The Bond franchise came close to being a thing of history in the late '80's. While quite anemic box office receipts from Licence To Kill had quite a bit to do with the disappearance of Bond from theaters in the early 90's, it's also true that the franchise was tied up in quite a few complicated legal battles during this time. When, after a six-year hiatus, plans for a new Bond movie were set in motion, the producers once again had to seek out a new Bond. While there is a lot of speculation surrounding the departure of Timothy Dalton, I think it best just to take him at his word. Dalton still maintains he was fed up with the legal delays and wanted nothing more to do with the role. Fortunately (or not depending on your proclivities), Pierce Brosnan was waiting in the wings to take over. He had actually been considered to take over from Roger Moore, but contractual obligations trapped him in the T.V. show Remington Steele.
Given my less than positive feelings about this, Brosnan's second film, I believe that in the interest of fairness I should confess that there is much that I like in Brosnan's portrayal. I am consistently amazed, for example, at what an amazingly cold-hearted bastard Brosnan can be in his films. Brosnan at times comes across as more akin to a pulp P.I. like Mike Hammer than he does to James Bond. It's startling to note for example that in each of his films, he ruthlessly drills and kills unarmed men, sometimes casually and sometimes with great relish. I point this out not because I'm some kind of sicko that enjoys this kind of thing, but to give Brosnan credit for projecting an aura of downright menace - an all too ready willingness to use that licence to kill - that I'm not sure any of the other Bonds attempted. Perhaps Brosnan affects this meanness to compensate for his unfortunate resemblance to a younger Fred MacMurray in certain scenes, but in any case it's a new and interesting addition to the gallery of Bond personas.
Unfortunately, however, all of Brosnan's movies to date have suffered under the same handicaps, and we might as well vet them here. With Brosnan's ascension to the role, the producers and writers finally gave up on Fleming's material entirely. If they were still to be making these when I'm in the old folks home, then it would have been a necessity sooner or later. There still remains a lot of unused material in Fleming's books, especially given how radically the plots of some of the novels were changed for the screen. If the filmmakers decided that it was time to slip the moorings, however, I'll bow to the inevitable and concede that if it were done, it might be best done quickly. In abandoning Fleming, however, the filmmakers made a decision that has almost completely eliminated the last vestiges of originality from the series. In their desire to avoid a mistake, the filmmakers have reduced every film to a rigid formula or template. Every Brosnan film follows the exact same arc. Babe count is rigidly metered at three. Bond is always spooning with some bit player to start the film as a lead in to a briefing from "M". Subsequently, Bond meets up with a woman who is the mistress of the lead villain. She can go either way, good or bad, but she'll end up dead before the credits roll. Woman three is the "final" woman, and will always accompany Bond while he storms the villain's base at the denouement. The villain's base must be stormed for Bond to prevent the detonation of some kind of nuclear weapon.
As stultifying as a rigid template is to original ideas for a Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies is more formulaic still, being as it is the second remake of You Only Live Twice! Think I'm exaggerating? Here's a capsule summary of You Only Live Twice:
The lead villain is trying to foment a nuclear war between two countries by stealing military hardware from those countries. Bond must team up with a Japanese secret agent lady to stop him.
How about a capsule summary for The Spy Who Loved Me?
The lead villain is trying to foment a nuclear war between two countries by stealing military hardware from those countries. Bond must team up with a Russian secret agent lady to stop him.
The capsule summary for Tomorrow Never Dies should be obvious. What value does the only variable parameter take?
The lead villain is trying to foment a nuclear war between two countries by stealing military hardware from those countries. Bond must team up with a Chinese secret agent lady to stop him.
Now I grant that Bond has been formulaic in general for some time, but you'd think that the filmmakers would at least have learned their lesson from the countless numbers of failed remakes that have littered movie history. At the very least, if you're going to redo something err on the side of fidelity to the original so the remake won't be all that much worse. Already the copy of a copy, Tomorrow Never Dies totally lacks the spectacle of the earlier films. The sad truth here is that the producers could have called in Gus Van Sant to do a scene for scene reshoot of either film and had something more exciting yet just as pointless.
