Three Blokes and a Chick Watch: Die Another Day
When Die Another Day first came out in cinemas, I went to see it an instantly took a severe dislike to it (translation: it turned me into a frothing, raging fanboy). It felt like a missed opportunity to truly celebrate the 40th anniversary of Bond ruined by CGI, bad writing and an outrageous plot. However, since I recently had to sit through For Your Eyes Only twice, I went into Die Another Day suddenly more open and willing to forgive its flaws, because at least it has a personality of its own. It’s a self-satisfied idiotic bastard of a personality, but it’s a personality nonetheless.
The other reason I was more receptive this time around was because one of the other two blokes (let’s just call him “Will”, because that’s his name) informed me that there are many layers of hidden reference to the other (at the time) 19 Bond films, some so subtle that they’re practically overlooked and could appear to be coincidental. See the list here, and I’m going to try and refrain from pointing out every reference to other Bond films (no reference counter this time!) because it’s a little bit pointless when there’s an IMDB page you can look at instead.
Unfortunately the chick was unavailable to join the three blokes for the first viewing, but I insisted on her watching it again with me so she wouldn’t miss out on all the bad CGI and Halle Berry trying to “act”.
Spoilers ahoy!
What’s the film about?
Following a truly bodged mission in Korea (because England can’t pick on the Russians any more because they’re about as relevant as disco), Bond is on the trail of some diamonds he was supposed to retrieve because we all know that diamond smuggling is the worst crime North Korea has committed. The trail leads him to millionaire entrepreneur Gustav Graves, who’s on the cusp of revealing his satellite that acts as a second sun and is definitely not some sort of doomsday device (nosiree, honest). How many bad innuendos can Bond slip in before it’s too late, and will the film make Halle Berry’s CIA agent character interesting enough to warrant a spin-off sequel of her own (hint: f*ck no)?
Who are the characters?
- James Bond: Brosnan’s last outing as Bond1, and he doesn’t look a day over forty despite being about fifty. Remember that, at this age, Roger Moore was physically melting. Brosnan uncomfortably finds himself aping Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton at various points in this film, and yet succeeds in maintaining his dignity.
- Jinx: a cocky unlikeable CIA agent, Jinx has the affliction of being played by Halle Berry, the most wooden actress in the world. Pretty sure the character was created just as an excuse to see Halle Berry in pleather.
- Gustav Graves: the smuggest man in the world, his grin has the power to cause people to gain the urge to punch him within a fifty mile radius. He prides himself on being like Bond, and there’s a really stupid secret behind his plans that we’ll touch on later. Toby Stephens would go on to play a fantastically good James Bond in some BBC audio adaptations of the Bond books, and then onwards to ruin some perfectly good BBC audio adaptations of the Philip Marlowe books2.
- Zao: a pale-faced genetic accident (that’s not a slur against his Korean nationality, I mean he actually does get involved in a genetic accident), Zao is this film’s villain’s henchman. He doesn’t appear to do anything particularly well aside from drive a Jaguar really fast, despite apparently being a feared dangerous criminal. He’s as wooden as Jinx, but at least he has the excuse of being played by a fashion model.
- Miranda Frost: the token strong independent woman who amazingly doesn’t fall for Bond (to be fair, he doesn’t even attempt to rape her into his way of thinking, unusual as that would be a good reference to Goldfinger). A fellow agent who definitely won’t turn out to be a double agent by the end of the film.
So what happens?
We see the traditional and iconic Bond opening where the barrel of a gun follows him across the screen, only for him to turn and shoot at it. It’s looking good, and then 18 seconds into it a CGI bullet flies down the barrel as Bond turns and fires the gun. It looks fake as hell, wasn’t required and oh god this film’s going to suck, isn’t it?
