Fortunately, I won free tickets for a sneak preview of Die Another Day, and didn't have to pay any money to waste 2 hours of my life.
It was awful - the worst movie I've seen all year. The opening credits sequence is the worst I've ever seen - largely because the Madonna song is not only awful, but also the most incongruous Bond song ever, and they play the entire thing while this silly thermal imaging (or somesuch FX) music video about Bond being tortured plays in the background. The movie's plot doesn't even make an effort to be marginally plausible or original - and that's even within the unrealistic, paint-by-numbers world of Bond films.
Brosnan seems to just be going through the motions at this point. He delivers his lines in a serious tone, but without conviction. You can tell he's getting tired of saying the obligatory "Bond, James Bond" over and over again.
The fight scenes are as unrealistic as they've been since Goldeneye. I realize that Bond movies aren't intended to be hyper-realistic, but reality can only be toyed with so much before it seems pointless to even bother with pretending to follow the laws of physics. Something blows up every few seconds (probably to distract the audience from the fact that the fight makes no sense and the outcome doesn't matter) and apparently dozens of people with automatic weapons are GUARANTEED TO MISS if their target is running or otherwise moving. The bad guy naturally has a sports car sitting around with as many gadgets and weapons as Bond's car - including a pintle-mounted gatling gun that fires just inches over his head, but somehow manages not to burn or deafen him. And of course Bond is as good at fencing (!?!) and other forms of sword-fighting as a professional fencing champion.
The dialogue is awful and sorely lacking in cleverness. The puns are cheap, contrived, and sadly predictable. And the blunt attempts at double entendres are clearly designed to be so blatantly obvious that even your average West Virginian would realize that they have a sexual subtext. Actually, it's the real dialogue that becomes the subtext - some of the exchanges would make no sense if taken at face value, which undermines the whole point of double entendre humor.
The Bond girls try so hard to be sexual that it's embarassing. Halle Berry is a sexy actress, but the movie hits you over the head with her sexuality so much (her slow-mo emergence from the waves in a bikini is laughably unsubtle) that she actually seems less attractive by the end of the film. You know it's gone over the top when, in the final fight, one girl (for no apparent reason) shows up in a one-strap sports bra-type thing, and the other one starts stripping *while* she's fighting.
It was a painful self-parody of a self-parodying movie series. 2/10.
It was awful - the worst movie I've seen all year. The opening credits sequence is the worst I've ever seen - largely because the Madonna song is not only awful, but also the most incongruous Bond song ever, and they play the entire thing while this silly thermal imaging (or somesuch FX) music video about Bond being tortured plays in the background. The movie's plot doesn't even make an effort to be marginally plausible or original - and that's even within the unrealistic, paint-by-numbers world of Bond films.
Brosnan seems to just be going through the motions at this point. He delivers his lines in a serious tone, but without conviction. You can tell he's getting tired of saying the obligatory "Bond, James Bond" over and over again.
The fight scenes are as unrealistic as they've been since Goldeneye. I realize that Bond movies aren't intended to be hyper-realistic, but reality can only be toyed with so much before it seems pointless to even bother with pretending to follow the laws of physics. Something blows up every few seconds (probably to distract the audience from the fact that the fight makes no sense and the outcome doesn't matter) and apparently dozens of people with automatic weapons are GUARANTEED TO MISS if their target is running or otherwise moving. The bad guy naturally has a sports car sitting around with as many gadgets and weapons as Bond's car - including a pintle-mounted gatling gun that fires just inches over his head, but somehow manages not to burn or deafen him. And of course Bond is as good at fencing (!?!) and other forms of sword-fighting as a professional fencing champion.
The dialogue is awful and sorely lacking in cleverness. The puns are cheap, contrived, and sadly predictable. And the blunt attempts at double entendres are clearly designed to be so blatantly obvious that even your average West Virginian would realize that they have a sexual subtext. Actually, it's the real dialogue that becomes the subtext - some of the exchanges would make no sense if taken at face value, which undermines the whole point of double entendre humor.
The Bond girls try so hard to be sexual that it's embarassing. Halle Berry is a sexy actress, but the movie hits you over the head with her sexuality so much (her slow-mo emergence from the waves in a bikini is laughably unsubtle) that she actually seems less attractive by the end of the film. You know it's gone over the top when, in the final fight, one girl (for no apparent reason) shows up in a one-strap sports bra-type thing, and the other one starts stripping *while* she's fighting.
It was a painful self-parody of a self-parodying movie series. 2/10.