DIRECTOR: Lee Tamahori
CAST: Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, Toby Stephens
With Daniel Craig finally hanging up his martini glass in his final Bond adventure NO TIME TO DIE, Awfully Good Movies is looking back at the far less critically praised final film of Craig’s predecessor in the role, Pierce Brosnan, which forced the Bond franchise to reboot from the very beginning: DIE ANOTHER DAY.
Although Brosnan continued raking in the box office bucks with his first three entries, it was his fourth go-around as Bond that had some mighty big expectations, being the 20th Bond adventure that would come out 40 years after Sean Connery first donned the tuxedo in DR. NO, with Bond’s new competitors in the spy movie game Matt Damon and Vin Diesel battling him for audiences’ affections. And for his big four-oh, Double-Oh-Seven would be facing his most challenging mission yet: being imprisoned in a North Korean prison camp for over a year after getting sold out by a mole within MI6, and then M revoking his license to kill after she busts Bond out. But though its first 25 minutes promise the best Bond to date–aside from Madonna’s techno-drone theme song–the rest of the movie cranks up the silliness dial somewhere between OCTOPUSSY and the 60s version of CASINO ROYALE, with Bond hunting down a billionaire diamond merchant who’s secretly an evil colonel that Bond seemingly killed in North Korea, now with a more whitewashed face and a killer solar ray from space.
And if that racist plot twist wasn’t enough, we’ve got plenty of invisible cars, “yo momma” jokes and laughable CGI surfing to push the already thin boundaries of plausibility, along with a pushing-50 Pierce Brosnan lacking most of the energy he first brought to this role just seven years ago. On the plus side, though, Halle Berry is here to perk things up in a sexy orange bikini as one of the franchise’s most memorable Bond girls, and Rosamund Pike drawing a sword in her debut role isn’t too shabby either. So perhaps there is NO TIME TO DIE that’s better than ANOTHER DAY…see what I did with the…titles there–look, just watch the video.
The name’s Movies… Awfully Good Movies, and just like Christmas Jones, we come more than once a year:
Follow the JOBLO MOVIE NETWORK
Follow us on YOUTUBE
Follow ARROW IN THE HEAD
Follow AITH on YOUTUBE