Today Bond enters the 21st century in
DIE ANOTHER DAY, wherein Bond must thwart a face-swapped villain's plot to use a giant diamond space laser to do a little political reconfiguring of the Korean peninsula.
After possibly the most complete cold opening yet (we see infiltration, spycraft, gadgets, Bond-being-found-out, escape, explosions, a vehicle chase scene, hand to hand combat, another escape, recapture, and torture - all in the first 12 minutes) - we get into what is possibly the most derivative Bond movie of them all. Now - this does seem to be a purposeful choice. This is the 20th Bond movie occuring at the time of the 40th anniversary of the opening of the franchise, so they naturally seek to highlight that. And highlight it they do. While it's most obvious in a Q scene in a relics room just filled with props from previous movies, it also was VERY clear that the screenwriters decided to mad-lib this movie's plot directly from every other Bond movie up to this point. I'm sure there are more complete articles out there documenting every single reference and element gleaned from the previous 19 films, but suffice it to say that almost every major plot beat feels like it has roots in a previous Bond installment.
This...isn't necessarily all bad. It's 2002 now, and (apart from a few mangled scenes), the action is better, the cinematography more impressive, and it's not a terrible thing to revisit Bond's Greatest Hits all crammed into 2 hours and 10 minutes. But - as I've said before - a Bond movies greatest strength is what it can give you that's fresh and new - not just an updated and better-looking-version of what's come before. There are some new elements - we have a real honest to goodness sword fight that is quite impressive, we have Bond being tortured and recovering with long hair and beard, we have a...car that turns invisible? I actually kind of liked that. Oh and nice to have car chase/fight between Bond's superpowered car and an evenly matched villain car with just as many shotguns and rocket launchers on board as Bond's.
It's still quite watchable. Halle Berry's Jinx is a well-placed ally (though not able to compete in the badassery department with Wai Lin from Tomorrow Never Dies) - and Frost's turn from Bond-Girl-Ally to Evil-Henchman is handled better than Elektra's same turn in the last movie. But some of the primary baddie's motivational aspect is weakly sustained, and mostly we have to drift from action piece to action piece to make it through.
Observations
- John Cleese is a worth successor to Desmond Llewelyn as Q, I like him very much here.
- Moneypenny's ahem...creative use of the mission simulator in the final beats of the denouement got a hearty guffaw out of me, this was a terrific gag.
- Bond gets with Jinx twice and Frost once for an update B.B. total of 58 with 46
So long Pierce Brosnan, you made the 90s a fun place - tomorrow we graduate to the final (as of now!) era with Daniel Craig.
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