It is now (ahem) four decades since James Bond made his debut on screen, never mind another decade since his debut on the page: he must, as a film entity alone, be into his seventies by now. However you calculate it, he can ill afford to spend fourteen months in a North Korean prison, coming out afterwards looking like Robinson Crusoe, as he does at the beginning of this, the twentieth entry in the series, give or take a Casino Royale or a Never Say Never Again. If the opening bout of incarceration, torture, and disgrace ("Double-0 status rescinded") is meant to provide a jolt, it would have been advisable not to precede it with one of those preposterously overblown pre-credits sequences, or to accompany it with techno-Madonna all through the actual credits. The film is wrecked before it can get off the ground. There was perhaps cause for hope in the enlistment of a new director, Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, Mulholland Falls, The Edge, Along Came a Spider), a cut above most of the recent helmsmen. Then again, the same could have been said about Michael Apted before the previous one, The World Is Not Enough. Bond proves again to be director-proof. In fairness, the second-banana villain's getaway by helicopter from an islet off Cuba is excitingly staged, and there's a vigorous swordfight in the Flynn-Rathbone tradition between Bond (who never needs practice to stay in trim) and the top banana. But then there's the laser-ray satellite, the invisible automobile, the wind-surfing on a tidal wave, the car chase through the melting Ice Palace, the cosmetic conversion of Asian to Caucasian, and so on. With Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry, Toby Stephens, Rosamund Pike, Rick Yune, Judi Dench, John Cleese. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd