Die Another Day (2002)

After forty years and half as many movies, the James Bond franchise has legs like few others (Godzilla comes to mind for longevity), and on the surface Die Another Day pays homage to a lot of great moments from the long history of the series.  The film itself, however, is the epitome of a trainwreck:  it starts strong and quickly derails, all the while remaining a ruin away from which you can’t tear your eyes.

After months of torture in a North Korean prison camp, James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) is released in a hostage trade orchestrated by M (Judi Dench) to root out a British conspirator.  Bond pursues Korean terrorist Zao (Rick Yune) to Cuba, where he learns that American spy Jinx Johnson (Halle Berry) is also on the case.  Together, the two follow the trail to British diamond baron Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens) and his orbital laser satellite.

From that plot synopsis, you already have a sense of the biggest problem with Die Another Day – its staggering unevenness.  The film sprints from setpiece to setpiece with little connective tissue between scenes other than someone coming in and expositing to Bond, “This is where you need to go next.”  The more dangerous message of these weak transitions is the intimation that Bond is rusty and doesn’t know his way around a secret mission anymore.  Consequently, the inorganic quality of the plot results in a film that is neither a triumph nor a catastrophe.  There are moments when Die Another Day is quite entertaining, but the moments when it isn’t prevent the whole from coalescing into a fulfilling moviegoing experience.

Case in point – at about the midpoint of the film, there’s a fantastic fencing match between Bond and Graves.  It’s energetic, fantastically choreographed and directed, and essential in developing the personalities of the two men.  The stuntwork is quite excellent, and the scene positively crackles.  Like any good setpiece, it’s easily divorced from the larger narrative, enjoyable on its own merits, but everything surrounding the duel is incomprehensibly disconnected; it’s anyone’s guess why the two men duel in the first place, nor does it make much sense for Graves to invite Bond to his secret lair after the duel.

And when the whole film proceeds in such a way, it’s just exhausting.  The fundamental flaw of the film is that in nearly every aspect of the narrative, Die Another Day is unable to commit to one direction.  In the character of Jinx, the filmmakers have an opportunity to give Bond an equal number, a female American agent every bit as skilled as he is; instead, Jinx is as often (if not more frequently) a damsel in distress.  Halle Berry is very good in the role, equally smart and sexy, but the role itself is somewhat thin.  After one particularly great fight sequence in the bowels of a plummeting airplane, Jinx dispatches her adversary and then quite literally sits down and waits for Bond to save her.

The Jinx of the first half of the film would never have done that, but it seems that halfway through Die Another Day everything in the film goes topsy-turvy and stops making sense.  The film’s opener, with hovercrafts and silly puns, is ludicrous enough but remains safely within the loose realism of the Bond films.  Once we get into the second half, with space lasers and ice palaces, the film surrenders entirely to poor CGI effects and absurd gadgetry far beyond what the boundaries of credulity can accommodate.  As if the invisible car weren’t preposterous enough, the film sees Bond surfing multiple times, and in the film’s climax Gustav Graves dons an electrified suit of armor for no apparent reason whatsoever; there’s a gag about making his suitcase device more ergonomic, but you won’t find this gizmo in an IKEA near you. 

It’s a real shame that Die Another Day goes so far off the rails, not only because it’s Brosnan’s final outing as 007, though it is tragic that the promise of Goldeneye was never fully met during Brosnan’s tenure.  The presence of story beats that actually work well – the motivation of the villain to live up to his father, the traitor within MI6 as an update on the classic henchman trope, and M’s unwavering faith in Bond – each make the film that much more excruciating because there are glimpses of a Bond film that could have been.  Instead, we get a movie with more explosions in the opening sequence than any other entire Bond film, turning up the volume instead of the intellect.

Perhaps the worst aesthetic offense is the moment when M tells Bond, “While you were gone, the world changed,” suggesting a post-9/11 self-awareness and a recognition of the new state of geopolitics.  Unfortunately, though, the film never really engages with that idea.  While positing a new paradigm for Bond, the film goes for broke in the direction of the worst excesses of the franchise; the space laser recalls Moonraker, while the hyper-technology seems like an unironic version of the exploding pen Never Say Never Again pulled off with a knowing wink.  With all the other callbacks to earlier films – Jinx’s bikinied exit from the ocean a la Dr. No, the Union Jack parachute ripped from The Spy Who Loved Me, and even more overt allusions like the Thunderball jetpack’s cameo, among others – the fortieth anniversary of the film franchise seems to attempt to argue implicitly that Bond doesn’t need to change.  The end result, however, tells an entirely different story; this is a Bond in desperate need of a new wind of change (so long as he doesn’t attempt to surf on it).

Die Another Day is rated PG-13 for “action violence and sexuality.”  There’s a quick flash of blood in one scene of impalement and an occasional slash during a duel sequence; other characters die with no blood visible, while the film shows glimpses of Bond being tortured in North Korea.  As noted above, nearly everything explodes in this film.  Bond sleeps with two women (a low number for him), but all we see are bare backs.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of Casino Royale (2006) on October 7, 2014!