For serious and gritty, see Casino Royale and the Dalton years. What I am going to ask you to imagine is that it’s more responsible for the glowering mega-franchise Daniel Craig leaves behind than we like to remember.īond films come in one of three broad categories: serious and gritty high camp and ill-advised genre mash-up. So no, I’m not going to ask you to imagine that Die Another Day is amazing. Then, finally, Moneypenny uses John Cleese’s VR machine to, er. Why does MI6 have a poster for a brand new Philips razor in their disused Underground station anyway? Are they that desperate to get Q to sort his moustache out? And that he’s actually a North Korean colonel. You can poke holes in most Bond films, but Die Another Day asks you to imagine that Toby Stephens’ villain Gustav Graves arrived out of absolutely nowhere, became a Richard Branson-style playboy tycoon and installed himself in the British establishment so successfully he got himself a knighthood, all in the space of 12 months. It is not a good movie in so, so many ways. Usually, a Bond anniversary is a time to make a case for why a film is the best, or at least to gorge on some fuzzy nostalgia.īut I’m afraid Die Another Day is not a good movie. It’s now 20 years since Pierce Brosnan fiddled about with Halle Berry’s tummy button while rolling around in a pile of diamonds at the end of Die Another Day.