In noting this film's lack of spectacle, I will vet another problem with the Brosnan series that I think is tied to the economics of movie making today. Bond films of the late 70's and throughout the 80's were marked by eye-popping stunt work. Even the lamer of the series entries from these years featured some truly amazing stunts that made sitting through a 2 hours plus movie worthwhile. Since Brosnan took over, the films have been surprisingly light in this area. There now seems to be an over reliance on vehicle chases (and you know how much I love those!) and even less thrilling running gun battles. The action of Tomorrow Never Dies consists almost entirely of these two things. While we've seen a couple of things in the 90's that hark back to the glory days of Bond, the truly outrageous bits from earlier movies are sadly lacking. Why this should be, I can't be sure. They still spend lavishly on the films, so I don't think it's a shortage of money per se. Perhaps the money that needs to be spent now goes to other things. Sets are as fabulous as ever in the latest films, even for mundane aspects of the production. The British taxpayer must be truly taxed at confiscatory rates indeed if the opulent digs of the British secret service are typical for government offices. Do salaries and sets alone eat up most of the production money? Is insurance now so costly that dangerous stunt work must be strictly limited? Are filmmakers trying to ease into doing everything on the computer through CGI effects instead of doing stunts "live"? I don't know the answers so I can't only note the dramatic loss of one of my favorite elements of the Bond experience.
Now that I've discussed at some length problems that are common to each of Brosnan's films we can turn to a truly abysmal problem with this film in particular, and yes it will require yet another digression. I hate to launch into it here for such a sub-par effort, but my musings will also be relevant higher up in the countdown. I believe that one of the reasons that the Bond movies have struck such a collective chord for so many people over the years is due to the fact that the Bond movies can be seen as the obverse of the romantic movie coin. I think I'm on solid ground here because numerous passages can be gotten from Fleming's novels that all but state this flat out. At the risk of gross over-simplification let me argue that, for the ladies, romance in the movies tends to follow a Snow White story arc. At the end of the picture, Prince Charming appears to sweep Snow White off her feet and together they live happily ever after. For the guys, the analogue comes in the form of knightly tales of chivalry in which a knight must show great personal bravery to win the Princess' hand in marriage. As much as the far-far-Left, man-hating wing of the feminist movement must hate the fact, the living-happily-ever-after idea must appeal to something in the female psyche - as demonstrated by the continued popularity of these movies. What touches the male psyche, however, are the appeals to notions of honor and self-sacrifice and the rewards that can be won for showing them. The hand of Princess Charming can only be won only through one's heroism and bravery.
Now what does this long-winded and somewhat risible discussion of storybook fantasy have to do with the matter at hand? My male readers can now do this thought experiment. Let your imagination run wild in imagining your personal dream girl; a woman possessed of unique beauty and whatever set of personal attributes and interests you desire. Am I going out on a limb predicting that you're not thinking of your ex-girlfriend? Now I'm sure that your ex- is a decent person and lovely to look at and all, but are you really dreaming of risking your life to hook up with her one more time? May I suggest that if you are, you need to get out a lot more? And yet the makers of Tomorrow Never Dies have amazingly asked us to fantasize along these exact lines! Now admittedly it is difficult to composite a female character that will appeal to a wide range of male fantasies, but surely it should have been easy for the screenwriters to intuit that a guy's ex-girlfriend is not a character geared to appeal to a very wide segment of the male movie-going public. Some of us more embittered members of said public would be more willing to risk our lives to avoid running into our ex- again. And as absurd as the ex-girlfriend thing is, the screenwriters compound the problem even further by introducing a second female character highly unlikely to conform to very many male fantasies in the audience. Was your fantasy woman someone who has exactly the same job as you do? Were you computer programmers out there dreaming of a woman as quick with a Java script as yourself? Are you accountants dreaming of the lady whose a master with the depreciation tables? Were you corporate lawyers dreaming of someone expert at the copyright infringement filing? Why do the makers of the Bond films continue to believe that a Bond fantasy woman should be a secret agent just like himself? I know they've included such a character time and time again, but it's a completely uninspired choice every time.
