Wednesday

What is it that was wrong with Die Another Day? Watching it again on Tuesday, I tried to decipher how it had killed off both Pierce Brosnan and that particular type of Bond. I knew it was a bad film, but I had always thought Brosnan was a good Bond, and could recover to make a better movie. However, that was not to be. It seems the problem wasn't with Brosnan, but with the type of Bond he was playing. The film came out in November 2002, and guess what came out in September 2002? The Bourne Identity. Brosnan's philandering, cheeky, invincible English gentleman seems almost ridiculous in comparison. That character was good for Roger Moore in the 70s and 80s, but not for us now. The problem, I think, was that they were trying to make Bond more serious - he gets captured and tortured at the beginning, he does care about some people - whilst still having the meaningless philandering. It doesn't work. They needed a new actor and a new approach. What also didn't help is that Halle Berry acted terribly, and the dialogue was absolutely awful. Roger Moore's puns were always quite crude, but in Die Another Day they seem overly explicit, and not very subtle. The villain is also not very well defined, and we still have the very cartoon like 'evil fortress guarded by henchman in black with guns'. These things can't be taken seriously anymore. Die Another Day was out of sync with itself, and the time it was made in.