Die Another Day (2002)

(In theaters, November 2002) Forty years after Doctor No, James Bond is back with his twentieth movie, and Die Another Day is kind of a half-hearted renewal. In the first hour, we actually see something new: James Bond failing and being captured. Shocking! you say as the suave British spy does things never seen before. He is tortured (with a Madonna song, appropriately enough), exchanged for another prisoner and has to fight his way back in the service. Tons of winks to previous Bond adventures are there for the sharp-eyed viewer, including a further nod to “the original James Bond” for those hardcore Bond fans. The only sour notes come from Halle Berry, whose Jinx has to be one of the worst Bond Girl ever: her line delivery is flat and perfunctory, with the added disadvantage of a crass attitude that make Bond look downright humble. Yikes! The second half of the film isn’t as appealing, given that it simply delivers Yet Another Bond Adventure with the usual trappings, boring action sequences and overlong finale. Jinx is scarcely worth rescuing, the villains are flat, the directing/editing gets more and more incoherent as the film goes along and some truly hideous CGI shots (Bond surfing amongst the icebergs) contaminate the otherwise good visuals. I did like parts of the end sequence, but the rest is just dull, dull, dull… Still, it’s hard not to like Rosamund Pike and the sword-fighting sequence. Add those to the good first hour, and we’ve got a better-than average Bond. Which is all you need, really.

(Second viewing, Jellyfin streaming, January 2025) Oof; I hadn’t seen Die Another Day in more than two decades and had forgotten almost all of it.  The good news are that it had a lot that I didn’t remember, and the bad news are that I had forgotten just how much of a sub-standard Bond it was. Oh, I don’t dislike all of it — it’s fun, after the dour and brooding Craig era, to see Bond in a good old over-the-top 1990s action movie adventure.  There are fancy gadgets, megalomaniac villains, spy films twists and turns, baby-faced Rosamund Pike looking very cute, and Pierce Brosnan being pretty good in the middle of it all.  The problem is that the rest of the film has severe problems.  Preposterous villain, irritating Bond girl (Halle Berry, wasted), slap-dash CGI sequences, too-frenetic editing, insipid writing and references to the franchise’s history that often feel hammered in.  Also, I don’t like Samantha Bond as Moneypenny.  Revisiting Die Another Day after watching a lot of the other Bond films leads me to reassess my first-viewing opinion — everything right and wrong I’ve noticed back in 2002 still stands, but the result is definitely in the lower tier of the series. Still fun to watch, though.