AKA: “The things I would do to Miranda Frost…” (reviewed by OG)

Okay, so Madonna’s theme song sucks.

Fine, so she makes a cameo in the film that’ll make you cringe. The way she delivers her lines will immediately turn you into a Level 8 thespian with Hadoken-firing abilities.. Her line: “I don’t like cockfights”…falls as flat as her last starring role did.

Never mind that, though.

This movie kicks serious ass…for the most part. In terms of what Pierce Brosnan has done for the series, this one stacks up right behind “Tomorrow Never Dies”, which featured Michelle Yeoh as his lethal and lovely sidekick…a combo that just couldn’t be beat. In “Die Another Day”, Bond gets hooked up with yet another female spy, only this time it’s Halle Berry’s semi-annoying “Jinx” character, and the Oscar-winner just can’t hold a candle to Yeoh’s former badass, try as she might. She’s nice to look at, sure, but there’s a lack of solidarity to the film’s claim that she’s as cool as Bond is. It just doesn’t work, even during the character’s climactic bitch vs. bitch sword fight.

But I digress. With the exception of the lackluster Berry character and the inclusion of a pretty terrible CGI sequence (you’ll know it when you see it, but it only lasts for less than a minute…thank God), “Die Another Day” delivers the goods, in the way that all classic Bond films have, with some extra salty goodness included. We get to see the Bond character torn and ravaged by a betrayal that lands him in a vicious North Korean prison. We get a shot of him, once again, at odds with MI6, and in defiance of M (Judi Dench), a plot point that helped Timothy Dalton’s “License to Kill” become one of my favorite Bond films to date. We see John Cleese settle perfectly into the Q role, and his back and forth comic delivery with Bond is priceless. We also get a cool Q-related shot of a room stacked with all the “relics” from previous Bond films (including the shoe with the dagger that juts out of it! Yes!), as well as what could possibly be the sweetest car he’s ever driven (two words: thermal camouflage). We even get a decent villain, a spoiled-rich diamond magnate with a penchant for fencing and a strange relationship to Zhao, a Korean thug with diamonds buried in his face whose trick car provides for a jaw-dropping ice-lake car chase. All that and the lovely Rosamund Pike as Miranda Frost, a gorgeous MI6 agent who for some reason pops up in nothing but a sports bra and sheer jogging pants for the film’s climax. You gotta love this franchise, folks, if only for the unapologetic sexism.

The plot? Um…something to do with a giant doomsday device that shoots a beam from outer space. Pure “Dr. Evil” type stuff. Couple that with one of the most unintentionally funny props in film history (wait till the baddie puts on that suit), and you’ve got yourself something resembling a story, my friend…and that’s all Bond ever needs. My only nitpicks: Bond never gets even with his lovely female jailer, who just happens to have him beaten down and drugged for days on end. That, and he never gets to cash his vengeance chips in with his betrayer (the “mole”…heh heh), who instead meets a pointy demise at the hands of Halle Berry’s character. Halle Berry, by the way, did a great job of getting the ever-loving crap screwed out of her in “Monster’s Ball”. Go Oscar!

So yeah…there’s not much more to say about this one. Reviewing a Bond film is a pretty compact outing for me, and I’ve been hooked on the series ever since my mom took me to see “A View to a Kill” back in the day. So I’m biased, to say the least. This newest installment, however, was successful in doing what every great Bond flick is supposed to do: take you away and entertain your ass, if only for 2 hours or so. And believe me, there are worse things a piece of celluloid could do.

(11.26.02)