Die Another Day

Pierce Brosnan’s fourth James Bond film turned out to be his last, though no one knew it at the time.  It was the biggest financial success of his films, earning over $400 million worldwide but was also widely disliked, due to the overreliance on bad visual effects and a story that had an excess of science fiction elements.  Bond films have often stretched technology to some degree but the second half of Die Another Day could be planted into a Star Trek film quite comfortably.

Spoilers abound below so be warned: 

Die Another Day was released on the 40^th anniversary of the Bond films and inserted countless references to the series long history, such as having Halle Berry come out of the sea in a manner similar to Honey Ryder in Dr No and her subsequent dialogue with Bond has lines lifted from when Tatiana first met Bond in From Russia With Love.  There were also a lot of gadgets and stunts that directly referenced previous entries which I thought to be excessive.  Skyfall, the 50^th anniversary film, celebrated this with much more subtlety and largely honored the series by simply being made as a very solid entry in the series.

Die Another Day was directed by Lee Tamahori, who directed one of my favorite films, The Edge, with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin.  The Edge focused on two characters lost in the Alaskan wilderness who have to figure out survive overcome the elements and each other.  It was a very intelligent thriller and I was excited to see what this director would bring to the Bond franchise.

Die Another Day feels dated, watching it ten years after its release.  However at the time it was made The Matrix was a recent film and it was influencing a lot of action films.  Also the Bond videogames had become very popular, starting with Goldeneye 64 for the Nintendo 64, a game I owned and played repeatedly.  The film seemed to want to honor those gamers by targeting a film for teenagers.  

The first half hour has Brosnan’s best work as Bond.  It is too bad the film rarely allowed him to express that though it does inform his performance throughout the film.  He has much less dialogue than in his other films and even though he appears in the opening scene he does not say anything until addressed by Zao and Moon, a full five minutes in.

M seems particularly cold in this episode.  Despite the situation she she also faced pressure in Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace and Skyfall and was portrayed with more depth in each of those films.  I think the directors of those films had a better sense of how to use her. than Lee Tamahori did here.  Dench’s role in Die Another Day is probably the smallest of any of the seven films she is in.

Some people love Halle Berry's work here and I initially thought she was a good choice for a Bond girl but she plays Jinx as a street girl in several scenes which is a bad fit for a Bond film.

Toby Stephens’ Graves who is the result of a ridiculous gene therapy experience that turned him from Colonel Moon to Graves (and somehow gave him an English accent) has a good sneer but otherwise seems petulant. 

Rosamund Pike is more interesting as Miranda Frost, playing Graves’ ultra- efficient assistant who rebuffs Bond’s endless advances, to seemingly give into them against her own better judgment, and then ultimately being driven by greed.  I think I would have liked it more if she had been the female lead.  Miranda’s reactions to Jinx, seemingly threatened by another competent woman, are another strand I wish the film had explored more.  Pike has turned into a top actress and I am glad this film gave her the initial exposure to audiences.

Rick Yune is menacing as Zao.  Michael Madsen is awful as Jinx boss in the NSA, Damian Falco.  He seems to be doing a bad William Shatner impression with his punctuating of odd words.  Raul Echevarria, who played a very different character in Amores Perros around the same time, is authentic as a sleeper agent.  Kenneth Tsang exudes dignity as General Moon, a loyal career soldier who was probably born in the wrong country.  His complex relationship with Bond is a highlight of the film and I wish the two had had another scene in the third act.  

The opening 25 minutes are the strongest with Bond captured and tortured by the North Korean military for over a year after seemingly accomplishing a dangerous mission to assassinate a North Korean colonel (Moon) who is trading African conflict diamonds.  This feels relevant and Brosnan plays Bond going undercover onto the North Korean base putting on a strong face but clearly edgy. When he is discovered he is defiant.  

The chase scene with the hovercrafts is exciting and the score is bombastic.  When Bond is captured, Brosnan subtly shows a bit of the discomfort when faced with the father of the man he believes he just killed.  We see a quick scene with music sounding a little like the shower scene music in Psycho as Bond’s head is dunked into a bathtub filled with ice repeatedly as the titles start.

The titles, played to Madonna’s title song are effective as they show a mix of a fire and ice theme with different shots of Bond being tortured and recovering in between sessions.  An attractive female soldier seems to be supervising the torture and I wonder why Bond didn’t try to seduce her to get some sort of edge.  When the titles end Bond is sitting in his cell with long hair and a beard and dried blood on his mouth, and looks like a wounded animal.

This is heavy material for a Bond film and the staccato beat of the song mixed with the visuals.  Using the titles to pass the time the narrative (fourteen months pass as Bond goes through the titles) is efficient.    