The films starts in Cornwall North Korea, along a stretch of beach that wouldn’t look amiss in 1940’s Normandy. A figure decked out completely in black surfs along the rolling tide and WAIT…this isn’t going to turn out to be Bond, is it? Bond wouldn’t surf into North Korea, that’s just stupi- oh, there’s an entire team of agents surfing into Korea. Does MI6 train all its agents to surf? Is that really a crucial skill that gets used a lot? Luckily, none of the night patrols notice the team of surfers rolling up the beach, and the big reveal is one of them leans into camera and whips off his night vision goggles (must be difficult to surf with them on, huh?) to reveal it’s Bond. So:
- Knows over ten languages
- Connoisseur of alcohol to the point he knows which year it comes from
- Lethal combatant, sharpshooter, stunt driver
- Surfs like a motherf*cker
One of these things is not like the others.
The team of agents gets to work setting up a perimeter to create a false beacon to attract a diamond smuggler to attending the wrong rendezvous point, with the intention of Bond taking the smuggler’s place. Fortunately the smuggler happens to look just like Pierce Brosnan otherwise the Koreans might have been tipped off had the expected seven-foot tall fat black diamond smuggler arrived and had turned into a coiffured white Irishman. Now riding the hijacked helicopter, Bond stuffs a wad of C4 plastic explosive into the case containing the diamonds because that’s the kind of wanton irresponsible impulsive shit James Bond does. At no point does he mutter to himself “these diamonds are to die for“, but he sure as hell was thinking it.
Inside the nearby military base, an angry young Korean fellow is kicking the crap out of a bag that’s clearly supposed to have someone inside it (sadistic villain habit #12 – tie up your cronies and beat them to death as training). The bag is opened and it turns out there was a dude in there. Angry young Korean man says a throwaway line about “find me a new anger management therapist”.
As Bond steps off the helicopter after landing in the base, another young angry looking Korean man subtly takes a picture of him and transmits it somewhere – we can tell this because despite being well into the 2000’s films feel the need to show cameras sending photos by showing big green loading bars and flashing words that say “TRANSMITTING”. Imagine if you uploaded a video to YouTube and it just flashed the word “UPLOADING” on screen until it was done – that would be patronising, wouldn’t it? The other angry young Korean comes out, now dressed as a General, and Bond approaches the guy with the camera, who introduces himself as “I am Zao. You are late”. It’s as awkward to hear as it was to read here and yet it’s only a taster of some of the terrible dialogue to come.
The General greets Bond and there’s some discussion about trading African conflict diamonds for weapons because oooh, relevant modern-day controversy! The General drops in a line about studying in the west (“majored in western hypocrisy”) and Bond admires the General’s collection of western supercars that he has lined up on the mud amongst the tanks and military vehicles. I’m sure none of this will come into play later. A bunch of hovercrafts turn up with the weapons for the deal as the General mentions that America has covered the area in landmines, which hovercrafts don’t trigger.
The transaction seems to be going fine (Bond does manage to slip in a “don’t blow it all at once” line while the diamond case is being appraised) up until Zao checks his Facebook status – turns out someone’s seen the image he uploaded and tagged it with the name “James Bond”.
The jig is up! The Colonel blows up Bond’s stolen helicopter with an anti-tank rifle and Zao restrains him. Suddenly the Colonel’s father, the General (that guy who played the Chinese chief of police in Rush Hour 2) ,calls him to announce that he’s just driving up the road to pop in for a visit and he’d better not see any British agents, illegal weapons deals or conflict diamonds when he gets there. The Colonel shits himself and decides the best course of action is to hop on to the hovercraft full of guns and get his arse out of there. Bond detonates the C4 inside the diamond case, which conveniently kills most of the squad standing not that close to it and only mildly peppers Zao’s face with diamonds. Bond chases after the Colonel in a smaller hovercraft after wrecking the shit out of the base with the hovercraft’s mounted cannon.
A pretty kickass hovercraft chase sequence ensues across a barren minefield as the Colonel shoots at Bond using the anti-tank gun, a machinegun and a flame-thrower. It looks great, all the vehicles hit their cues and explode at the drop of a hat like we expect them to, it looks real because they actually did it, and I appreciate it more knowing how Brosnan smashed his knee up and had to have emergency surgery so he could get back on set as soon as possible. Good stuff!
