Die Another Day (2002) | The Batman and Robin of James Bond

At last, we have come to the franchise killer. Obviously, it didn’t kill off the character of James Bond (another movie commits that sin more in both a literal and figurative sense), but it would be the movie that brought the series to a screeching halt and forced the filmmakers to reassess the character of Bond and how to tell his stories. James Bond had already been pretty invincible, and he was made even more so during the Moore and Brosnan eras when the spy gear and stunts were getting more and more outlandish. However, Die Another Day is the movie that reshaped my perception of Bond from superspy to superhero with how he manages to avoid death and save the day.

I have to admit that I saw the phrase “The Batman and Robin of the James Bond Series” while I was scanning the IMDB page for this movie and thought it was too apt an opinion not to include, so I take no credit for that title. Consider how the Batman movies were going from a darker comic book vibe somewhat close to their source material to the campy, pun-filled cartoon that Batman and Robin from 1997 was. Then consider how there was a small hiatus of Batman in movies until Christopher Nolan brought him back in a more grounded, serious movie with Batman Begins. Die Another Day involves James Bond outrunning a sky laser in a rocket car, and then windsurfing on a tidal wave, and then dueling another spy car on a frozen lake and in a melting ice hotel. After the absurdity of this, of course they would have to try to bring everything back down to earth with the Batman Begins of James Bond: Casino Royale.

As ridiculous as Die Another Day is, and as poorly as it has been received among fans, I still enjoy watching it. Shocking, I know, but I enjoy watching it for the same reason I enjoy watching Batman and Robin or the American Godzilla movies. They’re terrible, stupid movies that don’t make sense but are entertaining in their absurdity. If you gave me the option to watch this or The World is Not Enough, I’d rather watch Die Another Day because at least I’m going to laugh at something other than Denise Richard’s attempts at acting. Thus, I could list all of the movie’s faults in the Pros section for how I find them entertaining, but for the sake of avoiding confusion, I’ll try to be fair to the movie at first.

Pros

Fun hovercraft chase in the opening
The car battle, while stupid, has some cool stunts
The Aston Martin returns

Cons

Acting from the majority of the cast varies from hammy to stiff, including Halle Berry
The amount of disbelief that must be suspended for this movie is unattainable
Special effects look really bad
Peak stupidity with villains and their choices
Everyone is quipping with puns now, not just Bond
I don’t hate the theme song, but I definitely don’t love it

Plot & Thoughts

James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) is undercover in North Korea as an arms dealer. The egotistical son of General Moon (Kenneth Tsang), Colonel Moon (Will Yun Lee), receives Bond and starts the negotiations before he realizes who Bond really is. The deal goes bad and Colonel Moon races away on a hovercraft. Bond chases him down in another hovercraft over a minefield and along a long road before presumably killing him and sending him flying off a cliff. Unfortunately for Bond, he’s still deep in North Korea and MI6 does not seek to negotiate his release. So, Bond is forced to endure torture for several months while Madonna’s theme song for the movie plays.

MI6 finally does a prisoner trade with Zao (Rick Yune), Colonel Moon’s main lieutenant, for Bond. Bond is held against his will in a small clinic, but he’s determined to follow Zao to the end of the earth to ensure he doesn’t evade what he deserves, whatever that is. So, Bond promptly escapes and tracks Zao to a facility in Cuba where he’s undergoing experimental surgery to change his appearance with the intention of getting a new identity and causing more terror around the globe. Following Zao then puts him on the trail to a wealthy businessman in England by the name of Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens). Graves, who has made his millions off of diamonds, is a shady individual and MI6 is willing to give Bond another chance at being a double-o to find out more about Graves and what he’s up to.

With that basic synopsis out of the way, Die Another Day doesn’t sound like it’s as bad as its reputation makes it out to be. It’s when we get more specific that the movie reveals its quality, so there will be spoilers ahead to discuss how truly stupid Die Another Day gets. The opening scene before the title sequence is actually pretty good and perhaps as grounded as the movie gets. The hovercraft chase sequence is exciting and feels very much like a typical James Bond experience. Once the title sequence starts, Die Another Day quickly becomes a very different movie. The credits, while filled with many digital nude girls like previous Bond movies, shows Bond being tortured. All other title sequences have been either abstract or removed from what was happening to Bond at that time. Upon seeing this introduction for the first time, I was expecting a serious and melancholic movie with some grit to follow. Other than the most explicit sex scene to be featured in any James Bond movie, I was wrong.

After Bond is out of North Korea, we start bending the rules of reality almost immediately and increasing the physical capabilities of Bond. He escapes the hospital by pulling a Hannibal Lector and slowing down his heart rate to the point of making the EKG think he was going into cardiac arrest, and leaves during the commotion of all the nurses and doctors trying to save him, for one thing. Then, when he gets to Cuba and finds Zao, it starts going off the rails a little more. Bond meets the character of Jinx (Halle Berry)—with whom he has the explicit sex scene—and she stiffly acts as a femme fatale. She’s a CIA agent, apparently, and has her own agenda with the medical facility at which Zao is located. Zao’s plastic surgery has turned him into an albino in the process of becoming a white dude. The technology is so good, that his DNA is being rewritten so he can become the Saltine he always wanted to be. Zao escapes, Bond blasts a huge hole through a wall with an air canister, and Jinx dives off a very tall cliff to her death reappear later.