Let's put rubber to road and get moving on a discussion of this thing. Since we will rehash the exact same plot two more times during this countdown, let's try to use this review as an excuse to save time later. Setting aside differences in the teaser, we'll start exactly the same way two more times. The villain's start the movie here sinking a British ship that's apparently on patrol in the South China Sea. The gimmick here is some kind of stealth ship that the villain's have built to be invisible to radar. Thus they can torpedo the British ship and fire off missiles at patrolling Chinese planes as well in their effort to start a war between the two countries. The mastermind behind this all is Elliot Carver, a media mogul just like Ted Turner. I know many reviewers have made a knee-jerk comparison to Rupert Murdoch because he runs the fair-to-conservatives Fox network and they hate him because of that, but I say the hell with them. I'm going with Ted Turner. After all, he's the one who thinks the planet is over-populated and humans are destroying it. It's not that much of a stretch to see someone like that wanting a war to eliminate the excess humanity. (As an aside, that is indeed the plot of the The Spy Who Loved Me.)
Mysterious satellite signals are traced to a Carver satellite, and Carver rather bone-headedly includes all sorts of super-secret details in his newspapers about the sinking of the British ship, so British intelligence sends Bond out to check the guy over. In a truly lamentable twist Carver's wife is Bond's ex-girlfriend, so "M" orders Bond to approach her for inside information on Carver. Frankly, if I were Bond at this point, I'd be praying for Oddjob to show up and hurl a steel-brimmed hat into the side of my neck. No such luck, however, and Bond is off to Hamburg to make contact with the ex- and Carver. Just as aside there Elliot Carver, what sort of wussy super-villain actually gets married? Super-villains don't have wives, they have mistresses or kept women. Bond attends a swanky soiree held by Carver in Hamburg and not only sees his ex- again, but also is introduced to Wai Lin - the Chinese secret agent also investigating Carver.
Next Bond must undergo some of the most agonizing torture that he's ever had to endure - talking at length with his ex-girlfriend about their former relationship. She tells him about some super-secret room at the top of Carver's Hamburg headquarters, and Bond breaks in to steal the MacGuffin. In this case, it's a satellite control doohickey that allowed Carver to send the British ship sunk at the start off course into his stealth ship ambush. Bond is able to use the MacGuffin to find out where the British ship was sunk, at he parachutes down to the wreckage. There he finds Wai Lin also checking out the wreck, and they both discover that a nuclear missile is missing from the weapons room. They resurface to be promptly captured by Carver's men, and taken to his headquarters in Bangkok filling in for Vietnam. There Wai Lin finds Carver to be hobnobbing with some ChiCom general named Chang suspecting of stealing stealth technology.
After escaping from Carver's goons Wai Lin and Bond finally intuit the whole stealth ship thing, and since there are surprisingly few places in China to hide such a ship they quickly manage to locate it. It's here the whole plot is finally detailed. The missile is due to be fired into Beijing to kill all the current ChiCom leaders and pave the way for General Chang to take over. Carver is supposed to be getting some kind of Chinese cable T.V. rights and see his newspaper circulation increase from his coverage of the ensuing nuclear holocaust. I agree than he and Chang are probably hoping that the one missile ends up the only one fired, but once nuclear weapons start going off things could get out of control quickly. As an aside, I visited China this year with my wife and I've actually seen Chinese cable T.V. Many Chinese have more than 20 Chinese language cable channels already, so unless there's a big demand in China for Gilligan's Island re-runs dubbed in Mandarin, I doubt Carver's cable rights would be worth all that much. To quickly rap things up Bond and Wai Lin board the ship, blow a bunch of stuff up, kill a bunch of guards in a running machine gun battle, and prevent the launching of the missile. The stealth ship is blasted out of the water after it becomes visible on radar, and Bond and Wai Lin start getting it on on a piece of smoldering wreckage! All I can say is "Why don't you two get a room?". I hope no human corpses hideously mutilated by the explosions and fire drift by to spoil the mood.
