Judas tap-dancing Priest, what was this that I just watched?
Unfortunately, it was the 20th Bond picture of all time, Die Another Day, and the fourth and final starring Pierce Brosnan.
I hate this film. I loathe it. It is a spy thriller that has few thrills, a movie about intelligence operatives too stupid to understand intelligence if it bashed them unsubtly over the head, and spends so much time trying to be an homage to every Bond film previous that it instead just becomes self-referential and masturbatory tripe.
It is an utter waste of talent and possibility. Brosnan is, in some ways, my favorite Bond. And if someone else had been in this train wreck instead of him, he would be my favorite Bond. He even managed to make the utterly ridiculous The World is Not Enough enjoyable somehow. But no dice here.
And this was supposed to be the 20th Bond picture. Twenty. The producers had promised something to cap every film that had come before. Instead they dug themselves a hole so deep the only recourse was to fully reboot the series with Casino Royale, a film which I didn’t even bother seeing in theaters because I was still so disgusted with Die Another Day that I didn’t believe Bond could ever be good again.
I had somehow built up in my mind that the best, most fitting Bond tribute would be to bring back Connery, Moore, Lazenby, and Dalton as a re-formed SPECTRE for the 21st century, possibly made up of retired Double O MI6 agents incensed at Bond’s killing of their criminal colleague Alec Trevelyan (006) in Goldeneye. Dalton could do the heavy lifting as the major Big Bad, Connery and Moore could essentially just sit in chairs and stroke Persian cats from the shadows, possibly wearing Nehru suits. Hell, even have them remake Thunderball again, and have their plot be that they stole some nuclear weapons, to which an exasperated Bond can reply, “Again?!?”
But no, we couldn’t have a smart Bond movie that payed homage to 40 years of cinema history. We had to have a big, dumb action flick from the director whose next big project was xXx: State of the Union.
A rundown of the plot, if you can call it that? Ok, but spoilers ahead, because I’m going to point out how stupid a lot of this is. Bond is captured in the opening sequence after confronting and supposedly killing North Korean general Moon and maiming his lietenant Zao by embedding diamonds in his face. He is put into a prison camp where he is tortured throughout the credit sequence while Madonna auto-tunes her way through the worst Bond theme of all time. He is then summarily released by Moon’s father, and traded for Zao, because the Americans think he has broken and is feeding the North Koreans information.
Bond is disavowed by MI6 but is on the trail of the person who set him up. This leads him to Cuba, where he finds Zao undergoing radical gene therapy to make himself look more white? He also meets Jinx (Halle Berry) who shows up wearing something similar to Ursula Andress’s bikini in Dr. No. Bond traces some of the diamonds in Zao’s posession to Gustav Graves, an adrenaline junkie rebel billionaire in London. He confronts Graves about the diamonds being identical to conflict diamonds from Africa, and they for some reason begin a ridiculous fencing duel that eventually escalates to broadswords. Oh, and did I mention Madonna has an extended cameo as a fencing instructor? WTF?
Then M shows up and says all is forgiven if Bond continues tracking Graves, who is also being followed by Miranda Frost, another MI6 agent posing as his publicist. Graves is opening an ice hotel in Iceland where he is going to demonstrate his Icarus project, a giant diamond-powered space laser (like we haven’t heard that before). Yeah, in case you haven’t guessed it yet, the same therapy that is turning Zao into a white guy is responsible for Graves, who is, in fact, Moon, who we thought dead. Except not really, as only an idiot would’ve looked at Graves for one second and not immediately identified as being a villain: appeared, out of the blue, just a year or two ago, fabulously wealthy, building a space laser. As was mentioned in Tomorrow Never Dies: “Call it “Gupta’s Law of Convenient Anomalies” – if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.”
Oh, and Miranda Frost? Obvious double agent. Duh. Like we couldn’t have guessed that. M acts shocked when she finds this out, and that it was Frost who had betrayed Bond, feeding the Koreans intelligence that only could’ve come from MI6. She then blames the CIA Agent played by Michael Madsen (oh, how your talents are wasted here!!!!) for not telling them that Frost and Moon had been on the Harvard fencing team together. Oh really? THAT’S the CIA’s fault? MI6 doesn’t do full background checks on all of their agents these days? Gaaaaahr. . . . The first clue she was a double agent was you’d had her following Graves for months and hadn’t turned up anything. She’s either bad at her job or a traitor. Duh. I took one look at her and said, “She’s sleeping with Graves.”
Then there’s the “Action” sequences. Bond starts the film surfing into North Korea. You know, like you do. Later, he para-surfs in Iceland. So, Bond isn’t just a secret agent– he’s an extreme sports aficionado. Great. Also, Bond spends a lot of time in the cold, cold water underneath the ice sheet and is seemingly unaffected by the cold. I’m going to call all sorts of BS on that. Also, Bond is tricked by Miranda Frost, who manages to take the bullets out of his gun while they’re in bed together. Yeah, right. Bond is so awesome he can take all these guys on, but one little girl can steal his bullets and he doesn’t notice? Impossible. And this one rogue guy is really controlling the North Korean government and military? Really? Seriously, Team America: World Police presented a better, more realistic picture of how North Korean politics and their military work.
I could go on and on, but, literally, by the end of the movie, I’m just shaking my head asking, “Really? You think I’m that dumb?”
This movie is predictable, it’s puerile, it’s plebian, it’s prosaic, and utterly utterly ponderous. How this managed to become the biggest box-office grosser of all of the Bond films is beyond me. I guess Americans just have awful, awful taste in movies. Bring me back the self-aware parody of Roger Moore Bond compared to this drivel.
The biggest insult is that the plot “twists” are so painfully obvious to anyone who is paying attention. It’s slightly less taxing than an episode of CSI: Miami. Bond is great because he’s one step ahead of everyone– an intelligence agent who has everything figured out. When we, as the audience, have things figured out and he doesn’t, we’ve taken away everything redeemable about Bond and turned him into a sociopathic brute with a sex addiction and an alcohol problem. I’ll pass.
This movie gets zero martinis. You heard me. Zero. This movie made me reconsider that maybe I’d been too hard on Moonraker and Octopussy. That bad. Buy me some aspirin and let’s drink lots of water to get rid of the hangover this left. And let’s dream of Casino Royale, the excellent and much-needed reboot following this disaster.