Bond Films: Die Another Day

I had low expectations going in to Die Another Day. It was the last Brosnan Bond; it was the last Bond before the major reboot of Casino Royale. I had vague memories of it being the one with the ice-skating invisible car. Having seen it, I felt moderately surprised. As Bond films go, it has its flaws, but it's not terrible. It's fair to middling, with some good, and some bad.

The basic plot of Die Another Day is: captured and imprisoned in North Korea, Bond is tortured for fourteen months before being traded with one of the guys he fought in the opening. The Americans were concerned Bond had broken and was giving up intel, but in fact, someone else inside MI6 has been. Bond's license is revoked and he is put off duty, but he manages to escape police custody and bullshit his way Cuba, where he learns of a clinic that genetically modifies people and their identities. Following clues, he is shortly re-instated with MI6, meets the girl (Halle Barry), and infiltrates a British diamond mogul's circle party in the arctic, where he reveals a new satellite that can reflect sunlight peacefully - or be used as a deadly orbital ray gun, as Bond learns later. During an attempt to spy on the villain, Bond and the girl are nearly captured, and Bond learns the villain is in fact the corrupt North Korean officer he fought in the opening - genetically modified to appear British, and actually selling his deadly ray gun to Korean and Chinese warlords. Bond and the girl infiltrate using these sort of glider-packs, and board a place that is serving as a mobile command post while the villain trains his death ray on a road leading to the demilitarized zone. After an intense fight in which the death ray destroys the plane, Bond and the girl escape on a helicopter, starting it in mid-air and setting out for a bucolic house before going back to civilization.

There is a lot of action in this film. Action, action, action. It's well done, although with a high level of CGI, making some of it a bit unbelievable. Apparently, everyone in a Bond film is immune to hypothermia, but that is nothing new. The genetic modification bit seems far-fetched, but is really just a modern gloss on Charles Gray playing Blofeld after he'd already been played by three other actors. There is a fairly epic car fight that is interesting if only because Bond usually hasn't been taking on similarly-ranked spy cars.

Where Die Another Day fails is in the romantic and sexual chemistry. Halle Barry's Jinx is a fairly competent agent, but she doesn't have much style as an agent, and her liaisons with Bond seem perfunctory. Michelle Yeoh had more style as an agent from another government, and more sparks with Bond as a competitor. Add in a false flag Bond and you get no one Bond can really rely on. There isn't really a Bond girl in this film - just a couple of fellow spies who Bond happens to sleep with. At this point in the franchise, Bond hasn't figured out how to work with women who are his equals, with notable exceptions from On Her Majesty's Secret Servie and The Spy Who Loved Me.

Die Another Day was the last of four films bookended by extensive hiatus - six years before GoldenEye, and four until Casino Royale. They're all of the nineties, and all feature the same Bond, and the same M, for that matter. The Brosnan Bond films are practically of a genre to themselves, which I'll write about later. None of them are bad, but Die Another Day flails a bit as Bond moves into the twenty-first century.