2002 - Die Another Day
Alternate Title - Race Swapping Is Easy
PG13 - 133 minutes
Director - Lee Tamahori
Stars - Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, Rosamund Pike, Judi Dench, John Cleese, Michael Madsen
This movie begins with what I’ve always wanted to see in a Bond movie: surfing ninjas. It’s especially satisfactory when one of said ninjas turns out to be Bond himself. As a disclaimer, watching Die Another Day today is unfortunate considering that I chose today ahead of time and it just so happened that Brosnan’s daughter died today. I just wish I was on GoldenEye instead of his Bond movie that is considered the worst to date. However; the endless show of Bond must go on…
In the opening, Bond is pretending to be exchanging diamonds for guns with a Korean soldier. This lasts all of two minutes before his cover is blown and he has to escape in a hail of gunfire. Just a normal day for Bond; his cover being blown very easily and shooting random henchmen. Seriously MI6, send someone else if your plan is remaining undercover. They ALWAYS find out his identity without much effort. His secret identity lasts about as long as Waldo can remain hidden. I mean, eventually he gets the job done but if his last resort is to just shoot everyone and flee and his first plan of being incognito ALWAYS fails then why not just toss some grenades over a fence and call it a day? At any rate, Bond and the villain get involved in a vehicular chase and the bad guy falls over a random waterfall. Bond is captured by the villain’s father. Cue the music.
The movie cuts to 14 months later and Brosnan looks just he does in Robinson Crusoe. Okay, not just like. He actually looks like a cross between The Dude and that homeless guy you see with a paper bag in the alley. Bond is then traded for Zao (the guy that fell over the waterfall) who now has a fancy shiny face due to an explosion during the previous chase sequence. When M sees him, she’s an icy bitch like usual and tells him that she didn’t even want to trade him and she wishes he had killed himself. She says things that a junkie mother would tell her children. I’m hoping her womb has always been barren because if she has children they are surely a fucking train wreck. Bond tells her he must go after Zao and the person that sold him out.
One thing I’ve noticed about this movie so far that isn’t in the rest of them; style. By that I mean they integrate CG women in with his flashbacks, they cut the movie in a way that the rest didn’t do. Plus, the technology that checks out Bond’s vitals when he is retrieved is from whatever year Prometheus takes place in. This is the first Bond movie to come out after The Matrix truly hit so naturally they had to have tons of flashy bullet-time camera movements. This one has about 80% more slow motion than the rest of the movies combined.
While in Cuba, Bond meets Jinx. Played by Halle Berry. Her nickname is Jinx because she was born on Friday the 13th. Who in the holy goddamn hell knows what day of the week they were born on? Honestly, ask anyone and everyone would have to look it up or take a stab in the dark with a 1/7 odds. After talking for all of twenty seconds, Bond is suddenly inside Jinx. Probably the shortest time difference between the meet-cute and internal load-blowing I’ve ever seen. The next day, we find out that Jinx is also an assassin or agent or whatever. She’s basically Bond with huge tits. I think Bond’s greatest strength is his ability to pick out all women that are secret agents. It’s like his dick is a divine rod and secret agent vagina is the water.
In London we are introduced to Gustav Graves in the most over the top villain entrance in history. Then, almost immediately we are introduced to Madonna. Despite being in a fencing scene she still manages to be in bondage gear and is overly sexual about everything. Soon after, we are treated to an intense fencing scene between Graves and Bond. This escalates into a full on real sword fight that ends up being pretty brutal considering there are bystanders just casually watching the entire time while these two men are actually trying to kill each other. They look like they will do just that until Graves’ assistant, Miranda Frost breaks up the two men.
Surprise, surprise, Miranda Frost is working for MI6. Like I said, his dick can find a woman with a secret without fail. Both her and Bond head off to Iceland where Graves’ diamond base is. I can’t believe I just had to write that sentence. It hurt.
We are finally revealed to what Graves’ plan is and it is…a…um…thing that reflects sunlight…yeah, it’s basically just a Simpson’s episode. He’s just a younger Mr. Burns.
When Bond and Frost finally get Graves in their gun sights it is revealed that Frost is actually a double-double agent. Which would actually be a twist if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve only known she was MI6 for like twelve minutes and didn’t see her do shit about it. So basically they switch her twice and it has no effect on the overall plot. She might as well have just been working with Graves all along like they said in the beginning. Twists are only actually twists when they fucking matter to the movie. Now, had they said that M was a bad girl that would surprise the shit out of the audience.
After using his gadget ring to break glass, Bond escapes in a rocket car on the ice. Graves uses his machine to chase Bond with reflected sunlight that melts the ice behind him. Holy fuck. After escaping the rocket car, Bond parasail on the ice water and icebergs. I’m starting to realize why people hated this movie. It hasn’t been that good at all yet but it’s turning super shitty as time goes on. It’s hard to have a movie with an invisible car be good by any respects. Once he’s back in the invisible car, it immediately turns into a car chase with Zao behind him in a Jaguar that has a machine gun in the backseat that is firing bullets nonstop literally two inches above Zao’s head. You’d think he’d ask for a better clearance rate when installing the gun. Hell, if he hits a moderate bump in the road he’s going to blow his own head off. And if he survives that he sure as shit won’t survive when his speeding car crashes into a snow-bank.
Meanwhile, instead of just killing Jinx, Frost and Graves decide to slowly drown her. Why do Bond villains have to be so fucking romantic about everything? In the end, it’s really the key to their downfall.
Back to the car chase. It’s horribly stupid. Two gadget cars driving around a vague ice building. I can’t tell where they are or where they are going. Zao drives into the water and Bond shoots a diamond chandelier which falls right into Zao’s face. What a lame way to kill a guy that’s been through a ton of shit already. Plus, Bond saves Jinx. What a surprise. Frost and Graves escape on a plane to North Korea.
Bond and Jinx sneak onto a plane that Graves is on in the same manner that Dave Chappelle did in Con Air only they survive, which I suppose means their bodies won’t end up falling to earth with a note to John Cusack on them. It’s the only way Cusack gets mail.
To wrap up the movie, there is a long fight scene on the plane in which Frost is stabbed in the chest with a book by Jinx. Then Bond makes Graves use his own lightning suit against himself and then get sucked into the jet engine. THAT’S how you kill a villain. Not with a goddamn chandelier. Oh, did I not mention that Graves has a lightening suit? Yeah he totally does. And it’s fucking stupid. It’s basically a slightly more advanced suit than what Raul Julia wears at the end of The Street Fighter movie. Bond and Jinx escape in a helicopter.
We get a further screening into the insane mind of Moneypenny as we see her with virtual reality glasses pretending to fuck Bond on her desk. She must have a really strong desire to be on the receiving end of an AIDS stick.
Oh yeah, the movie ends with Jinx and Bond doing it on a pile of diamonds. The end.
Overall, what a terrible movie. There were a few sequences that I enjoyed but they were few and far between. If you’re going to have a twist, give your audience more than a dozen minutes to process the reason it’s so important. The last 3 of the Brosnan movies all started out decently and then just descended into a pile of shit. Let’s see how Daniel Craig does. Considering he’s the only Bond that can actually be described as ‘in shape’, I’m sure it’ll be a nice change.