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Die Another Day (Full Screen Special Edition) Customer Reviews (22 - 24 of 104 Reviews)

Pierce Brosnan IS James Bond
Pierce Brosnan once again proves that he is the definitive James Bond entering into the Twenty First Century. Keeping pace with cutting edge technology this film never loses touch with its roots. Interestingly with the cold war over there are so many reminders of it. Bond finds himself in peril in Communist North Korea, dealing with Red Chinese agents in Hong Kong and calling on a sleeper agent in Cuba. Did the cold war really end? Pierce never looked better and I would say that he has a few more assignments securely procured at this point in time. He really has this role down to perfection with just the right amount of humor and seriousness to make it believable yet entertaining as well. Roger Moore had his own approach to Bond and it worked for him handsomely. Pierce is doing just the same and he is more than well established in the role. Without Pierce this film would never had worked. He possesses the right amount of wit, charm and tenacity demanded by the best of the Bond films. The invisible Aston Martin is a very gutsy thing to introduce but Pierce makes it work with a little help from John Cleese the newly promoted Quartermaster. Halle Berry looks formidably well endowed physically in typical Bond fashion and she works capably as Bond's American counterpart on the field of battle or in bed. This film is both action packed and suspense filled entertainment. Composer David Arnold moved his score up another notch combing more techno elements with traditional Bond musical elements again keeping this film timely yet within traditional boundaries. The DVD extras are numerous. I particularly liked the segments on the digital editing and effects.

Good, but not premium Bond
Die Another Day was surprisingly impressive first time round but doesn't hold up well to a second viewing for a number of reasons. The pre-title sequence is particularly strong, and the film is plot-led with a good premise that it explores far more effectively than License to Kill - Bond screws up, gets captured and finds his license to kill revoked and has to go it alone. But to many wrong choices are made in the casting of those both in front of and behind the cameras to do it full justice.

Brosnan is certainly a major problem here, getting lazier in the role far sooner than his predecessors. He takes too much for granted and doesn't seem to be putting much effort into it in the assumption that he's got it down pat, when in reality he's starting to go to seed - certainly he must be the only man to come out of 14 months of torture in a Korean prison chubbier than when he went in, something his tendency to spend much of the opening of the film with his shirt off and hidden under a bushy Monty Python castaway beard only exacerbates.

He's not helped much by his co-stars either: Halle Berry, who seems to become a worse actress with each successive film, really can't handle sass or wisecracks, which is a shame since that's almost all her part consists of, and their initial meeting exchange of innuendoes seems more like eavesdropping a married man picking up a hooker to prove he's still got it than anything else. Rosamund Pike's other fatale femme fares a little better purely on he grounds that, while an extremely one-dimensional performer, to least her limited abilities fit the part. Toby Stephens' villain is a bigger problem. While it's a neat touch that he models himself on an unflattering portrait of Bond's vanity, Stephens actually seems to be basing his performance on Rik Mayall's caricatured MP Alan B'stard from sitcom The New Statesman, and the results aren't pretty - a largely ineffectual screen actor, it's no accident that he needs to don an electronic suit of armour to become a credible foe for Bond in the final punch-up. Curiously, two of the better performances on display come from bit-players John Cleese (pleasingly restrained) and Michael Madsen as a distinctly unimpressed company man. Even Madonna's unnecessary cameo as a lesbian fencing instructor is considerably less painful than her terrible title-song, easily the series' worst. Still, the resulting overly enthusiastic swordfight is okay but would probably have been even better had they hired William Hobbs to choreograph it instead of Bob Anderson (Anderson may have coached Errol Flynn, but only in some of his worst films).

The direction adds to the problems. Lee Tamahouri is a maddeningly variable director, and too often its his weaknesses on display here. For a series that prides itself on globe-trotting, he has a very poor sense of place (aside from the Iceland scenes, this is the first Bond film that really looks like they were afraid to leave the studio backlot) and his handling of action isn't always effective - indeed, the car chase actually looks like several shots are missing. Still, at least they manage to just about get away with the science behind the invisible car more effectively than the awful CGI that undermines the series' reputation for doing daring stunts for real: along with the occasionally slo-mo or sped up scene intros, it just seems horribly out of place without ever quite ruining the film.

Another big problem is the tone. As the 20th entry in EON's series, the desire to celebrate its heritage threatens at times to overwhelm the film as it becomes increasingly self-referential. With almost every scene having an homage, a prop or an audio or visual reference to a previous movie, it stops being fun and becomes labored long before the halfway point. Bond is feeding off himself so much here that at times it reminds you of one of those animals that, when caught in a trap, gnaws its own leg off. It just about gets away with it, but it gets messy. There's fun to be had, most of it in the first half before it goes all Diamonds Are Forever, but there's still the feeling that this could and should have been much better.

The extras package is superb, but strangely ommits the 50-minute documentary about the writers' struggle with the script that is on the UK disc.


Zero Stars
I remember when I used to be paid to write movie reviews, and where the utter dread I felt over being assigned the latest James Bond flick was mitigated by having carte blanche to say whatever I wanted about it, which inevitably amounted to hundreds of words of poking fun at it. Seeing how the last Bond flick I saw was The World is Not Enough, which was abysmal, I just wanted to see if the franchise had at least improved slightly since then, seeing how it could hardly have gotten any worse. Unfortunately, it's just as bad as it was before and, for all I know, may even be worse.

This is the 20th Bond film of the franchise, and in my book is about the fifteenth zero star movie they've come out with in a row, extending back to the days of Roger Moore. Don't ask me what people like about the Bond movies these days. Seems to me that you either have to be fifteen years old to enjoy it, or relish being reminded of being fifteen years old. The absolute nadir of cinema, which means, of course, that the franchise will probably be around longer than any of us.

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