Die Another Day

Skippable, and it is the film that ended an era by exhausting one. The fortieth-anniversary entry is stuffed with references to every previous film and with ideas that had no business being in the same picture: gene therapy that changes a man's race, a satellite that focuses sunlight into a beam, a palace made of ice, and a car that turns invisible.

The first act is genuinely interesting and almost nobody remembers it. Bond is captured in North Korea and held for fourteen months, tortured, traded in a prisoner exchange, and returned to a service that no longer trusts him and revokes his status. A Bond film about an agent broken by captivity is a strong premise, and it is abandoned entirely by the forty-minute mark.

What replaces it is the series at its most weightless. The parasurfing sequence, in which a digital Bond rides a wave off a collapsing glacier, is the most criticised piece of effects work in the franchise and is the moment the audience's patience ran out. Halle Berry's Jinx was intended to launch a spin-off that never happened.

It made a great deal of money and the production took the reaction seriously. Four years later the series restarted from the beginning with a different actor and almost none of this. Watch the first forty minutes if you are curious.