Diamonds, DNA or doomsday? Writers, please make up your minds. This story feels like the nervous (or lazy) agglomeration of too many ideas, too many opinions, and not nearly enough good sense. Had the very surprising anti-British/American angle taken up in the opening scene been retained, this could have been a vastly more entertaining night out. But it's a Bond film, after all, so provocative subtext is quickly swept aside to make way for hot chicks, cool gadgets, and a one-dimensional megalomaniac villain with surprise, surprise some freakish henchmen and a doomsday device up his sleeve (this time, quite literally). But while it hits all the traditional Bond notes, it somehow just doesn't play. Halle Berry is wasted, as are Rick Yune and relative newcomer Rosamund Pike ("Grace Kelly bio-pic, here I come.") Brosnan goes through the motions capably enough (copious chest-hair notwithstanding), but Toby Stephens is simply laughable as the villainous Gustav Graves. It doesn't help that he plays him uncannily like Rik Mayall's Lord Flasheart from "Blackadder". Even the trademark, innuendo-laced dialogue is surprisingly flaccid ironically, it now sounds like an "Austin Powers" script, but without the nerve go all the way. The digital effects are far too obvious (only the climactic sequence really impresses), but it's the "stunts" they're used to create that really annoy Bond's escape from the iceberg goes too far, even for this franchise of cinematic impossibility. As in the "Star Wars" prequels, it isn't so much the quality of the effects which grates it's the low quality of the writing they're trying to represent. With so many Bond parodies and knock-offs crowding the market these days from the deliberately funny ("Austin Powers") to the unintentionally hilarious ("xXx") the original franchise is going to have to do much more than just trade on its name. It can't be that hard. Just start with a decent script.
Review of Die Another Day
