If there is one thing that’s clear and needs to be mentioned immediately, it is this: Director Lee Tamahori should become the permanent man behind the camera for the James Bond series.

"Die Another Day" is the first Pierce Brosnan entry that has finally got it right. Tamahori is a New Zealander who found international success with "Once Were Warriors" and then came to the States to make "The Edge" and "Along Came a Spider." His visual panache used in the movie is astounding. It has some of the most incredible action sequences for any Bond film, but crucially the adventure is thoroughly engrossing. It stunningly moves from one impressive locale to another and finds exciting and outlandish ways to exploit each set piece. The scale and scope of the film is a vast improvement from the last two entries, and the supporting cast is not just solid but transcending.

What a great addition to get Halle Berry to play the Bond babe. As Jinx, she is also a trained assassin, a government agent who also has a knack for short-lived relationships and also gets into a good degree of trouble. She also has a luscious introduction into the movie, which has a teasingly slow-motion shot of her rising from the sea while wearing a threadbare bikini. And as for her action heroine presence, let’s say she always hits her mark and looks good handling a gun.

There is a task at hand however which means Bond can’t spend the entire movie with his hand down the cookie jar. Bond has to battle Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens, a classically trained actor in an engagingly snarling bad guy role), a diabolical madman that is developing Project Ikarus, yet another satellite laser gun which if used correctly could cause global warming. Graves, who wears this body armor with an attaching electrocution glove, looks somewhere in between Prince Charles of Wales and a 15th century brute from a Werner Herzog epic. In one of the most crackling action sequences, he has a fencing duel with Bond where they manage to tear up half of his estate. Brosnan, with finesse aplenty, underplays the scene while letting his opponent overplay the scene and looks mighty cool doing it. They rematch again at the climax mano-a-mano style, in a sequence that may be compared to the airplane catastrophe at the end of Goldfinger.

A second villain named Zao (Rick Yune) is also in Bond’s radar of opponents to take down. Zao might be the all-time ugliest villain in the Bond film canon, with diamonds embedded in his face and a skin complexion tone of white powder after an incomplete cosmetic surgery operation leaves him looking Kabuki. Trained in the Asian martial arts, he is one of Bond’s toughest adversaries. But as with all great action heroes, Bond defeats him by using his smarts with the assistance of gadgets provided by R (John Cleese, once again complimented with the best comic dialogue).

The new Bond film is still not without its share of misfires to nitpick. The title song by Madonna is among the three worst of all of the films in the series, and the usual title sequence of miniature nubile women isn’t playful and sexy this time but downright scary. But the twist at the beginning is not progressive but frustrating, once again leaving Bond damned and disgraced by his British agency before he flees and goes renegade. M16 (Judi Dench) is getting a little too prickly as Bond’s boss and her rigid scorn of him is getting kind of tired. But once Bond finds his sun in the tropical paradise of Havana, the excitement of the adventure begins. It doesn’t hurt for him to be quickly introduced to Halle Berry, either.