Die Another Day

Well, I’m finally caught up on the world of James Bond.

Hrm.

Spoilers are below …

First off, what a muddled mess. Way too many villains — Colonel Moon, General Moon, Zao, Frost, Redshirt Kil, Graves … any of them are reasonably interesting characters, and any three of them would have been a good array of villainy. By waiving all six of them (or five of them, if you want) at us, it’s just distractingly busy.

But it’s just as bad on the other side, where we’re distracted by not one hero, but two — and, worse, two who are working most of the time in parallel, not together, and thus overlap a lot of action — and, worst of all, one of the two is Haile Berry’s Jinx.

I am assured by a number of people that Berry can act, and well, but, frankly, I’ve yet to see it. She certainly doesn’t come off with glory here, as a second-tier Bond girl who’s supposed to be an NSA (!?) agent/assassin, Bond’s counterpart. Problem is, she just doesn’t act the part, usually wandering around with an apprehensive look on her face. And, if you think of it, does she ever actually move the plot along in any substantive way? I mean, she sleeps with Bond a couple of times, she kills a few people (including, if you had to predict the one villain she’d be teamed to fight with, that one), and she engages in not-very-convincing badinage. Oh, and she needs to be rescued. Twice.

There were rumors that this was a “pilot” for a Jinx movie series. I hope that’s been nipped in the bud.

Jinx is cute, and part of the problem is that, as written, she’s not a very strong character (and, frankly, Ursula Andress did the rising-from-the-surf shtick a lot better, 40 years ago). As a “secret agent partner” to Bond she’s a hell of a lot less effective than, say Michelle Yeoh’s Wai Lin (or even Barbara Bach’s Agent XXX). Overall she is a distraction to this film that could have been eliminated without hurting the overall plot.

The idea that Bond could be captured by the Bad Guys and held prisoner and tortured for a prolonged period isn’t a new one, but it’s a good one, and one long overdue. Indeed, it’s probably the freshest twist to the whole movie. While it almost inevitably leads to the “can he be trusted?” bit (and a bit more self-doubt might have been refreshing), it was still a good reminder that — well, the world is a dangerous place, even for 007.

On the other hand, aside from needing a shave, it didn’t seem that 14 months of torture and deprivation in a North Korean military prison slowed Bond down very much.

The ice palace was kind of neat, in a Bondesque way.

I understood what was meant, more or less, by “conflict diamonds,” but it would have probably been smart to explain them. Presumably that bit was cut to make room for other stuff.

The Icarus subplot is … well, silly, even by Bondian standards. First off, a hundred thousand environmentalists would have launched human wave attacks on Gustav Graves’ ice palace if it were revealed that (a) someone was suggesting an “artificial sun” and light source for the dark side of the planet (global warming indeed).

More importantly, it’s a stupid-ass weapon. As if the US (et al.) anti-satellite weaponry consists of a couple of missiles fired from a ship. As if Icarus really could shoot down all the ICBMs and SLBMs that the US could lob at NK. As if …

… well, yeah, it’s a Bond flick, and, yeah, the villain is nucking futs, but, jeez.

Finally, it’s a retread. Blofeld used an orbital laser, to similar purpose, in Diamonds Are Forever. Heck, there’s even a diamond connection there.

(We’ll leave aside the question of how much hi-tech gear the North Koreans could possibly be producing.)

On the other hand, it’s nice to see that the Bad Guys sometimes get cool cars, too. The new Q (nice reminder that the letter refers to Quartermaster) must be torqued.

Speaking of whom, John Cleese has settled into his role as the new Q. A bit more acerbic than Desmond Llewellyn, it’s still the same old routine.

The invisible car didn’t bother me all that much. Hell, it’s no more of a stretch than the other technogoodies we get to see.

The VR stuff is silly, in both uses of it. It’s not effective in building suspense (yeah, like they’d really kill Moneypenny, or she’d really bag James), and either sequence could have been cut both to the improved shortness and flow of the film.

Judy Densch as M gets to play the hard-ass as usual, but her scenes with Bond seem off. She’s far too ready to believe his innocence, and he’s far too ready to jump back in (metaphorical) bed with her (though, frankly, she’s the only female in the movie, aside from his interrogator, that he doesn’t sleep with). That the film segues so quickly from “Bond as semi-rogue going after the Zau” to “Bond as reinstated MI6 Double-0 going after a host of people” feels forced. More cutting room floor material, perhaps.

There’s an amusing page about the Vauxhall Cross Tube station here. The station is a reference to the new MI6 HQ, which is actually pictured in the movies. I’d no idea.

Much was made, most of it negative, about the brief cameo by Madonna as a fencing instructor. Ho-hum. I did like her character name, but her role could have been played, with little difference, by any other female dragged off the street. She wasn’t wretched, nor did she have me panting for more.

The same was not true for her title song in the soundtrack. That was wretched.

It seems that David Arnold has taken over the incidental music duties for the Bond flicks. This effort is a bit better than The World is Not Enough, but some occasional Barryesque touches aside, it remains pretty non-descript. John Barry’s soundtracks were players in the film, spinning an underlying thread that went from scene to scene. Arnold’s soundtrack pops up occasionally, then lapses inti quiescence — and is, perhaps, one of the reasons why the film doesn’t hold together well.

Margie’s main comment on the flick was that the Matrix-like video cuts — jerky fast-forwards or swooshes — were (a) distracting, and (b) un-Bondlike. To that I’ll add that they were (c) poorly executed. They didn’t occur with enough regularity or in a standard enough fashion to make it feel like it was an actual directorial vision, just that it was a toy that someone decided to play with. Clumsy, awkward, and not contributing anything.

Which would seem to apply to a lot of the movie.

Oh, yeah, there’s lots of sex, too. Having been stuck in an NK prison camp for 14 months, Bond makes up for it by shagging every skirt in sight — except, it must be noted, for Madonna and Densch (an odd combination there). There’s even a VR seduction with Moneypenny that garners a chuckle but manages to utterly derail the stumbling momentum of the flick.

As for Brosnan … I dunno. He has a few moments, but he never seems in control of things, only reacting to them. Both he and his character see to be going through the motions. There’s little of the humor — or of the anger — that has made Brosnan’s Bond worth watching.

And as for the Bond franchise? Well, it seems to remain a great way to print money. The movies are no longer the camp of the late Moore years, and there’s no reason why they can’t keep making them for another twenty installments. By the same token, though, the Brosnan era has had different directors every outing, which has certainly hurt. Conversely, the last two pictures have had Neal Purvis and Robert Waid at the writing helm, and they’ve certainly given me any cause to hope for something better (that they also co-wrote Johnny English isn’t an endorsement, either).

The fact is, Die Another Day made a lot of money. As long as the Bond films do, they’ll keep making them. I just won’t be nearly as excited as I used to be waiting for the next one.