DIE ANOTHER DAY
***
21st century Bond
WHAT stamina! Forty years of saving the world have diminished Bond’s derring-do not a whit and this, the first installment of the new millennium, maintains the franchise’s standing as the ultimate cinematic guilty pleasure.
Like a bus on a well-traveled route, “Die Another Day” makes all the familiar stops, but careens full-throttle in between as the action switches from North Korea to Cuba to Iceland and back.
Pierce Brosnan suits up for his fourth go-round as the debonair British superspy and, with an irresistible combination of ramrod-straight poise and rakish charm, has finally taken ownership of the role.
Helming a Bond film has typically been an exercise for journeymen directors, but New Zealand’s Lee Tamahori (“Once Were Warriors,” “The Edge”) manages to bring a distinctive flair to the bravura action sequences.
And, aside from a jarringly fake computer-generated avalanche scene that momentarily challenges the necessary suspension of disbelief, the big-bang set pieces are superbly crafted.
In a blatant grab for the Gen Y demographic, Bond literally surfs into the new millennium in the traditional grasp-you-by-the-collar, pre-title sequence, landing on the North Korean side of the demilitarized zone, and setting the scene for a politically topical showdown.
Before the whole shebang explodes into a relentless blast of uber-cool gadgets and ribald repartee, there is an unusually grim expositional stretch.
Bond confronts a communist colonel (Will Yun Lee) trafficking in “conflict” diamonds, but the plan goes awry and, after a spectacular Hovercraft chase over a minefield, Bond is tossed in jail.
Fourteen months of solitude and torture later, a grimy and bearded – but still strapping – Bond is exchanged for political prisoner Zao (Rick Yune), whose diamond shrapnel scars give him what is referred to as “expensive acne.”
Accused by MI6 of betraying secrets under torture, Bond is stripped of his license to kill and spends much of the rest of the film operating as a renegade.
Subjecting Bond to real physical pain and the mental anguish of having his loyalty questioned has the effect of making him more human than we’ve seen him since his wife died in the vastly underrated “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”
But once he lands in Cuba, orders a mojito (muddled, not stirred?) and sparks up some crackling chemistry with foxy American spy Jinx (Oscar-winner Halle Berry, having a ball), “Die” shifts gears into more familiar territory.
From then on it is, as window-dressing Bond Girl Miranda Frost (newcomer Rosamund Pike) remarks, “sex for dinner and death for breakfast,” as Jinx and 007 go after villain Rupert Graves (Toby Stephens), a megalomaniac British entrepreneur with a smile that looks like a snarl, a shimmering ice-palace lair and a preposterous invention that will help him achieve – that’s right – world domination.
The script, penned by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who co-wrote 1999’s “The World Is Not Enough,” twists and turns with enough insider betrayals and shape-shifting villains to keep it engaging, and the geopolitical setting feels vaguely in keeping with current events.
Even Madonna doesn’t suck in an unbilled cameo as a kinky fencing mistress named Verity. (Note to the filmmakers: Bring back the deliciously perverse Bond Girl monikers that seem to have disappeared with Xenia Onatopp.)
This 40th-anniversary release also pays winking homage to its predecessors with the inclusion of subtle references like a Union Jack parachute, the laser-threat from “Goldfinger” – and the not-so-subtle spectacle of Berry emerging from the sea in a low-slung bikini, in tribute to the original Bond Girl, Ursula Andress.
There’s one explosion too many in “Die,” but who’s counting? Bond still has upstart action heroes like Vin Diesel’s Xander Cage eating his dust.