Bond manages to get on to the larger hovercraft and engages in fisticuffs with the Colonel. The scene is only slightly marred in a brief moment when Bond leaps out of the way of a plume of flame after the Colonel goes for the flame-thrower again, because when we see the wide shot of the craft it looks like his vast leap would have carried him over the side into the mud and the mines.
Bond manages to send the hovercraft hurtling over a cliff with the Colonel stuck to the large fan on the back of it. Bond barely has time to quip (“saved by the bell”, because he grabbed on to a bell after leaping from the craft, get it?) before the Colonel’s daddy turns up and has him incarcerated. Oops.
In a first for the series, the trippy opening credits commingle with the scenes of Bond’s harsh interrogation by the Koreans. I admit that I’d probably only get Madonna’s Die Another Day theme stuck in my head if I was losing my mind, too. The credits finish just in time for a year to have passed, and Bond’s rocking a pretty awesome beard by now. He’s dragged out of his cell and put in front of the General, who’s annoyed that, despite unholy torture, not once has Bond dropped any secrets about MI6. Bond is taken away and thinks he’d up for the firing squad, but instead he’s swapped for Zao in an exchange of prisoners. In a nice bit of political commentary, Bond looks like crap whereas Zao’s wearing a comfortable looking orange jumpsuit and hasn’t a mark on him, implying that imprisonment in the West wasn’t that bad. Subtle, guys!
Bond is greeted back into British custody like anything dragged back from a foreign climate emerging into British territory – he’s stuck with needles and probed to make sure he’s not carrying anything nasty. Awakening in bed under lock and key, M visits him and explains that they think he’s a mole who’s been leaking information while in captivity and that he’s to eat shit for a bit while they work out what to do with him. The part Bond seems to take worst is when she revokes his 00 status. Bond hatches a scheme to get out of his cell, by lying in bed connected to his heart monitor and dying.
Putting himself in cardiac arrest just by trying pays off, as the medics rush to reanimate him. He thanks the doctors who save his life by de-fibrillating them (a move that can actually outright kill a live person). Outside, it turns out he’s on a ship, so like any sane man in pyjamas he hops over the railing and goes for a swim in filthy, freezing water. Lucky his heart wasn’t weakened by the cardiac arrest he just put himself through otherwise this could have been a really stupid move! Oh, right, it probably would have been.
He finds he’s in Hong Kong, so he strolls into his favourite Hong Kong hotel.
Rather than throw his arse out, the desk manager recognises him and offers him his usual suite (how does MI6 not know about any of this?). After a clean up and shave, it looks like Bond is going to have sexytimes with a masseuse when he breaks a mirror and reveals a camera behind it. This is a pretty typical setup for a Shanghai hotel (or so I’m told). He knows the hotel is a front for Chinese intelligence, and strikes a deal to take out Zao. He’s given a gift package and is directed to Cuba, where Zao was last seen in Havana.
In Cuba Bond uses his innate disguise abilities to blend in by pretending to be a blatant tourist, being the only person walking around with a designer haircut, sunglasses and a havana shirt. He calls into a cigar factory and orders some “delectatos” as Universal Exports, which is apparently code for “take me to the man in the expensive white suit upstairs who’s almost certainly Castro in hiding” (god forbid anyone actually goes there to order some obscure cigars). The factory turns out to be a front for a British sleeper cell. Making a few calls Castro finds out the Zao is hiding in a clinic that specialises in “gene therapy”, while Bond picks up the book that Ian Fleming stole his name off of based on the book’s author.
Castro gives him a car and a gun, and Bond checks into a hotel. At the bar he overhears a white South African gent be rude to the catering staff (Bond hates that sort of thing) because this film wasn’t controversial enough with offending the North Koreans that it needed to mock South Africans too. Bond chills at the bar and then catches Halle Berry emerging from the water like that famous bit in Dr. No (the bit Daniel Craig would go on to do in the next film…yes, that was a bit weird). Seeing as she’s the only genuine bit of skirt in the area he begins flirting the minute she comes within talking distance. It’s been over a year since Bond last laid anyone, so this is a bit like watching a recovered alcoholic approach a fully-stocked free bar. Puns are made about “the magnificent view”, “bird watching” and “there’s a mouthful”, the last one being Jinx eyeing Bond’s crotch as she comments on the word “ornithologist”.
