Die Another Day

Die Another Day

I just came back from seeing Die Another Day. By all accounts, it was another James Bond movie. As such, I went into it pretty much knowing what to expect, and most of the little plot twists were no surprise to me. Well, there was one, and it's always nice to have a little surprise in a movie this formulaic. It turns out that Halle Berry is just a figment of Bond's imagination. I know this because Halle knows this.

I recall reading bad reviews of the movie, and honestly, I don't see the point. It's Bond. And I think this movie delivers in all the ways you expect Bond to deliver. Evil, maniacal villain with an improbable plan to take over the world using some ridiculously science-fictiony weapon. A few changes of scenery to exotic locales. A plot which serves mainly as something upon which to hang a series of action/stunt sequences, like kernels of popcorn on a xmas tree garland. A handful of clever gadgets. A couple of attractive women whom Bond sexes. And of course, an increasingly juvenile litany of one-liners and double entendres. Childsplay.

It's like a game of MadLibs. "Give me a name of an evil villain." "Okay, now name an impossible superweapon." "Gimme a weird/cutesy name for a woman." I can't imagine how someone could have been that disappointed with this movie.

That said, I have to admit that I thought The World Is Not Enough, the last Bond movie, was awful. Or at least very lame. But then, I only ever saw it as a Usenet download, which is admittedly one of the least ideal ways to see a movie.

Anyway, Die Another Day was actually slightly better than I might have expected in a couple of small ways. For example, the villain was not quite as cheesily over-the-top as I expected a Bond villain to be. He wasn't like Jonathan Pryce in Tomorrow Never Dies, or like F. Murray Abraham in Star Trek: Insurrection (whom I characterize very much as a Bond villain). Also, the weird-looking henchman, the diamond-scarred Zao, wasn't just weird-looking for no reason. They actually did his origin as the movie went along. I mean, did we ever learn why Jaws (Richard Kiel) from The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker had metal teeth? No. Oh, and I like the fact that they went back to the British car in this movie. And the Aston Martin V12 Vanquish they used was absolutely beautiful!

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Also, the beginning of the movie was something different for Bond. He spent 14 months being tortured and held prisoner in a North Korean military camp. How un-Bond is that? I read in one review that one reason this was in the story was to explain why Bond wasn't around to save us from the events of Sept. 11: because he was locked up at the time. This may have been conjecture, I don't recall it being mentioned in the movie anywhere. It is a bit hard to believe that he couldn't escape in over a year's time. But it's interestingly un-Bond-like. I didn't mind it, but one thing I DID mind was one particular car gadget: the invisibility mode. That was way too Star Trek for a Bond movie.

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There were a couple of things I didn't like about the movie. I wasn't bothered by the nonsensical plot, as it was no worse than any standard Bond movie. I was a bit bothered by the length of the movie. It seemed to get a bit long there by the end, when the continual explosions began losing my attention. Judy Dench as M didn't have the biting interplay with Bond which she's had in previous 007 movies. Also, Brosnan is starting to show his age. He's looking a bit old for the action hero role. Speaking of looking old, Madonna has a cameo in one scene, and in all her shots, there is an unmistakable smoothing filter applied to her. She's over 40 years old now, everyone knows this, and I don't think anyone expects her to look 20. But apparently the movie makers tried. The result is that her shots looked distinctly out of place with the digital effect applied. Maybe they shouldn't have used it so heavily.

Speaking of Madonna, she recorded the theme song. I didn't like that either. The previous Bond theme songs, especially those of the Brosnan run, have had a very James Bond sensibility to them, even the k.d. lang song used in the closing credits of Tomorrow Never Dies. It's almost as if it wouldn't have matter who was singing them, since they didn't really sound like your typical Tina Turner, Garbage, or Sheryl Crow songs. I understand them to have been written and produced under close guidance of the movie folks. Madonna's Die Another Day song was very un-Bond-sounding, and I don't recall refrains of it being integrated into the movie at all either.

And even though they remained covered throughout the entire PG-13 movie, Halle Berry's breasts look really really good. So theme song, old Brosnan, and length aside, I had no problems with this Bond movie. If you're in the mood for some mindless, Bond-style action, I'd say see Die Another Day.