Opening with a surfing scene that recalls those Frankie and Annette beach blanket operas and featuring a para-surfing scene mid-film with the worst rear-projection since the same, Die Another Day locates our favourite British Cold War relic in North Korea, engaged in a hovercraft battle that is as uninspired as it sounds. Lines are cribbed from Star Wars ("Close the blast doors!" and the paraphrased "Spare me the unpleasantries," cribbed from Darth's "You may dispense with the pleasantries"), a weird riff picked up at the finale in a command centre/Death Star/Yavin scene involving a geriatric Leia (Judi Dench's pinched M) wandering around a radar-heavy control room as it comes into range of an evil galactic death-ray (not even mentioning how much the final set looks like the Cloud City set from The Empire Strikes Back, nor the "join me Luke" father/son/lightning-shooting-cyborg moments), while the same kind of camera-speed whip-trickery so unseen by most in Behind Enemy Lines unsuccessfully tries to make the bloated 130-minute running time seem snappy.

Bond kills a pocket dictator, is tortured for fourteen months after his capture under the opening credits, and emerges as some kind of creepy Zen yogi who actually meditates himself out of trouble. The femme banals of the piece are the dreadful Halle Berry as Jinx and the dreadful Rosamund Pike as quick-to-reform ice princess Miranda Frost, with a returning cast of John Cleese as gadgets expert "Q" (his fluidly paced cameo the highlight of the film), Samantha Bond as "Moneypenny," and Dench as "M." An orbital satellite menace is suspiciously familiar (see: Goldeneye; Moonraker), as is a diamond subplot that makes absolutely no sense except as it references Diamonds Are Forever. In the meantime, a ridiculous swordfight proves that Westerners have a lot to learn about staging such things; the dubbing of the evil space machine "Icarus" demonstrates again why evil geniuses and screenwriters should read all the way through to the end of a story (see also the "Ahab" submarine in xXx); and oodles of unspeakable dialogue, boring gadgets, bad CGI, and the gratuitous use of lasers reminds at once of Thunderball, Dr. No, Octopussy, and Episode II of Star Wars.

Its references easy to pick out in a junior "Trivial Pursuit" sort of way, the picture is clearly intended as a shrine to Bond and a pick-me-up for his fans, who enjoy jostling each other whenever a simple-minded in-reference collapses on the screen to die. (Let's not forget the Ursula Andress swimsuit, the "James goes rogue, but briefly" bullstuff of License to Kill, and the health spa infiltration and Moneypenny smooch of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, nudge nudge.) As entertainment goes, the latest Bond works a great deal like Jason X--the tenth Friday the 13^th film--except that Die Another Day has more implied sex, a higher body count, and a pace so deadening that it didn't even occur to me until well after the credits had finished to wonder why Epcot Center was in Iceland and why the bad guys were headquartered there. (It shares with Jason X, bizarrely, a couple of snarky holodeck sequences.) Die Another Day's centrepiece gag is an invisible Aston Martin, joining the invisible plane of I Spy as another useless, potentially more trouble than it's worth gewgaw, though it does function as a catalyst to visualize Wonder Woman sitting in a dotted outline of a plane on "Superfriends". As nostalgia goes, actually, it's the one moment that stirs. -Walter Chaw