They f*ck (not right there in the bar, they go back to Bond’s room first). Bond wakes up the next day to discover he’s been abandoned for a change, rather than being the abandoner for once. Noting Jinx boarding a boat for the genetic therapy centre using his binoculars, Bond grabs a wheelchair and visits the South African’s room. He knocks him out and puts him in the wheelchair (there’s a coloured woman on the guy’s bed because hey, hypocrisy based on apartheid is funny, right?). Luckily, the guy has some tickets to the gene clinic, so Bond poses as the unconscious man’s carer and boards the ship (I like to think he just hates South Africans and the tickets were a coincidence).
The script for the island sequence must have been written by a game designer because everything plays out like a series of video game objectives.
The next sequence tasks Bond with working out why a security camera is pointed at an empty wall. The solution to this is simply to unplug the camera and press the blatant button embedded in the wall disguised as a piece of grafitti. Do this and you’ll get an achievement.
Meanwhile, Jinx is talking to the clinic’s head doctor, who’s played by the guy who was the creepy warden from Beyond Reanimator (obscure geek fact!). He describes some impossible science about scrubbing off bone marrow and creating a “blank slate” of DNA that can then be rewritten using DNA harvested from people who won’t be missed (gene therapy is people!). Jinx passes him a cheque and before he has a chance to enjoy it she puts a bullet into his chest.
Bond finds Zao and he’s not looking so hot, being all albino-like while enduring the gene rewriting process. Bond wants answers but Zao’s not in the mood so they fight. In the melee they manage to set fire to the room with some random chemicals that probably shouldn’t have been in the operating room in the first place, and the fire alarm and sprinkler system kick in as Zao jogs away with Bond in pursuit.
Back in the nearby office, Jinx is wiring up some C4 to a timer because she’s as irresponsible with explosives as Bond is. She passes Bond in the corridor as he goes into the office after Zao. Like any contrived video game sequence, Zao leaps through the office window just before Jinx’s C4 goes off, dislodging a heavy bit of masonry that just happens to be big enough to block the window.
The game’s next objective is to find a way out. Grab the generic pressurised tanks and drag them into the corridor. Player two has to pursue Zao before he gets to the helicopter (make sure to shoot the random goons with AK47s near the helicopter). Player one now needs to press O to hit the tanks and cause them to blow a perfectly round hole in the wall. Player one can now join player two in chasing the helicopter as it gets away, but be aware that Zao is invincible during this sequence. This is the end of the level – give yourself a pat on the back and enjoy the cutscene.
Okay, enough of this video game shit – Jinx basically gets cornered by guards and dives backwards off of the cliff in a scene clearly rendered using CGI. Just look at the image above, and tell me it looks natural! The worst part is that back in the day they’d have thrown some bird off a cliff and filmed it, and it would’ve looked real because they threw some bird off of a cliff. That’s the point behind Bond films, do stupid stunts for real and don’t pussy out with naff computer graphics!
Bond finds diamonds in the empty bullet he stole from around Zao’s neck in the melee. Castro analyses the diamonds and finds that they’re all marked with “GG”, the emblem of Gustav Graves; Graves is an entrepreneur who discovered a diamond mine in Iceland. Wait, the stupid bastard actually left his emblem on diamonds he presumably gave Zao? Smart move, Graves! Castro also notes that the diamonds are chemically identical to African conflict diamonds – how a Cuban agent happens to know that sort of thing is never explained.
In London, Graves parachutes in to Buckingham Palace (to the tune of “London’s Calling”) because he’s going to be knighted. As he lands amongst the paparazzi, he shows off his horrible grin and takes questions. He piles into a Range Rover and they drive off, notably in the opposite direction from Buckingham Palace. Hey, guys, guys! You’re going the wrong way!
