade
Starring Pierce Brosnan, Halle Barry and Toby Stephens
Classification: AA
Rating: **½
For anyone who has ever wanted to see James Bond get mussed up and the smirk wiped off his face, Die Another Day, the spy's 40th-anniversary movie, is your chance. Along with the usual bullets, babes, car chases and megalomaniacs to thwart, Bond runs into some serious career trouble, and has a (brief) dark night of the soul.
In a movie that's distinguished by some higher heights than most recent Bonds, and some new lows, Die Another Day also sees Bond do battle with obviously artificial digitally created backgrounds and effects.
In compensation, there's Halle Berry as a rarity among Bond girls of recent vintage; someone who can look good rising up from the surf in a coral bikini and also offer some acting spice. Though she's underused, Berry adds some needed weight to the distaff side of the Bond film balance.
After the usual precredit sequence, we jump to surfers and a dateline in North Korea. Not just any surfers, but top-secret military-type surfers, dude, including 007 himself. Bond's mission is to interrupt an international illegal diamonds-for-weapons swap, with a couple of rogue Korean officers in the demilitarized zone. (North Koreans function here, as in American foreign policy, as convenient evildoers.) The swap goes awry and after a nasty explosion that bejewels the face of a Korean bad guy, Zao (Rick Yune), and an extended Hovercraft chase, Bond gets captured.
This is not just a cooling-off period. For 14 months, Bond is in the slammer without lovers, martinis or the opportunity to rack up air-mile points. The months roll by in a bizarrely sexual torture montage, with Bond in bondage, head repeatedly dunked in a bucket and body covered with scorpions. All of this is interspersed with the usual silhouettes of writhing women's bodies as the title song (a sinewy dance-beat thing, sung by Madonna) plays. What this could mean remains perplexing, but at least it beats Hovercraft chases.
When Bond finally gets released, looking like Jesus, or at least a fatter Tom Hanks from Castaway, it's through no ingenuity of his own but through a prisoner exchange. M (Judy Dench) tells him he's through and he has to lose his beloved licence to kill, leaving him with little more than liberty to quip.
Every hero needs to be revitalized by a little humiliation, and for at least the first 40 minutes of Die Another Day, Bond's dressing-down seems to do him and the movie franchise a world of good. Director Lee Tamahori ( Once Were Warriors, The Edge) brings hints of heroic mythology, an attempt to prove that Bonds do not necessarily have more fun. Wearing a little touch of grey on his temples, the fallen hero is associated with dark appetites ("sex for dinner; death for breakfast") and he must descend into the underground (an abandoned London tube station) to regain his powers.
The small quivery note of doubt (could 007 really be . . . vulnerable?) is soon overtaken by enough improbabilities to break most of the laws designed by Darwin, Newton and Moses. There are, to name a few examples, identity-changing bone-marrow treatments, artificial suns and a Korean father and son who speak to each other in different languages.
But soon swagger wins out, after an amusing reversal of a conventional Bond scene in which he strides through a swank lobby (the Hong Kong Yacht Club), half-naked and scruffy, looking like a cave man who has taken assertiveness training.
Next, Bond heads off to Cuba, where he learns his Korean enemy is holed up in a well-guarded island health clinic. In a series of nods to Dr. No, the first Bond film, Bond meets Halle Berry's character, a beauty arising from the surf à la Ursula Andress.
Her name is Jinx and after the usual mind-numbingly sexual banter, they move beyond the verbal. Soon it becomes clear that Jinx is Bond's equal, and possibly, a rival.
After Cuba, the scriptwriters apparently resigned, handing over the rest of the story duties to the film's action unit.
The ensuing hopscotch travelogue next moves to London, where Bond is on hand to witness the arrival-by-parachute of businessman Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens), a mysterious diamond merchant. Bond accepts the challenge of the arrogant Graves, which provides the best-directed sequence in the film -- a sword fight where each man gets to swash his buckle impressively and the men's club where it takes place is destroyed in the process.
Later, Bond reconciles with M, picks up some new toys -- including a stealth Austin-Martin -- and at Gustav's invitation, heads off to Iceland, with Graves and his equally subtly named ice-queen publicist, Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike), to witness Graves's new invention/weapon. Jinx shows up in Iceland, too, and soon everyone is chasing everyone else around the ice palace in sports cars on ice, dodging pink lasers. The battle climaxes with one of the most artificial computer-generated stunts in recent movie history as Bond, wearing an improvised parachute, apparently skips over the top of a tsunami; it's bad enough to make Nintendo's Super Mario game look like documentary realism.
About the time you're ready to say "enough," the movie adds another action set piece, with the cast returning to Korea for another bout of hand-to-hand combat on a crashing cargo plane. The audience should be well worn-out by then, but the middle-aging Bond emerges with smirk and hair intact, ready to be spry again another day.
Liam Lacey