James Bond appears to be achieving what years of political and military brinkmanship have failed to do - unite North and South Korea in a common cause. The makers of the 20th 007 film, Die Another Day, have come under fire over their portrayal of North Korea as an evil regime hell-bent on world domination.

Despite years of increasingly tense separation between the two countries on the Korean peninsula, viewers in the South have taken umbrage to the film's depiction of their northern neighbours. Ananova reports they have called for a boycott in the South's 140 cinemas.

The spy thriller opened in South Korea on New Year's Eve but has wasted little time in agitating a sensitive population. "I don't want to see a movie where North Korea is depicted as a menace to peace on the Korean peninsula and the US is depicted as a hero that resolves the crisis," one student in Seoul, the capital, is quoted as saying.

Die Another Day already received a drubbing in the North, where the Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland claimed America was "the headquarters that spreads abnormality, degeneration, violence and ... corrupt sex culture". In the film, Bond teams up with South Korean agents to thwart a renegade commander from the North who tries to slice the two countries apart with a satellite laser before invading Japan.