Bond tails Graves to a fencing club, where we see – oh, hello Madonna! Glad you could be here to exposit at us about Graves’ publicist Miranda Frost and how she’s an awesome swordsman swordswoman swordsperson. You done yet? Good, thanks, don’t give up the day job. Bond inevitably engages Graves in a wager and the two spar, with Bond losing terribly because you can’t be awesome at everything you try your hand to (except surfing, obviously). On the third round Bond knocks the sword out of Graves’ hand, which instantly pisses him off despite the fact he’s winning. Graves wants to up the wager and the weapons. Rather than whip out their cocks and start slapping each other around the face with them, Graves tears two antique swords off of the wall and ups the game to “first blood drawn from the torso”. What ensues is a pretty cool sword fight through the building, and at no point does a security guard appear to kick them out for tearing around the establishment vandalising the place.
Despite Graves trying to hack Bond into minced beef, Bond manages to slice his chest and win the wager. Graves invites the man who just publicly embarrassed him to attend the launch of his new Icarus project as well as giving him a fat cheque. One of the building’s attendants (where the hell were you when Bond and Graves were slicing up the building?) hands Bond an old iron key and he somehow knows it’s for the door at the end of Westminster bridge opposite Big Ben. Heading there the door leads to a disused London Underground railway station. Having visited this bridge with fellow bloke Will myself I can attest that in real life there’s just a broom closet behind the door. M greets him (apparently Bond got noticed! Who’d have thought?) and says he’s useful again due to stumbling into various leads and making the connection between Graves and conflict diamonds (thanks again for that, Castro!).
There’s a random sequence where terrorists break into MI6 and shoot everybody up, with Bond having to save M from being taken hostage. It plays out just like a sequence from the N64 version of The World is Not Enough video game so it’s no surprise when the whole thing turns out to be a VR simulation when John Cleese (as “R”, Q’s replacement) removes the VR glasses from Bond’s face. Christ, we’re halfway through the film and we’re only now getting a Q scene? This one’s not one of the better ones as it’s trying too hard to reference the older Bond films, so there’s the attache case and Rosa Klebb’s shoe (I don’t want to know why they kept that) from From Russia with Love and the jetpack from Thunderball. Things only get worse when they introduce Bond’s new Aston.
An invisible car! It’s as stupid as it sounds.
Meanwhile, M briefs Miranda Frost that Bond will be joining her in Iceland and doesn’t realise that perhaps the fact she hasn’t turned up anything in three months is perhaps massively suspicious. She also infers to Miranda that she’s not quite MI6 material because she doesn’t shag other agents.
Iceland! Let’s shoot through what happens next as quickly as possible because the film drags its heels for half an hour:
- Bond arrives at Grave’s Iceland hotel, which is literally made of ice. Upon getting out of his car he’s greeted by a man who says “I’m Mr. Kil” and Bond replies “Isn’t that a name to die for?”. It’s as wooden to hear as it is to read.
- Graves arrives in his rocket car (seriously).
- Zao turns up and talks Korean to Graves – it’s now we realise that Graves is actually the Korean General from the beginning, having underwent the gene therapy process. The audience gets really confused for a moment because a) the guys in the pre-credits sequence are never the main villains and b) we could hardly remember the general as he appeared over an hour ago.
- Bond flirts with Miranda and Jinx, really bad innuendos are made (“did he tell you his ‘big bang’ theory”, “I got the thrust of it”).
- Graves unveils his Icarus satellite by lighting up the evening sky, confusing the three Korean gentlemen who don’t seem to know why they’ve been invited and presumably scaring the shit out of all the people living in that part of the globe.
Bond follows the portable Icarus control panel by getting into his invisible car and following the guy carrying it (apparently it’s completely silent and doesn’t make obvious tyre tracks in the snow). He leaves the car to look into one of the windows of the building the control panel was carried into and sees a lush, warm jungle surrounding a hot spring. Oh, did I mention that this sequence was filmed in one of the bio-domes in CORNWALL? He’s literally caught within seconds by a random guard.