I will concede the movie the fact that Jonathan Pryce's performance as Carver actually kind of grows on you. Pryce isn't the least bit physically imposing. In fact, if anything he runs towards being anile with his white hair and his granny glasses with the Coke-bottle bottom lenses. In every scene he's in, however, he manages to dominate the screen with his astounding egotism. One moment he's cackling with excitement over composing the headline to appear over the newspaper story concerning the sunken British ship. Next he's calmly explaining the ancient art of Chakra (?) torture over a tray of goofy looking metallic instruments. On board the stealth ship he's pulling employee's heads back by the hair and shouting "What do I pay you for?" at them. He somehow manages to remain just at the top at each moment without actually going over it. I actually kind of got a kick out of the moment when he mocks Wai Lin with fake karate moves and goofy sounds after she tries to get a kick in at him. Seldom do we see such displays of outright contempt from the series' heavies. After Carver's scheme has clearly fallen apart, Pryce manages a picture-perfect expression of rage and exasperation on his face - astoundingly managing to ham it up without saying a single word.
However good Pryce is, however, the movie founders and sinks like a torpedoed British frigate the instant Terry Hatcher shows up on screen. Ms. Hatcher plays Paris Carver, wife of super villain and ex- of Bond. In discussing this character, I must truly resist the urge to pile on poor Ms. Hatcher. I have nothing against her personally, and I don't want to be overly critical of her acting ability. The fact remains that I hate, Hate, HATE this *$#@%& ex-girlfriend thing. Perhaps I haven't made that clear up until now? Every moment this character is on the screen is one of unendurable agony. Bond gets all moony-eyed and says: "I didn't know what I'd say if I ever saw you again". Paris comes back with: "What happened to us James? Did I get too close?". What in the world were they thinking? If I had wanted all this baloney about relationships, I would have stayed home all day watching Lifetime television. After two minutes of this hooey, I was longing for anything less painful - the bite of a laser burning into my crotch perhaps.
For God's sake, let's move on to the other female lead. Michelle Yeoh plays the Chinese agent, Wai Lin. Ms. Yeoh stands in an uneasy relationship to this movie because she is simultaneously one of the few reasons for seeing it and terribly wasted in her role. Ms. Yeoh is an action star in her own right of course, having starred in many Hong Kong actioners as the lead ass-whupper. Here, however, she is given next to nothing to do as Wai Lin, and the main problem with the idea of Bond's female counterpart becomes all too clear. The script goes out its way to pound home the idea that Wai Lin is Bond's complete equal in the secret agent business. We're to believe that she's just as tough a fighter and just as well equipped with gadgets as Bond ever was. Unfortunately all this stress on competence leaves no room to develop the most necessary attribute of a Bond girl - simple femininity. Make no mistake, I think that Ms. Yeoh is a gorgeous woman. I'm certainly not implying that she's the least bit mannish in appearance. As written, however, a male actor would have just as deftly filled her role. There is nothing at all distinctly feminine about the character of Wai Lin, and this leads to a complete lack of romantic chemistry between her and Bond. I guess I can't totally absolve Ms. Yeoh of responsibility for this lack of chemistry. Maybe a different actress could have brought much more romance to the part. Even so, I would still have to wonder, however, why Wai Lin should be attracted to Bond anyway? If she's so supremely competent, why does she even spend time with him on the job, much less off the job so to speak? It's arguable whether anyone would expect any romantic sparks to be struck at all on the job between too hardened professionals.
