Bringing Out a Dead Bond

DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

(Written in 2003)

I have skipped the last few James Bond movies since "Goldeneye" because Pierce Brosnan did not do it for me as Bond, but I was told that "Die Another Day" was one of the better entries. I suppose better for most audience members means more explosions than one can count every five minutes. It is a definite sign of the times that James Bond delivers not the standard double entendres but the requisite special-effects of your standard-issue action picture. If "Die Another Day" has anything to do with Bond, then I must have missed it.

Pierce Brosnan is once again the superspy James Bond, the loyal British assassin whose latest assignment takes him to North Korea. After a series of mishaps, Bond is imprisoned for fourteen months (!) Eventually, he is freed though his boss, M (Judi Dench, looking less authoritative than usual) has disowned him for ruining relations between Korea and Britain. Bond suspects betrayal and seeks revenge, a no-no for a double agent, by parading around the globe from Havana to Iceland. In Havana, Bond meets Jinx (Halle Berry), who looks good in a bikini and who is also an assassin. The plot centers around a villain named Graves (Toby Stephens), who may not be what he seems, and whose primary intention is world domination and wants it by using a large mirror/satellite to incinerate any country of choice. So we get a series of explosions, lots of cars crashing through glass and ice, an invisible car (!), anti-tank grenade launchers, endless sword fights, lots of parachutes, Michael Madsen as a haggard-looking intelligence agent, Madonna as a fencing expert (!) and poor old John Cleese as the inventive Q (at least, he uses a priceless Monty Python line).

Some of this is sort of fun, all of it implausible to the nth degree. And dear old Brosnan may have charm and arrogance in spades, but he doesn't have the killer instinct that Bond needs. Sean Connery had it, and Roger Moore mostly amped up on the charm. Timothy Dalton was merely a refrigerator. I just have one request for this series: live and let die.