He assaults the guard, raising the alarm, and then takes out two others using a conveniently placed steam pipe. Frost grabs him and the two make out against a nearby car, which is apparently enough to fool the three goons who come looking for Bond (the noises they make while chewing each other’s faces off are pretty nauseating, too). Back in Bond’s hotel room, they have sex, despite Miranda saying that none of his charms would work on her five minutes before.
Meanwhile, Jinx is breaking into the bio-dome via the room. She rappels down and finds Zao having a nap on Graves’ “dream machine”, and is taken out by Graves wearing a taser glove. They drag her to the diamond mine and strap her to one of the laser cutting machines, because despite being a fake diamond mine the lasers are real…why?! Do they regularly get inspectors down there? If so, don’t the inspectors notice a) the lack of people operating the mine and b) the lack of diamonds? Who are you trying to fool, Graves? Why bother?! The only tenable explanation is that they wanted to mimic the scene from Goldfinger, so cue Mr. Kil slowly cutting a path towards Jinx’s head using one.
Having had his sex, Bond goes outside and cuts a hole in the ice. He sticks a rebreather in his mouth and jumps in to the below-freezing water without so much as a “goodbye cruel world”.
Emerging from the hot spring, he overhears Jinx in trouble and comes to the rescue. There’s a fight scene between him and Mr. Kil as lasers dance around them. So, those lasers aren’t just pointless, they’re dangerous too! Jinx manages to grab the control panel for the lasers, having one fire through the back of Mr. Kil’s skull and narrowly missing Bond by an inch. Bond frees Jinx and the two cut off Kil’s arm with a laser so they can use his hand to enter the restricted area (shame that a sophisticated bit of kit like that doesn’t check to see if the person attached to the arm has a pulse or not). Bond directs Jinx to go and get Miranda, and then confronts Graves in his office.
Graves reveals that he modelled his new persona on Bond, meaning that there are now three anti-Bonds in this film:
- Jinx, an equally sexually predatory agent that holds a similar role albeit for America.
- Graves, a man self-styled on Bond’s egotism who’s a distorted mirror image of 007.
- Miranda Frost, another British agent resistant to Bond’s style and sex by doing things a more chaste manner (except most of this is a front as she’s actually banging Graves).
Frost appears and SURPRISE! She’s the mole! She holds Bond at gunpoint. Downstairs, Jinx walks straight into Bond’s hotel room without a second thought and is promptly trapped as the doors slam behind her. Bond escapes as Zao, Frost, and a bunch of presumably cross-eyed goons with assault rifles fail to get a competent shot off at him. Graves yells the following in Korean:
I’m fairly certain that’s supposed to be “quickly”. Bond uses Jinx’s dangling rappel line to escape on to the roof (how did she get out then?) and then down the side of the dome. Bond impulsively runs at the first thing he sees, which in this case happens to be Graves’ rocket car; a car that only has two speeds (‘stationary’ and ‘f*ck-off fast’) and cannot make turns. Graves responds by using his SATELLITE LASER OF DEATH that apparently can’t keep up with a car that maxes out at 300mph. This was the point when I was sat in the cinema and I realised that the film had suddenly become “Bond vs. the power of the Sun”. It’s too big, it’s too stupid, it’s too unbelievable. I could just about believe this scenario if it was a Batman film with Christopher Nolan directing.
The satellite chases Bond over a cliff, so Bond fires the harpoons the car uses to break and dangles helplessly over the side of the cliff. Luckily the death ray is sporting enough to sit there waiting for Bond to climb up.
Rather than fry the meddlesome agent to a crisp, Graves uses the death ray to bisect the cliff face. Bond rips the hatch off the back of the car and tugs out the emergency parachute. Using these, he para-sails down the cliff and over the massive tidal wave in a clusterf*ck of terrible CGI and godawful writing that somehow makes the rest of the Bond series so much more believable, even the submarine car, Bond in space and yes, even that bit where he inflates a black man until he f*cking explodes.
