Okay so now we're at the fourth and last of Brosnan's Bond film and the 20th Bond film in general. This is my review for Die Another Day.
Plot: The film begins with Bond going undercover in a North Korean military base where a rouge Colonel named Tan-Sun Moon is illegally trading African conflict diamonds for weaponry. Bond's cover is blown and so they fight each other resulting in Moon's apparent death leading his father, General Moon to imprison Bond. Bond is released 14 months later for a prison exchange but is suspended from his 00 status due to M believing that he leaked information during his imprisonment. So Bond escapes from MI6 security and goes off to clear his name and find the real traitor.
This is kind of another Bond film that I think is a decent flick, but I definitely get why some people disliked it. What most people say about it is that this one had way too many CGI and explosions and gadgets and that really hurt the plot. I completely agree with that, but that doesn't mean I doesn't mean I thought it was all that bad. Part of why I say this kind of has to do with how I feel so far about the Bond film in general so far. And that is I'm surprised the amount of gadgets in this film was practically in every single film of James Bond. I guess from seeing the last third of this movie once on TV years ago and from what I got out of all the parodies and knock-offs from the James Bond franchise, I did start this marathon believing that there was going to be an awful lot of gadgets from the very start, because all that other stuff lead me to believe that, that is supposedly a total must have in a Bond film. That's actually a small part of why From Russia With Love is one of my favorite Bond films so far; because we actually got into Q and his gadgets unlike Dr. No. Now I've gotten over how there's a lack of gadgets considering how they make up for it with still having good action and also focusing a little more on the story or stuff like that, which is where Bond films like From Her Majesty's Secret Service are really good. But in the case of Die Another Day, I can honestly say that I liked that they had a lot of gadgets and that most of them were really good to begin with. But everything else that they had too much of, I can agree with. There was a lot of CGI and in some cases a lot of explosions. And when I think more about the plot and the characters, a really big chuck of all that stuff was rather underdone. Like Halle Berry's character, Jinx; how people felt about her acting is a whole other argument since I'm not very familiar about her outside of this film and the X-Men movies, but I did find her character to be really underdeveloped. This was particularly sad because from what little I saw years ago, I was lead to believe there was a really good amount of development and maybe even complexity to her character. But as it turns out as one guy puts it (I don't remember who it was or where online), there seemed to be more development in Miranda Frost then Jinx even though she's the female star. As for the plot, while it did start of strong with Bond getting imprisoned and once again kind of going rouge against MI6 is a rare/different take from a Bond film which is always a good thing, it sadly did start to get a little confusing and leaving me not completely sure what was happening. But despite this, we do get more great action to go with the gadgets and I particularly enjoyed the third act for the most part despite it really not turning out as I remembered. Plus this is when we start to have John Cleese officially be the new Q. I completely forgot to mentioned that he started popping up as R in my The World Is Not Enough review in amidst of the whole Denise Richards thing. I am sorry about that everyone.
And that's my review for Die Another Day. It does focus too much on explosions and CGI to the point of leaving some characters like Jinx underdeveloped, but it still is enjoyable at least to be with its action and lots of particularly cool gadgets make it a decent film for otherwise just mindless entertainment while thinking of how it could've been a lot better.
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