Tomorrow Never Dies was pretty good. It’s sandwiched between one great movie and two crappy ones, so people seem to forget it even existed.
Another Die Another Day hater checking in. I agree with Cal Meacham in thinking that Moonraker is the very worst Bond film but somehow I hate Die another Day more because it had the potential to be so awesome and so totally screwed it up.
I thought (like others here) that the beginning was pretty awesome - the stuff with Bond being tortured between the opening credits of the film worked really well and promised a lot. Like, we were going to explore some of the space between the total fantasy world spy Bond is and what a more realistic MI6 agent might be. Or at least dwell on the difference a bit. I was pretty excited by this possibility because I’m a real fan of the series but it has a colossal weakness - there’s a lot of very specific elements that make a Bond film:
[ul]
[li]Beautiful women, at least one treacherous[/li][li]Banter with Moneypenny[/li][li]Gorgeous locations[/li][li]Ridiculous but cool weaponry from Q[/li][li]Stupid puns (Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais once observed that if Bond worked in your office, everyone would hate him for this alone)[/li][li]Violent fight scenes[/li][li]Amazing stunt work[/li][li]Hugely wealthy supervillain with implausible plan for world domination[/li][li]Bond himself: suave, cynical, ruthless and emotionally detached.[/li][/ul]
If you deviate more than slightly from the above, it stops feeling like a Bond film at all but if you keep to the template, you’re always seeing the same film. The villain thing is the biggest problem, I think. It must be a struggle to keep coming up with someone who fits the bill. Anyway, my point is that I think in the modern era, the number one problem the Bond producers have is ‘how can we avoid serving up stuff the fan has already seen?’ And instead of trying to avoid this, with Die Another Day, they tried to turn the bug into a big feature. Massive error. As Peter Morris said, I think little background touches (like Rosa Klebb’s spiky shoe) would have been charming. Extended plot devices were a big mistake because Bond films already cannibalise from themselves so heavily. The ‘killer satellite’ for example was borrowed from Goldeneye which in turn was borrowed from Dimaonds are Forever. It felt too much like the film was eating itself.
Yes, Halle Berry was awful.
The ending felt like it had drifted out of all reality. The Americans have gone to Defcon 2 over the situation in North Korea but there’s no real sense of the film organically raising the stakes to such levels - it all feels so arbitrary and absurd. The direction really fell apart over the last 20 minutes or so with just endless frenetic fighting.
The revelation about Toby Stephen’s character was ridiculous. Bond lives in a fantastical world, but he doesn’t live in a cartoon - that couldn’t happen. It couldn’t nearly happen. Especially annoying as I thought Toby Stephens was otherwise a pretty cool villain and he did a good acting job but he couldn’t save the material.
I should have known from the theme song. The Madonna theme song is bloody awful. And though there are exceptions to the rule, in general shit Bond theme song = shit film.
I’d rather watch Die Another Day twice than Quantum of Solace once. What a shitpile. And it also fails every single one of the criteria above.
Oh, but it was GRITTY and DARK and REALISTIC.
Sorry, not for me.
I thought Die Another Day was a lot of fun. Sure, Madonna can’t act her way out of a paper bag. Yeah, I’ll give you Halle Berry and Pierce Brosnan had the chemistry of Margaret and Dennis the Menace. Absolutely, the invisible car was a huuuuuuuge (product placement) stretch. But it was fun, darnit!
While I also enjoyed parts of Live and Let Die, there wasn’t any part of Die Another Day that matched the hokiness of the Louisiana sheriff boat-chase scenes (a character they were compelled to bring back for The Man With the Golden Gun, I think it was). And not even Christopher Walken could save the mess that was A View To A Kill.
Bond movies vary wildly, in my opinion. As do opinions about them. I kinda liked the over-the-topness of, say, Diamonds Are Forever (Jimmy Dean, for cryin’ out loud!), and I also enjoyed the more realistic grittiness of Casino Royale.
Plus, as mentioned above … Die Another Day had Rosamund Pike, and she was babe-a-licious!!!
It didnt fail because of that, it failed because its director aint worth shit, plain and simple. QoS was bad on its own sake, but had, as well, to fuck up royally the whole “Spectre” thing in seconds. Wherehas CR distilled its menace way better than any other Bond movie ever made previously.
Really regrettable that Martin Campbell didnt sign for a run of several Bond movies, he’s as precious to the franchise that Craig is.
If Halle Berry is in a movie, it is good. That’s the law.
“The World Is Not Enough” and “Licence to Kill” are the two James Bond movies that I have barely any recollection what they’re about (other than there’s a nuclear bomb in the former and a drug dealer in the latter). Actually, I’m not too clear on “The Living Daylights”, either – someone was defecting, I think.
I don’t mind if a James Bond movie is silly, but the one thing it shouldn’t be is unmemorable.
The writer maybe?
Like in Catwoman?
Catwoman? Swordfish?
Possible, I can’t recall the scene well enough to be sure, but I remember really disliking it at the time.
I re-watched parts of The World Is Not Enough on TV a couple of weeks ago. I still don’t remember what it’s about 
*
Die Another Day* was hammy and ridiculous (and not in any particularly good ways), but at least it wasn’t boring.
Even in those cinematical atrocities the law still works…Halle can do no wrong.