The James Bond movie franchise celebrates its 40th anniversary this year and, fortunately, the latest movie in the series, Die Another Day, is one of the better of recent years. Directed by Lee Tamahori, who made his name with the gritty abuse drama Once Were Warriors before taking on big Hollywood thrillers like Along Came a Spider, it feels, for the first half or two thirds at least, like a real movie rather than a relentless assault of action and special-effects sequences.
Also, appropriately for an anniversary, it has something of the air of retrospect about it, with many an amusing reference to earlier Bond movies, playfully reflecting on its heritage. There’s Halle Berry emerging from the sea in a bikini and with a knife at her thigh, like Ursula Andress in Dr No, the first Bond movie; there is Bond examining, in Q’s laboratory, some old gadgets from previous movies (including the shoe with a blade in its toe worn by Rosa Krebb in From Russia with Love), and so on.
The tone is lighter than that of the last Bond movie, with some of the engaging preposterousness of the Roger Moore-era films added back in. The last few Bond films seemed rather grim, and appeared to be trying foolishly to slot themselves into the real world. The World Is Not Enough concerned itself with oil pipelines in somewhere like Kazakhstan, but Die Another Day goes the whole hog and rediscovers the arch-villain bent on global destruction, using ray-guns in space, an operation he coordinates from an ice palace in the polar circle. Of course.
Tamahori signals at the start that this Bond movie will be a little different. After the pre-credits action sequence, when Bond is captured by the North Koreans, he is put to torture. This is a favourite motif in the Ian Fleming books — Bond is tortured again and again, in ever more bizarre ways, from the carpet-beater applied to his testicles in Casino Royale to, if memory serves, the toilet over a volcano in You Only Live Twice. So Tamahori is reviving a true Fleming tradition, one most of the movies chose to ignore or to render more tastefully. Moreover, Tamahori intercuts Bond being tortured with the title sequence, which is in other respects the usual cheesy fantasy of floating female silhouettes and so forth; except that now the floating females, cut with Bond’s torture, seem like the projections of a disordered mind. (At the same time, by the way, the audience is being tortured by Madonna’s dull theme song.)
Pierce Brosnan’s Bond emerges from North Korea with Jesus hair and beard, and looking remarkably healthy for someone who’s just suffered 14 months of abuse. Clearly, they didn’t starve him. He gets back to England only to discover that M, his boss (Judi Dench), feels that he has outlived his usefulness. Thus, in his quest to find the person who betrayed him to the North Koreans, Bond will have to go it alone. This puts him, temporarily, in a space other than the usual officially sanctioned one, though he doesn’t seem to have much of a problem doing without the support of MI6 — he whizzes in and out of Hong Kong and Cuba without difficulty. But the most interesting thing here, now that Dench is playing M, is the hint that her relation to him is quasi-maternal, and her rejection carries more of an emotional charge than most Bond movies would allow or be capable of transmitting.
The subsequent interplay between Bond and the Berry character, the American agent Jinx, also has more liveliness than we’ve seen in recent Bond movies. Perhaps that’s down to the presence of someone who can really act (Berry is certainly perfect for the mooted spin-off movie), but it seems Tamahori has given Brosnan and his co-stars a little more room to be characters rather than simply ciphers in a plot-driven effects movie. This is all good.
Die Another Day, in fact, has the coherence of a proper movie right up to a fantastic sword-fight with chief villain Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens). The fight is brilliantly done, bringing together the snobbish aristocratic pretensions that permeate the books and the savagery at the heart of Bond’s vocation as spy and glorified assassin. It is a superb sequence, which also gestures intelligently towards the old swashbucklers that are the forebears of the Bond movies, but unfortunately it breaks the movie in two: it feels almost like the movie’s real climax, after which Die Another Day collapses into a series of set-pieces, another three climaxes before it’s over. Paradoxically, their sheer extravagance reduces their impact. By the time of the final battle, one is too blitzed to care much.
Bond himself, superstud that he is, may well be able to deal with four climaxes in one hour. The rest of us, however, would probably have been as happy with better structure, more foreplay and one climax. Okay, two.