Like Timothy Dalton’s final Bond film, License to Kill, Pierce Brosnan’s final turn as Bond in Die Another Day, offers a departure from the familiar. Introduced with a shimmer of gray at his temples, this Bond is a bit more seasoned than he was in the previous three films. This is both honest to Brosnan’s age, but also appropriate to the stress-filled, paranoid times that this Bond exists. Released in 2002, Die Another Day is the first Bond film released in the post-9/11 era, which is perhaps why our introduction to Bond here is in torturous peril, not in the arms of a woman or the wake of success.
Bond’s imprisonment in a North Korean prison – also rather timely – lasts fourteen months, and we are introduced to the prospects of our own being tortured in a decade much closer than the fading memories of Vietnam that are often still alluded to but so far removed from the current generation that it becomes just another war. Watching this film in 2013, one can appreciate the irony of one of our heroic operatives being tortured instead of the other way around, but I digress.
Regardless, what begins as a promising, cynical look at post 9/11 paranoia and cynicism becomes a film desperately seeking an audience that clamors for the spectacle of wind surfing – something that is so eerily familiar to Roger Moore’s alpine slaloming in both its silliness and visual poorness that begs the question how much has Bond – or the studio – really evolved in the last twenty years?
And herein lies an appropriate contradiction. The film that begins with the depiction of a more bellicose world than we’d seen in a while is also one that stays the course of cliché and silly spectacle. It’s in this irony that I would like to think the filmmakers are poking fun at an endemic inability to recognize and adapt to a world thrust into flux, but I don’t want to give them this much credit.
In addition to the sloppily contrived surfing scene, Die Another Day plagiarizes previous Bond films. A connection between diamond smugglers and terrorism is blatantly lifted from Diamonds are Forever; the threat of a nuclear space station is taken from both Moonraker and The Man with the Golden Gun; the imminent threat of drowning is alluded to, particularly toward the end, from Thunderball. With the exception of Moonraker, these are some of the finer Bond films to “pay homage to,” but all in all, the final Brosnan film feels like an uninspired amalgam torn between poignancy and pop culture.
The choice to have Madonna sing the title song, one whose scrannel clashes with the dark seriousness of the opening scene, only supports an argument of the latter. Moreover, Halle Berry is a wasted addition to this film. Fresh off her Oscar-winning turn in Monster’s Ball – a film that was terribly overt with its metaphors but did an adequate job showing Berry’s acting ability – Berry is thrust into the alliterate role of Jinx Johnson, a character who is so convoluted, it’s difficult to care whether she’s a double, triple, or quadruple agent…or whether she’s just there to be eye candy replicating Ursula Andres’s white bikini with belt in the premiere James Bond film, Dr. No.
All in all, Brosnon deserved a better send off that what he was given.
