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British agent James Bond surfs into the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. There the renegade North Korean Colonel Moon is laundering diamonds to buy arms. Unveiled as a spy, Bond disrupts Moon's operations, maiming his henchman Zao. Pursuing Bond on a hovercraft, Moon plunges over a cliff and is seemingly killed. Imprisoned by the North Korean authorities. Bond is tortured for over a year before being released in exchange for Zao, recently captured in the west.

Convalescing near Hong Kong, Bond has his licence to kill revoked by his superior M, who suspects him of disclosing secrets. Determined to clear his name, Bond escapes and swims to Hong Kong, where he hears Zao is active. Tipped off by the Chinese secret service, Bond follows Zao to Cuba. At a private medical clinic he finds Zao undergoing treatment to change the way he looks and hooks up with American agent Jinx, who is also on Zao's trail. After fighting with Bond, Zao escapes.

Reassigned the case by M, Bond is introduced to flamboyant businessman Gustav Graves, who is suspected of dealing in Moon's diamonds (Bond's fellow agent Miranda Frost is working undercover as Graves' PA). Graves invites Bond to a party in an ice palace in Iceland. There Bond meets Jinx, who is also investigating Graves, and sees the unveiling of Graves' ‘Icarus' project: a satellite that directs solar rays on to targets on Earth. Bond is betrayed by Frost - who's actually in cahoots with Graves - but avoids capture. After killing Zao, Bond rescues Jinx, who's been betrayed by Frost, from the melting ice palace. The two agents sneak on board Graves' departing plane, which takes them into North Korean airspace. There Graves reveals that he is actually Colonel Moon, having changed his appearance in the Cuban clinic, and directs Icarus to set off mines in the demilitarised zone to demonstrate North Korean might. Bond kills Graves while Jinx dispatches Frost. Having disabled Icarus, Bond and Jinx bail out of the aircraft in a helicopter.

Celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the 'official' 007 series, Die Another Day has been briefed to include nods to all the earlier Bonds. Perhaps the most significant is the discovery of the jet-pack from Thunderball (1965) in Q's arsenal, which prompts Bond to muse of the gadget, and perhaps the whole formula, "Does this old thing still work?" Demonstrating that the film-makers aren't entirely confident of the answer, the echoes of earlier films are stirred into a remixer and overlaid with ironies. State-of-the-art gimmicks try to drag a hero into a future where he has to compete with xXx, Austin Powers and The Matrix.

The Goldfinger Aston Martin returns, though it now has a daft invisibility device. The screenwriters deserve credit for finding a new use for the standard passenger-side ejector seat, and the theme of pitting Bond against his own bag of tricks leads to a satisfying bit of stunt-driving as the smug agent finds himself playing dodgems with a villain whose motor is also loaded with rocketry. When chief villain Gustav Graves parasails into London his chute opens into a Union Jack - a shtick Roger Moore used in The Spy Who Loves Me (1977), suggesting that the version of Bond this Korean shapechanger has modelled himself on is the camp creation of the 1970s (rigorously excluded from Pierce Brosnan's four essays at the part).

When Halle Berry's Jinx erupts in slow-mo from the Cuban surf in an echo of Ursula Andress' Honey Ryder, we are presented not with a Nordic sex goddess but with a woman fully qualified to be Bond's partner. Besides being a bedmate, Jinx serves the plot function fulfilled in previous films by Bond's CIA buddy Felix Leiter (though there have been action women in the series before - Barbara Bach in The Spy Who Loved Me). The Goldfinger laser-torture reference is deployed against the heroine rather than the hero, and she is at least as capable as he when it comes to getting out of trouble - Berry's best action is a stunning backwards dive away from her pursuers. The first Bond girl to come to the series fresh from an Oscar win, Berry does less acting than her glacial rival Rosamund Pike (as Berry's fellow X-woman Famke Janssen demonstrated in Goldeneye, the bad-girl roles are more fun).

The most interesting moments direct the attention back where it ought to be: on Bond himself. Pierce Brosnan's spy goes beyond even the angst Timothy Dalton brought to the role by being clapped into a Korean hellhole for over a year and tortured by a silent Asian woman who favours alternating doses of scorpion venom and antidote (a touch lan Fleming might have liked). Escaping from his own boss (M "disavows" him on the assumption he has talked). Bond shambles bare-chested, full-bearded and in pyjamas into the Hong Kong Yacht Club to be greeted by an obsequious manager who treats him with all the deference accorded Sean Connery as he strolled into tropical hotels back when pre-package-holiday UK audiences found Bond's travel habits as beyond their means as his tastes in liquor and women.

It's a shame the film's best action sequence - a polite fencing contest in a London club that gets out of hand - comes mid-point rather than as the finale since it's at once back-to-basics physical action and expressive of the mutual loathing of the minor-image hero and villain. Deploying the old snobbery with violence, we see here why the character has lasted. Later, when CG ice palaces and planes flying into death rays dominate, we have cause to wonder whether this old thing can work much longer.

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