Bond lands safely while the audience recovers from what they’ve just seen. The film can only get better from this point on, although having already blown its load it seems to have difficulty topping what we’ve just seen. He steals a snowmobile from some poor sod who’s randomly just driving around (I find it hard to believe he was patrolling so far out so he must have been just having some fun) and heads back to the bio-dome, where Graves is pulling his men out and leaving Zao behind to clear up any loose ends. He remotely controls his invisible car…hang on, how the hell does he do that if he can’t even see the bloody thing? Let’s get a few things clear about the invisible car:
- I don’t know about you, but I have a hard enough time trying to remember where I’ve parked my car when I can see it – having an invisible car just means you’re definitely not going to remember where you left it.
- The thing was given to him for a mission in Iceland, a place where it snows a lot (according to this film anyway, I always thought Iceland was the green one and Greenland was the wintry one). Apart from snow sticking to the invisible tyres, there would be a layer of clearly visible snow on the car following a snowfall.
- Being invisible, what’s to stop some poor bastard from driving right into-
The alarm raised, Zao leaps into his conveniently parked Jaguar and takes off in pursuit of Bond, who’s Aston is powerless against Zao’s thermal imaging camera. The Aston conveniently loses the invisibility for this sequence as a loading bar pops up on Bond’s dashboard to tell him when he can use it again (wayhey, another video game convention misappropriated for this film!).
I think the “cars on ice” sequence is really good, and I don’t have much to say about it because it’s awesome, and made to look even better having just had the CGI atrocity forced into our faces minutes before. It’s a lot more impressive to see cars skidding around on ice with pyrotechnics that are real than it is to see a horrible fake mess of CGI for some impossible situation, which is what the Bond franchise is all about. Knowing that the film crew had numerous stunt cars to film the sequence because many kept cracking the ice, and the fact that it was still a dangerous scene to film despite special measures being taken just makes me appreciate it more. Two classic British cars pimped to the nines with gadgets going at each other is one area where Die Another Day got it right (the return of the ejector seat from Goldfinger was genuinely a nice touch, too).
It’s still pretty good when the cars head inside the hotel (at this point Graves has pointed his doom laser at it causing it to melt, so Jinx is slowly drowning in Bond’s room), and the sequence is only ruined when it finishes by the invisible car telling Bond he can use it again, so he reverses backwards when Zao drives at him and the Jaguar flies through a balcony into a pool of water. Before Zao can swim out Bond unceremoniously drops a large, sharp chandelier of icicles on his head by drive-by shooting them.
Jinx has been dead for about five minutes now, so when Bond pulls her out of the hotel and carries her to a hot spring we’re not expecting (or caring) much. She survives, because brain death only sets in when there’s actually a brain there.
MI6 and the NSA decide to team up because it turns out that, having built a massive death ray he could point potentially anywhere and threaten anyone with, Graves intends to use it to clear out those minefields we saw at the beginning of the film. This seems a little bit overkill for the task and it appears that Graves’ aspirations are rather limited in scope to allowing North Korea to march into the South. Following a failed missile launch against the satellite (perhaps firing the missile directly at the death ray wasn’t the best idea?) Bond and Jinx fly into Korea on tiny gliders.
Having presumably scouted the area for hours, Bond completely flubs their first clear sniper opportunity on Graves by not shooting through Miranda Frost. The two agents then have to furiously cut through the wire fence between them and the airport as Graves’ plane takes off – you’d have thought they’d have done this sooner rather than presume that Bond would make a competent sniper. They manage to catch up to the plane on foot and climb on to the wheels, without a single Korean sentry noticing them on this undoubtedly heavily fortified base.
On the plane Graves is decked out in full Korean officer’s uniform and has had the Icarus control system assembled into a suit of armour for no obvious reason than “it’s more ergonomic than a suitcase”. He meets with his father for the first time since he became Graves, and his father quickly realises that his son is crazier than a bag of rottweilers and points a gun at him.
