Friday, August 03, 2012

Before you can be re-Bourne: Die Another Day & The Bourne Identity

Diminished expectations can be wonderful things. As I started watching Die Another Day, there were a lot of things I knew about it. It was going to be terrible. It had an invisible car. It had James Bond wakeboarding on an iceberg. It had Madonna in it, a truly terrible bit of stunt-casting. It was the last gasp of an already irrelevant franchise, lurching to its death before the Daniel Craig reboot.

Once again, I was surprised. The opening sequence is pretty good. There's that calamity of the series, the lamentably bad back-projection/green screening/godawful something or other while Bond is fighting on the hovercraft, but there was decent humour for a change (as long as you like people being used as literal punchbags) and the initial battle in the DMZ after Bond has been discovered feels like the weapons-of-mass-destruction bring-and-buy saale from Tomorrow Never Dies, but done properly.

And then Madonna ruins it all when she starts 'singing' on what I think was the most dreadful Bond theme ever committed. (Then again, I like Chris Cornell's 2006 effort for Casino Royale, so perhaps I'm not to be trusted.) The titles are good, a decent way to show Bond's suffering to the audience without actually making us watch three months of scorpions and waterboarding, and then we're into the film proper.

Die Another Day is a film that wears its insecurities on its sleeve. From the moment M arrives and declares Bond is "no use to anyone now", to the way almost every scene or plot twist appears to hark back to a golden age of previous Bonds, to the Aladdin's cave of Bond ephemera in Vauxhall Cross station, everything shows a film worried that the franchise is irrelevant in the modern world.

That scene with John Cleese is breathtaking. When I watched it now, a veteran of all these Bond films, I was entranced in a way I wasn't on my first viewing. It's not just a bunch of old junk; it's the crocodile submarine from Octopussy, it's the horsebox microplane, it's Rosa Kleb's shoes, for God's sake. I don't think Bond has fanboys in the way that Star Trek or Star Wars does; it has Alan Partridge types who can recite the opening titles of The Spy Who Loved Me. And they deserved this scene, even if it was just clearing things out and stuffing all the old junk in a hole to make way for Bond 6.0.

But it's not just the gadgets that are recycled. There's more than a whiff of Goldeneye's dam jump when Jinx leaps off a cliff. Colonel Moon tells Bond before the opening credits that "you British still believe you have the right to police the world" and you can hear an echo of Dr No from 40 years before, fulminating about Sean Connery being just a policeman. There's Bond inventing yet another 'extreme sport'; after snowboarding and wakeboarding, he came up with 'kite-surfing on the most fake CGI wave the world has ever seen'. The diamond powered weapon is Blofeld's heat ray from Diamonds Are Forever. Jinx's grand entrance harks back to Ursula Andress. And in as dramatic an example of recycling as the franchise can bear, they even took the twist from the previous film and made one of the damsels-in-distress eeeeevil.

Judged with this perspective, it's actually quite an audacious film; Bond hasn't been this post-modern since Lazenby remarked that "this never happened to the other guy". And I was surprised, surprised that after the stale guff of the first three Brosnans, I really enjoyed this one.

Sure, the overreliance on CGI (and bad CGI at that - where's George Lucas to remaster a film when it actually needs it?) is grating. The invisible car is inexcusable - clearly it wandered in from Harry Potter's garage (a series which began in 2002 - how long can a decade be?) and it is par for the course that Orientals are evil (this time Koreans, who apparently secretly want to be white, as the plot device from Thunderball is upscaled to 2002-era HD gene therapy).

But it's not bad. Despite these flaws, it's quite good. I waited for Madonna to arrive, watching through my fingers, knowing that would be the point it all turned to shit. Like Star Wars' headbanging stormtrooper, who, once you notice him, divides the film into two parts: The Bit Before The Stormtrooper Bangs His Head and The Bit After The Stormtrooper Bangs His Head. But Die Another Day isn't easily divisible into The Bit Before It All Goes Shit and The Bit After Madonna Appears.

She might have ruined the titles, but they keep her gob pretty much shut in the film, there's a terrific, joyful destruction of the fencing club (nothing's been as much fun since Bond fought an incompetent ninja in Moonraker's Venice glass museum) and ok, there might be rehashes of the Thunderball breathing apparatus, the Goldfinger laser and Reynard's bullet-in-the-brain (this time round it's Graves' insomnia) but it's mostly all good fun.

Like Graves says, "it's not a secret, it's a surprise" - the surprise is that all the eco-friendliness of the plot and gadgets actually adds up to something quite fun. It knows how silly it is, but Die Another Day also knows how to enjoy itself.

Shame they couldn't recycle a decent theme tune. (Maybe deep down they know all environmentalists are evil, whether they work for Quantum, or The Spy Who Loved Me, or any of the other buggers...)

2002 was also the year of the final Austin Powers movie, which was about as much fun as the explosive decompression from the climax of Die Another Goldfinger. I thought about watching that, but realised one Austin Powers movie should be enough for anyone. 2002 was a great year for film (as good as 1985) and it was natural that I'd end up watching The Bourne Identity to compare and contrast.

Just like Madonna divides Die Another Day up in two parts (or doesn't) so The Bourne Identity is made from The Bit Before Clive Owen Gets Shot and The Other Bit. And strangely, just like we all knew Die Another Day was terrible, there's certain things we all 'knew' about the Bourne films.

The fight scenes were unwatchable, being nothing but over-fast cuts. Not so; the best fight (in Bourne's Parisian flat) is well choreographed and easy to follow.

Bourne is convincing when Brosnan is not. Well, Bourne looks 12 years old. Maybe Brosnan's not so bad after all.

The car chase in The Bourne Identity is brilliant. It's better than anything Bond had done up to this point, but it's also slightly too long. Ah well. No car chase can really compare to Ronin, so let's leave that at that.

The Bourne Identity is a much more exciting film: it's full of stress and fear from start to finish, but it never really relaxes. You'll be excited, but you won't exactly be having fun. Bond, on the other hand, has more fun locations and is that bit more well-groomed. It's like Olivier vs Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man; Bourne is all pumped up and Method acting, Bond is just suave and unflappable. Now who's insecure?

Of course, in a few years Bond would metamorphose into something like Bourne, but right at this point they're clearly different. Bond is better with the ladies, Bourne can run properly. Bond hasn't been in a crap car since the 2CV in For Your Eyes Only; Bourne's a bit too competent at driving a clapped out Mini. And Bourne doesn't even know who he is, whereas Bond can jump off the side of a warship and instantly find his way to his favourite Hong Kong hotel.

So it's not what I thought it would be, going into this pair of films, that one would be lean and muscular and the other just dull and incompetent. Bourne is more realistic (as far as ridiculous spy movies go) whereas Bond is more fun. And who would have thought he'd still be fun, 20 films in, put up against something directed by the man who made Swingers? At the end, when the credits tell us James Bond Will Return, it was the first time I didn't dread that for a while. Die Another Day isn't as awful as we all think it is.


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