Die Another Day - A slightly ironic title...

...considering this was the Bond film which partly forced Bond to ‘reboot.’

For what it’s worth, I liked ‘Die Another Day.’ Okay, so it may never be up there with the best of the Bond movies, but it certainly doesn’t deserve to be down there with the worst.  I’ll go as far as to say that it is a little effects-laden and the Madonna cameo just really shouldn’t be in there, but it’s still good fun (and isn’t that what a Bond film should be?).

This time Bond is captured by the North Koreans for a good year and a half near the beginning of the film (don’t think that should be too much of a spoiler – as it’s basically covered in the typically-weird opening credits montage) and tortured.  When MI6 finally get him out, it’s because he’s being exchanged for a North Korean war criminal – in fact the very same war criminal he went to North Korea to assassinate.

Anyway, MI6 don’t really see much use for poor ol’ Bondy and consign him to the scrap heap.  Only Bond has other ideas and kind of ‘goes rogue.’ Well, slightly rogue.  Not quite as ‘rogue’ as Licensed to Kill’ but still rogue enough to be not on MI6’s payroll.  And those dastardly North Koreans better watch out and not try starting a war with the rest of the world.

As I said, I quite liked it.  It’s topical (what with the North Koreans regularly scaring the world with their sabre-rattling) and rolls along reasonably well.  Maybe I’m just nostalgic as I liked the old ‘happy-go-lucky’ Bond films (before the darker and more gritty Daniel Craig era) and this was the last of its kind.  A lot of people hated it because of its awful use of ‘green screen’ special effects.  Okay, you may expect to be able to tell the hero is up against a green screen in your average B-movie, but this is a high-budget Bond film – it really is pretty awful.  And then you have the invisible car.  Over the decades Bond has had more than his fair share of cool gadgets to get him out of trouble.  It seemed that a car that completely disappears at will was suspending the disbelief a  little too much.

Overall, Die Another Day will never be a classic.  There is a fair amount wrong with it.  Halle Berry, although being a great actress, kind of suffered from the ‘Bond girl curse’ and didn’t really live up to expectations (there was even talk of a spin-off film series based on her character – never going to happen now).  Don’t expect too much from this, but if you’re still okay with the lighter side of Bond (even though this one does try to ‘go dark’ - or as dark as anything pre-Craig ever will) and fancy a load of dodgy special effects and Pierce Brosnan’s smirk then there are worse films out there (there are also better Bond films out there, but you probably already know that).

And I still like John Cleese better as ‘Q’ than the kid they currently have.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that