8 More Movie Sequels With Visual Effects Inexcusably Worse Than The Original
7. Die Another Day
The sharp decline in quality found across the Pierce Brosnan era of Bond films was a huge disappointment considering that his first appearance - Goldeneye - is a stellar 007 outing. The mediocre duo of Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough followed, but nobody was prepared for just how bad Tamahori's Die Another Day would be - on pretty much all fronts.
The movie starts with a solid opening sequence but soon devolves into a cocktail of cringe-worthy dialogue and painfully bad special effects sequences, layered with so much bad cheese that you can almost smell it. The film's particularly rubbish highlight arrives after we're introduced to an ice palace (sigh), and finds Bond surfing across some massive waves, weaving in and around several huge blocks of ice in his path, before using one of them as a ramp to boost away and reach dry land.
And to be frank, it looks fake as balls. The green screen is annoyingly apparent in the close-up shots of Brosnan, and the wide shots clearly show a textureless, rag doll-like CGI figure. It's just impossible to buy the onscreen action, and scenes like this were what made the Bond series look utterly ridiculous when compared to the gritty realism of fellow spy Jason Bourne.
Brosnan's previous Bond films were much darker than Die Another Day, and so, their effects sequences were relatively "toned-down", and certainly much cleaner than this. It's no wonder Casino Royale served as a tonal reboot of the franchise.