Die Another Day
, the latest Bond flick, is so bad that I'm not even going to link to it.
No spoilers here, by the way.
First of all, the villains held great promise but like most of the movie, were just blah. Rick Yune plays one of the most visually distinctive Bond villains I can remember--Zao has diamonds embedded in the right half of his face.
Halle Berry as Jinx was dull. Apparently, MGM is going to create a spin-off flick with her starring in the lead role. This is a bad idea because 1) her character was terribly uncompelling in any sense, and 2) Bond girls have traditionally played second fiddle to 007 and should stay at that. Call me Hootie Johnson if you will, but I like seeing Bond girls stay as Bond girls. The fact that Halle's a hot commodity right now has convinced some brain-dead Hollywood producer that putting her in a spinoff would be a fantastic idea. Here's a newsflash: nobody gives a shit about Bond girls outside the context of a Bond movie. Sorry to say it, but they are ornaments; you may argue differently but i will show you a list of 20 Bond girls that say otherwise.
But back to the movie: boring, loud, pretty, dull. Lee Tamahori, a Kiwi, directed it and he's done some great work--Once Were Warriors comes to mind--but Die Another Day lacked the cleverness that has been a Bond signature since Day One. There was absolutely no subtlety between Berry and Brosnan (although there was more chemistry between them than between Denise Richards and Brosnan in the last film), and this detracted from the dry, witty type of film that made the franchise great. This was an action movie, not a spy movie, and it was a Hollywood action movie to boot--explosions and CGI abound, but nothing really distinguished Die Another Die from the rest of the crappy action movies that are released every year.
It gets a serious Boo-urns from me.
BTW, Rotten Tomatoes didn't like it either. It's an interesting site--it collects positive and negative reviews from both print and web media, and aggregate the reviews into Fresh (good) or Rotten (bad) score. Neat idea.
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