At least the Brosnan Bonds in their formulaic approach always feature an attempt at pre-credits excitement. The teaser is always lightly tied to the ensuing plot. In this case one of Carver's hench-noids is buying the satellite control MacGuffin at a "terrorist arms bazaar" - on the Russian border no less. Bond in on the spot actually spying for a change by setting up cameras to broadcast the proceedings back to British naval and intelligence officers. A British admiral is on hand, and since he's a Hollywood caricature of a military man, he's all gung ho to fire missiles at the bazaar to take out "half the world's terrorists". He's also, for Fawlty Towers fans, the sausage-loving doctor from "The Kipper And The Corpse" episode. It only becomes clear after the missile is fired that thermo-nuclear weapons are on the ground attached to a jet fighter. Bond liberally applies grenades in his effort to make his way to the fighter, and he manages to commandeer it and take off before the missile hits. A man in the fighter's back seat rather illogically tries to strangle Bond even though Bond is piloting the plane while another fighter simultaneously tries to shoot the fighter down. A quick application of the rear-seat ejector button removes the "back-seat driver" by hurling him into the other plane! I really can't find too much fault with this bit, even though it is based more around CGI and blue screen effects that it is actual stunts.
Unfortunately, the good will earned by an imaginative teaser is immediately lost when the laughable theme song begins to play. While normally the theme affably sails over my head while I ogle the naked, dancing, credits girls, as I listened to Sheryl Crow's song I woke to the horrific fact that the lyrics are actually supposed to be about her relationship with Bond and all its problems! Again with the relationship stuff! What in the world is wrong with these people! I don't want it in the movie. I don't want it while the credits roll. What I'm really starting to want at this point is for Jaws to show up and take a bite out of my jugular so I don't have to suffer any more if it.
After Bond visits Carver's party in Hamburg under a paper-thin cover of banker, he makes it so obvious that he's lying about the banking thing that Carver orders his goons to rough him up. What follows is a pretty good set-to between Bond and several goons in a soundproofed room. If you haven't guessed by now I have a great fondness for these hand-to-hand fights, even though I've never taken or thrown a punch in my life. I guess the visceral thrill that I draw from these tussles arises from the fact that this is a type of violence and danger that is all too realistic. We can thrill to Bond's amazing escapes, like the jet fighter escape above, but we'll never personally be in a similar situation so the thrills are never anything but vicarious. Being set upon by bat-wielding thugs, however, is not an inconceivable thing even for those of us leading the most mundane of existences. When we see it on screen the adrenalin flows just that much more freely because of the frightening real life possibility that we too might be caught up in just such a situation, and we know Bond's going to make it when we most decidedly wouldn't.
This scrape also contains an interesting coda that shows Brosnan at his near nastiest. Once all the thugs have been put down, one is on the ground literally begging for assistance on a walkie-talkie. While this guy pleads for help, Brosnan carefully lifts a glass ashtray, tests it for weight, and calmly smashes it into the guy's head. Nastier still is what occurs later in the film, after Carver has his wife dispatched for passing information to Bond. Bond returns to his hotel room to find Paris' body in his bed. While his attention is focused on her, the always creepy-looking Vincent Schiavelli gets the drop on him and holds him at gunpoint. Schiavelli, playing Dr. Kaufman, is not the least bit intimidating physically and his Katzenjammer Kids' accent makes him almost a comic figure. After Bond manages to disarm Kaufman, however, he turns the gun on Kaufman and calmly puts a bullet in his head - execution style. These acts of calculated heartlessness have really become Brosnan's trademark in the role.