Meanwhile, Bond and Jinx take control of the plane. They clear out some guards and Jinx takes over piloting while Bond goes to confront Graves (again, for about the third time now). Graves stuns his father using his taser glove and then shoots him during one last hug. Fortunately, Graves’ plans are ruined when one Korean soldier, seeing Bond about to blast Graves, spazzes out at the agent causing Bond to shoot one of the windows. The cabin de-pressurises like hell and half the crew are sucked out of the windows as the plane begins to nosedive.
The only four people left on the plane after Jinx pulls it out of a nosedive are conveniently Miranda Frost, Graves, Bond and Jinx (there was one pilot guy who left before Jinx took over the cockpit and never came back, so presumably he went to take a dump and decided not to come out in such a mess following the plane tilting at 45 degrees). Frost in particular comes for Jinx, holding her at sword-point and demanding she put the plane in automatic, despite it clearly heading towards the massive death ray in front of them. Miranda’s only wearing a bra and underwear so was presumably getting changed when the plane turned sideways (or she was lying around waiting for Graves). All the while Bond and Graves are grappling with each other, and you can see Graves is already regretting having the button that controls the taser glove placed on the chest of his armour.
The plane flies straight into the beam, catching Miranda off-guard (dozy cow!). Sword-fighting ensues between her and Jinx in the plane’s dojo (all Korean planes have those, you know) while Bond continues fisticuffs with Graves. It’s difficult to enjoy these scenes because the camera is trying to make it look like they’re are on a plane that’s going to crash, so the cameraman keeps shaking it like he’s having a fit. Jinx offs Miranda by stabbing a knife with a copy of the Art of War stuck on it into her chest.
Bond’s not having so much luck, taking a couple of hundred volts to the nervous system via Graves’ taser glove. Graves mocks him while throwing out one of the two reserve parachutes (thus far he hasn’t even shown concern over where Zao is or what Miranda’s doing, what a bastard!) and clipping on the other one. He stupidly leans over to mock Bond some more, giving 007 ample time to pull the cord on his parachute. Graves is sucked out of the window and as he clings on to the side, Bond presses his chest button. 100,000 volts course through the metal Graves is holding on to back up the arms of the suit (I’d call that a major design flaw!) and he lets go. He’s sucked directly into one of the jet engines.
The villains defeated, there’s just the small matter of escaping the plummeting plane. The film now copies the sequence of escaping the plane from The Living Daylights in its entirety, except this time using a helicopter that was in the back of the plane instead of a car. There’s a brief shot of some supercars that fell from the plane sticking upright in the Koren farmland, so it was totally setting up all those supercars lined up in the beginning after all.
Back in England, Bond comes to make out with Moneypenny in her office and R interrupts because, hilariously, she’s wearing the VR goggles! Ha! That’s brilliant. It doesn’t make a damn lick of sense as to why the virtual program would be both a shooting range and a sex simulator but hilarious all the same, I’m sure. Just what the hell have you been up to in your spare time, R?
In some unspecified location we hear Jinx asking Bond to “keep it in” because “it’s the perfect fit”. It turns out that she means a diamond in her bellybutton, as the helicopter had a load of diamonds stashed inside it and they’re now lying in a pile of them (and I thought crumbs were bad!). Wait a second, aren’t these African conflict diamonds, items that have caused death and bloodshed and suffering?
And thus the film ends with Bond and Jinx having sex in a pile of human misery. Fade to black, a dance remix of Madonna plays over the credits.
So how is the film overall?
It’s a shame, there are some brilliant moments in Die Another Day, but they are overshadowed by truly terrible dialogue, horrible (and on one occasion insulting unreal) CGI sequences and smug, self-satisfied writing. Bleurgh. Go watch Goldeneye, instead. It’s a similar plot but a better film.
Also, they spent most of the budget on CGI which is why they had to film in Cornwall a lot, I guess.
Wait a second, you said Graves was the smuggest man in the world! Prove it!
I’ll also go one better – here’s a choice frame I found completely by accident when pausing the film…
Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | August 27, 2012 at 11:09 pm | Films, James Bond, Three Blokes and a Chick Watch | No comment
Tags: 007, bad film, Die Another Day, James Bond, movie recap, movie review, Pierce Brosnan