`A Hero Never Out of Date` - The New York Times looks ahead to DAD

12-Sep-2002 • Die Another Day

The New York Times have published articles on each of the four films they have gauged to be "most anticipated" of this autumn season of blockbusters. "Die Another Day" makes the shortlist:

A Hero Never Out of Date
By A. O. SCOTT

I`m not ordinarily a big fan of franchise movies, which tend to compensate for their dearth of imagination with a surfeit of sensational gimmickry, but I make an exception in the case of the suave superspy who virtually invented the multisequel action genre, and who is about to save the world from evil (I assume) for the 20th time in 40 years. Mr. Bond - if ever a fictional character deserved the honorific, it is this one - has kept his cool through enormous changes in geopolitics, sexual mores and haberdashery. In 1962, when "Dr. No" was released, he embodied a British variant of the Playboy philosophy and offered a dashing, debonair answer to cold war anxieties.

Since then, he has survived the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of feminism and the near-fatal widening (in the Roger Moore era) of tuxedo lapels. He has also faced decades of parody (from Woody Allen and company in "Casino Royale" to the "Austin Powers" pictures) and intense competition from muscle-bound Yanks like Bruce Willis and Vin Diesel, who would very likely prefer a can of Mountain Dew to a dry martini. Of course, an element of self-mockery was built into the Bond movies from the start, and the current 007, Pierce Brosnan, has, in the hiatus between "The World Is Not Enough" and "Die Another Day," played the definitive anti-Bond in "The Tailor of Panama," John Boorman`s severely underrated adaptation of a John LeCarrÃ© novel. That movie poked at the cynical, manipulative underbelly of the Bond persona, and while one should not expect such insight from Lee Tamahori`s "Die Another Day," the times have restored some of Mr. Bond`s tarnished luster of relevance.

Yes, he is a throwback - and his new adventure begins on the Korean peninsula, last outpost of the old cold war - but he has also, all along, been a prophet. With his taste for the latest gadgets, his fluency in the habits of far-flung cultures and his easy, cheeky triumphalism, James Bond was the embodiment of globalization long before the word came into wide usage, and movies themselves were agents of the process, part of the vanguard of Hollywood`s world-conquering entertainment forces. So "Die Another Day" (to open Nov. 22) offers a perfect pop-culture occasion for critical analysis of the world situation in all its complexity and contradictions. Which is, of course, why I`m looking forward to it. That, and Halle Berry.