After the credits I think there was an opportunity to show a day in the life of Bond the prisoner.  It could have picked up just after a torture session and to see how he is fed, get some sense of the questions they ask him and just a bit of his daily routine.  I would have happily dropped some of the sci-fi chases from later in the film to explore this here.  The film ultimately spends more time showing Bond re-entering society than it does as a prisoner.

When Bond and General Moon meet quickly Bond speaks with a broken voice, indicating he is either thirsty or maybe he has spoken throughout his captivity.  A similar plot device was used with Jack Bauer in the sixth season of 24 in which he had spent nearly two years as political prisoner of the Chinese but never spoke a word.  However the show detailed some of Jack’s physical and emotional recovery from the ordeal.  Bond is not permitted much of the same.

The scene where Bond and General Moon have a final exchange before Bond is traded is well constructed because Moon allows Bond to think he is about to be executed and uses it to try to get Bond to reveal who had corrupted his son.  Arnold’s score is soaring with an Asian military flavor but also mournful Brosnan plays Bond as beaten but defiant.  When Bond turns back as he realizes he is not going to be shot there is a great shot of Moon, painfully having to release his son’s killer, looking at him and composing himself with as much dignity as he can though we sense it must be difficult for him. 

Bond then angrily discovers that he is being traded for Zao, Colonel Moon’s second in command.  As he comes into the hands of the British we immediately realize that Bond is not getting the welcome he deserves but another form of captivity. 

M and Bond then have an interesting scene.  It is not clear where they are but it looks like a hospital and Bond, who is perhaps waking up for the first time after being sedated during the trade, realizes he is captive yet again.  M revokes Bond’s 007 status, probably due pressure the Americans are placing on the British (demonstrated to a higher degree in Quantum of Solace) but by entering his cell shows she trusts him but is bound to her job.  Bond’s wounded pride is on full display here as he is embarrassed that he was traded but eager to prove that he had did not cracked. 

Bond escapes easily from his British captors after not being able to escape his North Korean captors for over a year.  Perhaps M made had security light in the boat where he was being held so he could get away without trouble-Falco implies that she had a hand in it.  Of course they are not torturing him but this might have been sold better if we had seen a bungled escape attempt during his time in North Korea and maybe he learns from a past mistake when escaping from the British.  The scene in which he walks into an expensive Hong Kong hotel dressed in soaking pajamas and with long hair and a beard is very funny and Brosnan perfectly delivers the line “My usual suite” to the concierge,  actings as if he is in one of his Brioni tuxedos; note his brief reaction to the concierge’s question before Mr. Chang steps in.

The Cuba scenes start off well as Bond meets with a sleeper agent to get information on Zao.  The factory (with the foreman reading the newspaper to the workers making cigars) looks authentic and l felt the environment with all the low life gangsters felt real. 

Bond’s infiltration of the clinic is effective as he eases his way through and then Bond seems filled with barely controlled rage as he finds Zao.  The fight with Zao is well staged but at the end of the sequence as Jinx takes the fall an exaggerated backwards dive and the Cuban guards do nothing about Bond standing there armed the film starts its similar nosedive.

The sequence in the Blades club (a modernization of a game of bridge that took place in the novel Moonraker) is overblown and uninteresting. Brosnan looks silly in the white fencing outfit and Madonna’s cameo is absurd since she never gives Bond the fencing lesson he came for or even a tip despite the fact he is supposedly there for one.

Judi Dench has her best scene in the film in the Underground.  M’s actions seem to indicate that she has been following Bond all along and his resentment at losing his Double 0 status after all he underwent in North Korea bubbles up.

The virtual reality scene seems to exist both to pay tribute to the gamers who had helped make Bond cool again and to introduce the audience to the sci-fi heavy second half.  Bond’s shooting of M seemed to be a delightful wish fulfillment.

From here the film has one bad scene after another and few good ones. Bond has his Q scene but although I like Cleese the scene is underlined by the ridiculous invisible car.  Bond then goes to Iceland and the film enters a series of implausible scenes in the Ice Palace.  Bond follows people around in his invisible car leaving tracks in the ice which should be easy to spot if they do not hear the car.  He uses the breather from Thunderball to swim under ice then inexplicably both throws it away and comes out of the ice without being cold. 

The laser sequence in which Bond fights a big thug while dodging lasers is ridiculous.  The scene in which he and Miranda go to bed feels cut down since they walk into the room and start getting undressed without any sort of seduction or foreplay. 

