The 007 Files: Part 10

1999-2002: James Bond Go Boom

As the Bond series went on, the women became a bit more competent with each decade. This is likely by necessity, for if every Bond woman was modeled after The Man With the Golden Gun’s ditzy Mary Goodnight the feminists of the world might have (rightly) torn the series to shreds. Since that low point in 1974, Bond’s women have been increasingly intelligent, at times more so than our hero himself.

However, these women come with varying degrees of believability. For every hit (Barbara Bach in The Spy Who Loved Me) there’s a drastic miss. Bond’s main squeeze in 1999’s The World is Not Enough is the latter. Her name is Christmas Jones, and she’s a nuclear physicist played by Denise Richards. I don’t hate Ms. Richards, but of all the roles she was born to play, a brainy nuclear physicist isn’t one of them. It might have worked if anyone made any effort to make her look like one, but when we first meet her she looks as if she just came from Hooters.

Fortunately, the miscast Richards is one of the few complaints I have about The World is Not Enough; a film which holds up far better than I anticipated. It’s nothing spectacular, but it’s an exciting action film with a great deal of memorable characters. The villain Renard, played by Robert Carlyle, is the most chilling and effective nemesis of the Brosnan era. Almost as good is Sophie Marceau as Elektra King, a sociopathic victim of Stockholm’s Syndrome. These supporting characters help save the rest of the film from overwhelming blandness.

Even through the worst moments in the Brosnan era, what gets lost is just how good Brosnan was at playing Bond his way. Of all the Bonds, Brosnan’s was the most efficient. When I say that, I do not mean he is the best. He isn’t. However, his Bond was all killer, no filler. The Brosnan films are rarely about Bond himself. He goes out into the field, gets the job done, and comes back to dear old England to fight another day. The World is Not Enough recognizes this, and as such it uses Brosnan better than any of his other entries in the series. He may meet a character or two that he knew from his past, but he rarely makes his fights overtly personal.

This quality is neither a bad nor good thing, per se. Some of my favorite Bond films (From Russia With Love, Licence to Kill, next week’s Casino Royale) are almost entirely about the Bond character himself. Meanwhile, there are just as many great ones that concern themselves with the world around Bond rather than the man. The Roger Moore era heavily trafficked in the latter, and the same can be said about the Brosnan era. Bond is a calm, stable epicenter for the films to revolve around. Trouble only comes when 1) there’s nothing all that exciting happening around him or 2) the filmmakers do all they can to disconnect the audience from the action onscreen.

The twentieth Bond film, Die Another Day, would prove to be Pierce Brosnan’s last film in the series. It would also prove to be one of the worst. Here’s a video clip of Die Another Day, and we’ll discuss it on the other side.

Now, answer honestly. Was any part of that truly exciting to you? Yes, there were parts that looked cool, but nifty aesthetics do not an exciting action scene make. This sequence is representative of everything that is wrong with Die Another Day. Every scene is made merely to look cool as they pile on various stunts, explosions and surprisingly weak CGI effects, and as a result the experience as a whole is far too empty.

Die Another Day is all the more disappointing because it begins on a relatively promising note. Our hero flies into Korea’s demilitarized zone and proceeds to make things explode real good, but not long after he is captured by a North Korean general and tortured for 14 months straight or so. Think of the potential here! The most invincible secret agent in film history captured and tortured for over year! The impact this will have on Bond going forward could be devastating!

Well, in the universe of Die Another Day, not so much. After a prisoner exchange which grants Bond his freedom once more, he sets off to dry land, shaves and starts eating his usual high-class food. The beast is once again back in his natural environment. After the opening sequence, the months and months of pain and abuse Bond must have experienced is wholly ignored in favor of explosions, slow motion and people trying to look as cool as possible. All attempts at verisimilitude are abandoned about halfway through the film, which is when the film leaves Earth and takes place in some fantasy land the Bond films have never entered before.

In Die Another Day, Bond is no longer a secret agent but instead some sort of Superman with science-fiction gadgets rather than mere fiction ones. The gadgets he’s used over the years have all been ridiculous, but this filmed introduced the world to an invisible freaking car. No matter how insane the gadgets have been in the past, they’ve always seemed feasible in the Bond universe. The car here is the first Bond tool that makes you wonder whether or not they’re just making stuff up.

The villains are also rather ineffective. The big bad, Gustav Graves, is played by Toby Stephens in a very strange, fake way. Looking at IMDb, I see that he played the titular role in a 2000 version of The Great Gatsby, which sounds about right. Imagine Jay Gatsby as a Bond villain and that’s about what you get. He’s far too “look at me! I’m fancy and British!” too pull off a sinister enough nemesis.

The best thing about Die Another Day is the introduction of a new Q played by John Cleese. Since Goldfinger, Q was played by Desmond Llewellyn, but he passed away in 1999 after completing his role in The World is Not Enough. Cleese had a small part in that film as well, but in Die Another Day he flies solo and shows some fun chemistry with Brosnan in what becomes the film’s most enjoyable scene. Over the course of the series the stereotypical Q scene had been done to death, but Cleese’s first and only shot at it proves wonderful. After several references to past Bond films (and even a brief wink to Monty Python and the Holy Grail), the lone problem with this scene is that it’s the only one Cleese and Brosnan would ever do together. I don’t know if the possibility exists of Cleese coming back and working with Daniel Craig, but that is a notion I would wholeheartedly support.

Like Moonraker before it, Die Another Day is doomed by its absolute commitment to being as huge and ridiculous as it possibly can. The main difference is that Die Another Day is not nearly the fascinating, watchable train wreck that Moonraker is. It feels simultaneously ridiculous and tired, as if everyone involved simply ran out of ideas and started to reach into unnecessary territory. Even ex-James Bond Roger Moore voiced his disapproval of the film, once again proving that he is better than you:

"I thought it just went too far — and that’s from me, the first Bond in space! Invisible cars and dodgy CGI footage? Please!"

Amen, Roger. That CGI footage was indeed “dodgy.” Even producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson admitted this, and going forward they decided to leave the fantasy world of Die Another Day behind. Not only would they choose to take the series in a more realistic, Fleming-inspired direction. They would scrap everything that had come before and restart the entire series from scratch. If you’re going to take the 007 character back to its roots, there’s only one way to go: Casino Royale.

Next Week: The final entry in “The 007 Files” looks at Daniel Craig’s first two films of the series.