Then, there’s Gustav Graves. I’m not sure what direction was given to Toby Stephens, nor do I know whether or not he wanted to continue the string of over-the-top hammy performances for Bond villains. However, he does his best to make Gustav Graves as smarmy as he is evil while being as over-the-top as possible. When he’s first introduced in the film with the scene at the fencing club, he immediately emanates the persona one would associate with the word “douchebag” and it never lets up. I love it because of how ridiculous the character is, and it gets even better when you learn the twist of who Graves really is because…it just gets dumber. Graves is actually Colonel Moon who had managed to miraculously survive his fall off the cliff at the beginning of his movie and undergo the experimental gene therapy to the point of transforming from a young North Korean colonel to a posh English millionaire peddling diamonds and creating satellites that shoot solar lasers. I’m not sure how many rewrites this script got, but it might have benefited from a few more.

The stupidity does not end with the villains either. The action scenes get really dumb too. As I mentioned, there is a satellite that Graves managed to launch into orbit at some point—the movie didn’t bother to show us—under the guise of some philanthropic plan. Of course, it is actually a weapon capable of using energy from the sun to create a giant solar laser beam, and he uses it in an attempt to kill Bond who is racing away in a rocket car across a giant frozen portion of the ocean or wherever the hell they are. Somehow, the rocket car escapes the death beam and hangs off the edge of the glacier, waiting to be melted but Graves does the villain thing of reveling in his moment instead of killing Bond. The glacier melts and Bond uses the parachute and part of the car to surf on the CGI tidal wave caused by the glacial debris before he gets back to his own vehicle and has a spy-car battle throughout a hotel that is made of ice. Those last three sentences may have run on a little bit, but I didn’t really want to take too long to describe the stupidity. I assure you it is as dumb as it sounds.

When the movie is not overloading you with explosions, quick camera swivels, loud music, and gunfights, the characters are talking. Surprisingly enough (or not), the movie does not get any smarter when the characters speak. So much of the script is just overflowing with puns and jokes, I would caution against the James Bond drinking game rule specifically around puns for this movie. Bond used to be the pun machine in the movies, but, for some reason, they decided to bestow that gift to other characters as well. It’s a quippy movie with some rough acting performances.

Halle Berry, despite being a well-known star by this point, is pretty bad in Die Another Day. The quality of her performance is extra funny when you consider that she had to leave the set to get her Academy Award for her performance in Monster’s Ball. Rosamund Pike does a decent job and manages to out-act Berry—this was her first big theatrical release—but the script doesn’t do her any favors. There’s also the brief scene in which Madonna shows up. I don’t think she’s so terrible that she deserved a Razzy for the five minutes she was in the movie, but it’s a good thing she didn’t stick around longer.

Now, I’ve pointed out the stupidity of the plot. I’ve mentioned the ridiculousness of the technology and the villains featured in this movie. I’ve talked about the laughable script and acting performances. This is easily one of the worst James Bond movies in the entire catalog from an objective point of view. And yet, I enjoy watching it over several of the other movies I’ve reviewed so far (and some to come). I find it way more entertaining than the more forgettable entries simply because of how absurd it gets. It’s deserving of every criticism, but I like to think that the less serious a movie is, the more slack you can cut it for when it fails—except for Casino Royale from 1967. It may have soured my opinion on James Bond movies when I was younger, but it doesn’t anger me when I watch it these days like some of the Daniel Craig Bond films do because those are so serious in tone and some seem to actively dislike the character of Bond. I can laugh at Die Another Day and have a good time with its silliness because, at the very least, the writers still understood the character of James Bond and why people like him.

TL;DR

Die Another Day is a bad movie. There is no denying it. Between Halle Berry being upstaged in acting quality by Rosamund Pike and Toby Stephens channeling his inner Frank Langella as Gustav Graves, the acting is either flat like Denise Richards’ Christmas Jones from The World is Not Enough or bombastic like Johnathon Pryce’s Elliot Carver from Tomorrow Never Dies. The special effects, especially the digital effects during the tidal wave sequence, look awful. The dialogue is infested with so many puns it would make Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze turn red with embarrassment. Things go from acceptable to completely unbelievable before the movie ends and Bond walks away more powerful than I ever imagined—and this isn’t even his final form. Yet, all of these flaws make the movie more memorable and entertaining than some of the duller entries on the list, for mostly the wrong reasons.

Hair of the Dog Drinking Game Rule

It was something of an editing trick in film, TV, and music videos that became very popular in the late ‘90s and early 2000s in which the camera movement would suddenly speed up or slow down to change the drama of the shot. It’s also something that, thankfully, went away. It always felt like a cheap way to try to inject some action or intensity into a scene that would also manage to blur what was happening because they didn’t use a camera specifically for the speed. if you want an example, compare how things look in Die Another Day when the action slows down to the action scenes in a Zack Snyder movie. While Snyder is a hack, he at least understands that you have to shoot it in slow motion to keep the film from looking blurry.

Getting to the point, Die Another Day has a lot of moments where the editing has the camera movement suddenly change. For that reason and the fact that it’s a stupid trick, I’d say it’s worthy of a drinking game rule.