Brosnan gets a good scene, in which he faces off with Graves and Miranda, who has been playing Graves’ assistant but also an undercover British agent is revealed to a mole and behind his betrayal in the first act.  Bond’s reaction, to try to shoot Miranda only to discover she took the bullets from his gun while they were in bed together, is great.  Bond often will take much bigger calculated risks than most would and Miranda would not expect him to try to shoot her.  Bond also wants to get even as he now realizes she was the one who betrayed him, and indirectly caused his North Korean ordeal.  Miranda’s quick answer about him having brought the gun to bed is doubly insulting. Tamahori wisely keeps the camera on the two actors’ faces during this critical scene. 

From here if I have the film on, I turn it off.  Die Another Day is action packed from this point to the end but in an unbelievable way.  Bond’s escape in the jet powered car while being chased by a satellite is preposterous.  The digital ice surfing is the worst scene in the series and takes me out of the film.  Wretchedly, while several long shots are clearly of a digital Bond, there are close-ups of Brosnan trying to sell it against the cartoon-like background.  He’s a good actor and is superb in action scenes but cannot conquer those visuals and neither could any other actor (see Kurt Russell trying the same in Escape From L.A.). Following this is an amped up car chase/battle that is edited like a Michael Bay action scene (not a good thing to this viewer) which Bond wins by using his car’s cloaking device.    

The climax on the plane has a good musical cue and benefits only from the reappearance of General Moon, who sees that his son is still alive but has been changed to an Englishman.  The drama of Graves killing his own father (the second Bond villain in a row to commit patricide) is diminished by the absurd Robocop-like suit Graves is wearing.  Bond and Jinx' respective face offs with Graves and Miranda (who is inexplicably wearing a sexy sword-fighting outfit aboard an airplane) are overblown and only notable for how Jinx dispatches Miranda. 

Amazingly helicopter escape is even worse.  The helicopter just happens to be in the plane which is disintegrating after flying right through the Icarus beam.  Why the plane is only disintegrating as opposed to blowing up at impact-as the nuclear warhead did is not explained although I do admit to being ignorant of physics.  As Bond and Jinx are in the falling helicopter trying to get it to start the digital images around them look fake and as the helicopter finally started I felt relieved only that the film was about to end.

Moneypenny gets a funny scene in which she and Bond appear to finally consummate their years of sexual tension but is then revealed to be taking place in the virtual reality machine.  The final scene with Bond and Jinx in some kind of temple seems forced which is an appropriate conclusion to what is ultimately a disappointing film.

The biggest influence of Die Another Day seems to be Diamonds Are Forever, my least favorite film in the Bond series.  It similarly starts strong (Bond furiously hunting Blofeld to avenge the death of his wife) but also gradually turns silly with unbelievably staged scenes and a weak villain. 

The puns in this film are dreadfully unfunny.  The only ones I sort of chuckled at was “saved by the bell” and “find me a new anger management therapist” but both came during the best part of the film, the first 25 minutes.

Although the film performed better than the other Brosnan Bond films, which were all big hits (and admittedly there was probably a younger audience that loved the sci-fi elements) most hardcore fans like me were let down by the second half and the producers had to decide how to move forward. 

The Bond series took an interesting turn after this.  Brosnan expected to make one final film.  I felt the shortcomings of Die Another Day were not his fault at all as he gave a strong performance.  Brosnan talked publicly about bringing in Quentin Tarantino to direct Casino Royale, who had expressed interest in the story, which the producers now had the rights to.   Casino Royale was the first Bond novel and I knew Brosnan would be too old to play Bond at beginning of his 00 career but I was interested to see how Tarantino would address it.   

Rumors surfaced in early 2004 that Brosnan would not return as Bond.  Neither the producers nor Brosnan initially said anything to dispute nor confirm this though eventually Brosnan confirmed that he had been let go.  I thought this was a risky move by the producers.  Brosnan’s popularity had helped save the series in the mid 1990s and to not make a final film in which all could part on good terms could hurt the Bond image. But producer Michael Wilson now felt inspired, after the misstep with Die Another Day, to go back to Fleming and revamp Bond as a more realistic hero using Casino Royale. 

Tarantino was not hired and that and was probably a good idea.  Tarantino is a fine director but also combative.  Tarantino’s films usually have a singular vision and Bond films are made as a collaboration.  The producers wisely rehired Martin Campbell who had made the well-received Goldeneye to helm the new film and along with their regular screenwriters brought in Oscar winning screenwriter Paul Haagis.

I credit the producers for recognizing the misstep they took with this film and adjusting.  The Bond films since then make excellent use of the Bond character while still giving the audience a fun time at the movies.

**(out of five)