As a franchise, the James Bond series needs its stomach stapled.
Inside Die Another Day there's a taut espionage adventure struggling to survive that bane of the new millennium, digital-effects bloat.
For a good hour or so, director Lee Tamahori and screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade set up a lean, exciting revenge saga pitting Bond against North Korean irregulars who are militarizing the DMZ. Then they spend the next hour or so blowing it all to glittering, expensive smithereens.
Pierce Brosnan has always suggested he could play Bond as damaged goods. For the first part of this movie he gets the chance. Betrayed by an unknown informer when he's in the middle of a Communist base, Bond spends more than a year in a North Korean torture chamber. In one of the most inventive opening-credit sequences since Seven, scorpions slither around fiery anatomical images while Bond's own battered body moves in and out of focus.
The international intelligence community - including Her Majesty's Secret Service - shuts out 007, swapping him after 14 months for his most grotesque North Korean enemy, Zao (Rick Yune). Americans suspect that Bond broke under pressure and gave up one of their spies. So Bond is on his own.
Sporting his Robinson Crusoe look, Brosnan strides into the Hong Kong Yacht Club, gets his usual suite and, in a deft, funny sequence, ends up cutting a deal with Chinese agents to discover who in the West sandbagged him and also caused the death of several agents from Peking. The key figure to trace is Zao, who moves through most of the picture with diamond shards embedded in his face like asteroids frozen in mid-streak.
The darkly merry chase leads to a pioneering DNA-transplant center in Cuba that prolongs life for Communist leaders and wealthy Westerners; Halle Berry beats Bond to it as an American NSA agent, nicknamed Jinx partly because her relationships never last. Berry's entrance easily rivals the Venus-with-a-conch-shell image of Ursula Andress emerging from the surf in Dr. No. Too bad all Bond can muster for his initial come-on is "Magnificent view." It is, of course, but are those words the best the screenwriters can muster? The subsequent dialogue is even worse.
Die Another Day? In this film you die for a good line. And though Brosnan and Berry look spiffy together, they're such independent operators that there's no rooting interest for them, well, to bond.
Still gliding on the sardonic elegance of Emilio Echevarria (the terrific Mexican actor from Amores Perros) as well as some slick visual jokes - including a splashy send-off for Jinx from the DNA center - the movie finally touches down on Bond's home turf. Following a trail of diamonds used to purchase North Korean weaponry, 007 tracks jewel tycoon/adventurer Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens) and his fencing-champ publicist Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike) to London.
At a fencing club, the quip level remains atrocious. But the slashing, unpredictable action delivers its own zesty punchlines when Bond crosses swords with Graves. We also get some precious putdowns from the always-welcome John Cleese as Q, the gadget-master, when Judi Dench's bracing M admits Bond back into her cool good graces. And Q's basement tour of outmoded gimmicks (Lotte Lenya's armed sensible shoes out of From Russia With Love, the jet-pack from Thunderball) reflects the movie's good-humored embrace of the Bond-film legacy.
As soon as Bond accepts Graves' invitation to travel to Iceland - where Graves will demonstrate a satellite that can operate as a second sun - the picture falls apart like a skyscraper of cards. The first half relies on heightening real-world politics to a day-after-tomorrow tension level. The second half explodes into the unmoored sci-fi fantasy of fiascoes like Moonraker.
In this glacial sci-fi setting, the verbal witlessness (those not-so-wise cracks keep coming) and slack visual artifice (Graves' ice palace is a banal version of the Sydney Opera House) prove fatal. Stephens, as Graves, is a real find - if you can call the son of Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith "a find." In London he conveys anger and intelligence. But in Iceland, he freezes into stupid-villain tricks, such as not eliminating enemies immediately.
Director Tamahori could have saved the day in Die Another Day if his skills suited special-effects extravaganzas. But what makes the opening reels exciting is their illusion of things really happening: a trio of agents surfing through high waves to the North Korean shore, like a human trident taking shape before your eyes; Hovercrafts playing deadly games of bumper-cars across a minefield; two semi-invincible fencers wreaking havoc on a London club.
Tamahori's visceral instincts can't guide him through a fantasy-land where agents outrace avalanches and swim unharmed through Arctic waters. Without the virtuoso talent of a George Lucas, the otherworldly explosions and computerized derring-do in Iceland have no zing; the film fails to recover its footing in a prolonged final act back in Korea.
One of the movie's intended wows is a car that disappears from view at the push of a button. Unfortunately, the invisibility effects are the same as those of the next-generation Stealth flier in the I Spy movie. With tropes this repetitive, super-spies may be the ones doing the next disappearing act.
Die Another Day
Starring Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry
Directed by Lee Tamahori
Released by MGM
Rated PG-13
Time 132
Score score **