The spy who bored me; The latest postmodern take on the James Bond

If you've heard the ghastly theme song, you'll know what to expect. Madonna's nadir in the history of Bond themes serves as a pretty effective metaphor for all that is wrong with the latest instalment, Die Another Day.

Both the song and the film, for example, reference earlier, better Bond films: Madonna uses snatches of sampled strings and orchestra to try and ape the crashing, grandiose majesty of the classic arrangements. And the film reads like a compendium of vintage Bond moments reworked: Halle Berry emerges from the sea in homage to Ursula Andress in Dr No, people face death by slow-moving lasers, expendable evil henchmen are sucked from a depressurising aeroplane. And the terrifying super-weapon that threatens the safety of the world as we know it is exactly the same as the one in Diamonds Are Forever - a giant space laser.

The problem is that by consciously referencing so many memorable scenes, both the film-makers and Madonna only serve to highlight how lacklustre their own efforts are.

Madonna employs the services of achingly hip French producer Mirwais in an attemp to be seen as cool and contemporary.

Likewise, the Bond franchise appropriates extreme-sports stunts - Bond surfs! Bond kite-boards down a tidal wave! - and gimmicky editing techniques to try and breath some youth into the moribund series. It's embarrassing to watch.

But appropriately, as Madonna's terrible song plays over the title sequence, we see a montage of Bond being tortured by North Korean special forces. He's plunged into icy water, he's stung with scorpions by a girl in leather fetish boots. But nat-urally he reveals nothing.

If the North Koreans had shown the good sense to put Madonna's reedy drone on a continuous loop, they'd have broken him in a matter of days. Another fundamental problem with the film is that, in an attempt to go one bigger and better than rival movies such as xXx and Mission: Impossible, the Bond team have devised stunts and sets of such ludicrous complexity that they have to be entirely rendered by digital special effects.

Which would be fine if the software available was up to the task. It clearly isn't. The ice palace lair of Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens - surely the most insipid Bond villain ever) looks like something you'd find in a cheapo box of winter-wonderland-themed Christmas cards. And there is a sequence in which Bond plummets 100 metres down the side of a rapidly melting ice floe, only to cunningly fashion a parachute and surfboard out of bits of his stolen rocket-sledge. He then surfs to freedom down a tidal wave.

It is so creakily rendered, it reminded me of films from the 1950s and 1960s in which projected scenery was used to give the impression that a car was in motion, while the actors had a conversation within. And frankly, while at a push you could believe that Vin Diesel could handle himself on a snowboard, Brosnan is looking a little old to be chucking himself around on such hazardous-looking equipment. But at least the nagging worry that the superannuated secret agent is about to give himself a hernia takes your mind off the bewilderingly far- fetched plot.

So is there any reason to go and see this movie? Certainly not the action sequences. The film features the most boring car chase in history, in which Bond and an evil henchman drive round and round the ice palace. It's like two pensioners vying for the last parking space in a multi-storey carpark. And the fight scenes are poorly directed, lacking the elegance and simplicity that used to work so well in earlier Bond movies. But since Columbia Tristar recently decided not to release Guy Ritchie's Swept Away, this could be your last chance to catch Madonna on the big screen. She plays Verity, a fencing instructor who seems to exist in permanent soft focus. She gets to utter the loaded line: "I don't like cock fights." And who would want to miss that?

The depressing thing is that, however poor this latest instalment of Bond is, it's virtually certain to be as hugely lucrative as its predecessors. The Bond formula seems to be a guaranteed money-maker. So does the rowdy Anglo-Asian culture-clash comedy, albeit it on a smaller scale. East Is East was the biggest success that FilmFour ever produced. And this year's Bend It Like Beckham was one of the surprise hits of the summer - the British equivalent of the US indie smash, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, although nowhere near as big and fat in terms of box-office takings. So it will be interesting to see whether the latest movie to bring the Punjab to the British provinces proves to be as successful.

Anita And Me was adapted for the screen by Meera Syal from her own best-selling novel. And I wonder whether that wasn't the first big mistake of the production. Syal is clearly deeply enamoured of her own words, so the film is absolutely full of them, in the form of a slightly grating voiceover and an erratic narrative that seems designed to stuff in as many of Syal's jokes as possible rather than to drive the story anywhere in particular.

Set in the 1970s, in the Midlands village of Toddington, the film is crammed with cacophonous period detail - flares, glam rock, Jackie magazine and enough man-made fibre to start an electrical fire from static sparks.

In the middle of all this is Meena, the daughter of the only Asian family in the village. She's smart, rebellious and very funny - no prizes for guessing which character Syal identifies with.

She's also unhealthily obsessed with Anita - a blonde bad girl with her very own gang of slapper cohorts, named The Wenches. Meena manages to inveigle her way into Anita's gang, but exams, puberty and an undercurrent of racism in their small community turns the friendship sour.

There are some charming moments in the film - an impromptu musical number featuring Meena's dad for one. And it's brutally candid about the minefield that is teenage friendships.

But ultimately, this is a deeply unsatisfying picture - a messy, indulgent film that chooses easy laughs over developing the story and characters or seriously addressing any of the issues raised.

The most interesting release of the week comes from France, where a 26-year-old female director has done the most daring thing you could attempt in French cinema right now. She's taken an adored national icon - Amelie's Audrey Tautou - and turned her into a monster.

In He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, Tautou stars as Angelique, at first glance as irresistible as Amelie. But Angelique has a darker side. She suffers from erotomania, a con-dition that convinces its victims they're in a relationship with someone who is barely aware of their existence, often with tragic con-sequences. In this case, the subject is Loc, a married cardiologist.

Laetitia Colombani, evidently a very talented young director, tells the same story first from the point of view of Angelique, then from Loc's side - a very effective device. This intriguing, Hitchcockian thriller is a very impressive debut from Colombani, and its one of the cleverest career decisions Tautou could have made.

Die Another Day is released on Wednesday; all other films on Friday reviewedDie Another Day (12A)Lee TamahoriHH Anita And Me (12A)Metin HuseyinHH he Loves Me, He Loves Me Not (12A)Laetitia ColombaniHHH

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