Die Another Day (2002)
Directed by Lee Tamahori

Film Review

The original series of James Bond films concludes in predictably showy style with a smash and grab raid on all of the previous films, a treat no doubt for the fans but a far from satisfying way to round off a phenomenally successful franchise.  The twentieth Bond film, Die Another Day features Pierce Brosnan in his fourth and final outing as the smoothest and chunkiest 007 since Sean Connery, with Halle Berry serving up a Bond girl who is every bit his equal (a rare innovation).  It isn't up to the standard of GoldenEye (1995) but the film begins well, with a superbly gritty pre-credits opener which offers a glimpse of how things would pan out with the re-booted James Bond series a few years later.  After this very promising start, things go downhill faster than a Boeing 747 in freefall, and we are soon back in the old Roger Moore days, with comicbook characters, comicbook plot and enough tacky sexual innuendo to fuel another three hundred Carry On films.  Unlikely as it sounds, this was the most commercially successful Bond film to date - it took 430 million dollars at the box ofice.

Director Lee Tamahori's attempts to deliver a serious modern action movie are comprehensively thwarted by a laughably bad script and special effects which seem to have been created on a BBC microcomputer from the 1980s.  The screenwriters' ambitions were clearly far too much for the production's budget, but rather than rein these in the producer and director opted for the slightly less sane option of trying to deliver a film on one tenth of the budget it would have needed to be remotely convincing.  So we get an invisible car that turns out to be as naff as it sounds and the sorry spectacle of Bond happily surfing on a man-made tsunami, looking as if he knows he is making a cheap pop music video.

Add in a few really appalling gags and some pretty pointless slo-mo and the film's credibility is dead way before we get to the laughably bad CGI-saturated denouement.  Brosnan's solid performance and some sterling support from Toby Stephens, Judi Dench and Rick Yune (not to mention a superbly well choreographed swordfighting sequence) just about manage to distract us from the mediocre effects work and sustain the spectator's interest, but this is definitely not Bond's finest hour.  Rather, it is what you might hope to get if you randomly splice together all of the previous nineteen Bond films and for no good reason overlay on top of that some seriously bad computer effects.  This one will leave you shaken, and definitely not stirred.  To coin a phrase, things could only get better.

Film Synopsis

James Bond's mission to assassinate rogue Korean colonel Tan-Sun Moon ends in a frantic chase in which 007's target appears to fall to his death.  Bond is then captured by North Korean soldiers, who subject him to brutal torture.  Fourteen months later, Bond is traded for Zao, Moon's sadistic henchman.  Once his 00 status has been rescinded, Bond evades MI6 security and begins his own mission, to uncover the identity of the man who betrayed him.  His quest begins in Havana, where he meets Jinx, an American secret service agent who, unbeknown to him, is chasing the same quarry.  Bond discovers that Zao is a patient at a gene therapy clinic, which can offer a complete change of identity via a new DNA restructuring process.  Zao escapes but Bond makes an unlikely connection between him and the billionaire businessman Gustav Graves.  After a macho skirmish with Graves in London, Bond accepts his invitation to his ice palace in Iceland.  Here, Graves proudly demonstrates his brainchild, an orbital satellite that can focus solar energy onto small areas of land - a powerful weapon if it should fall into the wrong hands...