'Die Another Day' revisited

With 'Quantum of Solace' due to hit our screens soon, we take a daily look back at the 21 official Bond films. Day 20: ‘Die Another Day’

Die Another Day (2002, Lee Tamahori)

Villain: Gustav Graves
At Stake: War between North and South Korea
Candy: Halle Berry as Jacinta ‘Jinx’ Johnson
Gizmo: Invisible car. Oh, mercy…
Theme song: Halting aerobics workout muzak ‘Die Another Day’ by Madonna
Quote: ‘Sex for dinner, death for breakfast.’

After watching a Bond a day for the better part of three weeks, one finds oneself bruised but amused, raising as many eyebrows as expectations and invigorated by even the slightest entry into a forty year diary that boasts passages of unparalleled action, occasional wit, regular banality and overarching Britishness.

That none of these characteristics are apparent in Pierce Brosnan’s calamitous swansong comes as a crushing disappointment for those of us who consider him the finest of the six 007s.

There’s an old joke, often attributed to Adolf Hitler, that a dog with no nose smells terrible. It is a psychometric baffler that the Bond people seem to have distilled into a family motto when producing this jejune, overflowing slurry-bucket that can’t do right for doing wrong.

In a fatuous bid to appeal to completists, fanboys and, ultimately, themselves, the Broccoli’s have attempted to crowbar a magnificently pointless reference to every single preceding Bond film into a slipshod shelf-filler that’s been unaccountably patterned after the Promethian excesses of Vin Diesel’s ‘xXx’ and John Woo’s feebler Stateside noodlings.

To fully compile ‘Die Another Day’s shortcomings is akin to mocking a bad hedge: it’s spectacularly unruly, but only because it has been allowed to grow thuswise. Suffice it to say that it will appeal to all those malcontents who’d always thought that James should pack in the cruelty, urbanity and spy shit that had always bogged him down and instead get jiggy with some laser beams, kite-surfing, and an invisible car.

Brosnan has always seemed like his own man. His later invocations of the Fleming spirit in ‘The Tailor of Panama’ and ‘The Matador’ suggested he had some groovy ideas as to what of his version of Bond could go on to include. Sadly, he was saddled with the ashy leavings of a franchise that had dispensed with experimentation or original thinking.

James Bond will return in… ‘Casino Royale’

Read our original review of 'Die Another Day'

 

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