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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Pierce Brosnan is relaxed, Halle Berry has a catsuit to die for and the gadgets are awesome. It's flawed, but it's the best 007 flick in 20 years.
Nov 22, 2002 | It's a testament to the eternal optimism of moviegoers that nearly everyone looks forward to a new James Bond picture. It never matters how disappointing the last one might have been: The franchise, which is now 40 years old, has come to mean something more than the sum of its highly inconsistent parts. For one thing, the series is safe as milk that's been neither shaken nor stirred -- grannies of many stripes will happily watch the older Bonds (and maybe some of the newer ones) on the telly when they show up.
At the same time, there's still something vaguely disreputable about the Bond movies; it's more an aura than a theorem that can be proved. When they're bad, they leave us feeling disappointingly clean. But when they're good, we walk away feeling just a little dirty -- a bit treacherous and elegant ourselves, if only for an hour or so.
With just a bit of streamlining, "Die Another Day," the 20th Bond picture, might have left us feeling very, very dirty. As it is, the movie is hobbled by an overblown climax that feels tacked on, a trundling, sorry patchwork of needless explosions and weary derring-do that reads like an apology -- a coda thrown in, at great expense (these are big explosions), in case we didn't find the rest of the movie exciting enough.
That's a shame, because right up until that climax -- which mucks up the movie's last half-hour or so -- "Die Another Day" has plenty of the wit and style that the Bond movies have been missing for the past 20 years or so. Pierce Brosnan, who has played Bond in the last four movies, has sometimes been a perfectly adequate 007 and sometimes a disappointing one, depending largely on what's going on around him: He's elegant and often very human, but he's also rather stiff, as if he has sometimes found it hard to compete with so many deafening explosions and can-you-top-this stunts.
"Die Another Day"
Directed by Lee Tamahori
Starring Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, Toby Stephens, John Cleese, Judi Dench
Brosnan has been livelier in pictures like "The Thomas Crown Affair" and "The Tailor of Panama" than he has in any of his first three Bond movies; in "Die Another Day," he seems to have finally brought it all together. He's both relaxed and sly, and his lines have a nice ring to them, like the satisfying ping you get when you tap a piece of fine crystal. And in the best Bond tradition, he isn't afraid to play the fool occasionally.
When the terrific "new" Q (not that the late, great Desmond Llewellyn can ever quite be replaced), John Cleese, shows 007 some of the new gadgets, Bond looks him over and takes a good-natured jab at him: "You're cleverer than you look." Cleese's Q coolly sends it right back at him: "And you're looking cleverer than you are." Brosnan's Bond takes it like a gent, with an unabashed little laugh that shows he knows he's been topped.
Perhaps Brosnan is particularly good here because for once he's actually been given something to do. At least until that ill-advised climax, director Lee Tamahori, whose credits include "Once Were Warriors" and "Along Came a Spider," and writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade seem to have taken care to give us something different from the same old Bond. Tamahori seems out to entertain us rather than just impress us, and that distinction makes all the difference.
For the 2.9 percent of the population who expect a contemporary Bond movie to be a model of coherence, it's crucial to note that the plot of "Die Another Day" doesn't make a whole lot of sense, although there are moments when Tamahori fools us into thinking that maybe it will. In the opening sequence, Bond is captured in a demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, after botching an assignment to kill a power-crazed baddie.
When 007 is finally released, he zigzags across the globe, from Hong Kong to Cuba to London to Iceland, to track down that villain's right-hand man, the steely Zao (Rick Yune), who's pretty easy to spot, thanks to the glittering diamonds that have been embedded into his cheek after an unfortunate accident with an exploding briefcase.