Unfortunately, after these high-points there remains little else of note in the way of action set pieces. After Bond's execution of Kaufman, he flees his hotel room for his tricked-out BMW but the parking garage is knee-deep in Carver's goons. At this point I'll pass over how unconscionable it is for the filmmakers to foist some blocky Kraut car on 007 instead of the traditional English Aston Martin, and cut to the (car) chase. As you should know by know, my excitement at car chases in general is pretty minimal. At least this chase adds the traditional Bond gadgets to the mix in an effort to spice things up. Bond's BMW is decked out with rockets, it can drop pointed star-shaped pieces of metal to puncture the tires of pursuers, and it has tires that reinflate after themselves being punctured. The chase itself isn't at all bad but it's nothing that we haven't seen before in other Bonds, and the restriction of it to the parking garage is unnecessarily confining. The filmmakers themselves also seem to thing that the whole bit is far more clever than it is. The signature gimmick is a remote control apparatus that allows Bond to drive the car by touching a computer mouse pad. Frankly, all it adds to the mix is the sight of Bond hunkered down in the car's back seat instead of sitting at the wheel - not really all that noticeable a difference from prior versions of this bit. The remote control also allows Bond to leap clear and steer the BMW off the roof of the garage into an Avis rent-a-car office across the street, primarily to earn a few product placement dollars. Further marring the chase is a gadget whose only apparent purpose is to pop from the hood of the car and sever a tow cable placed across the road at exactly the right height; a gadget whose overall uselessness is belied by its fortunate employment here.
Appearing again here is a stellar example of what I've called the isolated stunt in earlier reviews. Bond learns of the location of the sunken British ship, and decides to perform what's talked up as an extremely dangerous parachute jump down to visit the wreck. Now I hope the guy who did this stunt earned enough money to put all of his kids through college. I begrudge the man nothing. The jump itself makes for an impressive moment, but the purpose behind the jump is utterly mundane. All Bond wants to do is get to the wreck. Aren't there some underwater sleds or mini-submersibles left over from practically every other movie in the series that Bond can use to boat over to the wreck? Is it really necessary for plot purposes to leap from a plane? It's as if Bond were dining on top of the space needle and felt the need to use the can. Sure he could parachute down to a waiting jet boat, head off at full speed towards a waiting U.S. naval vessel, and leap aboard to use the head. It might make for interesting viewing certainly but it wouldn't be necessary, and instead of being exciting it would seem silly. It's just that sort of unnecessary feel that hangs over the Halo jump here. It's interesting and beautifully filmed, but there's just no good excuse for it.
The filmmakers also failed to realize that the earlier car chase more than satisfied our desire for seeing quickly driven vehicles. Vehicle chase, part deux, takes the form of a CGI-powered helicopter chasing Bond and Wai Lin on a motorcycle. Some kudos are in order either to the people of Bangkok for cleaning up their city since the filming of The Man With The Golden Gun, or to the filmmakers for finally shooting around the prettier parts of the city. The chase itself, though, is nothing particularly special. The bit features two people racing around on a motorcycle in the streets for the most part, followed by a ride around some breakaway platforms that seem to surround Thai buildings, and capped by a leap from roof to roof. What the chase really does is serve to illustrate how terribly wasted Michelle Yeoh was in this film. Even though she's an action movie veteran, her only true involvement in a traditional action set piece comes via this rather lackluster chase. And even at that she primarily just sits at the back of the bike while Bond drives. In point of fact, I'm sure both Yeoh and Brosnan were both extensively doubled during the chase to boot so it's not even really her back there if you know what I mean.
After the motorcycle chase, little is left of interest to us. Ms. Yeoh is given her chance to engage in a martial arts style struggle that harkens back to her Hong Kong work. The whole thing is far too perfunctory, however, to leave much of an impression and I must point you towards her Hong Kong films to truly see how good she can be. Once Bond and Wai Lin have infiltrated the stealth ship, a gun battle shortly ensues between them and Carver's henchmen. While the interminable car chase was the less-than-thrilling staple of earlier Bonds, the running gun battle threatens to become the current staple. If anything, gun battles are even less exciting that car chases. At their core they simply feature lot of blanks popping while nameless actors feign being hit. A bit of gunplay is always necessary in an action film, but the final gun battle here rages far beyond the point of pure necessity. It remains watchable here due solely to the fact that Ms. Yeoh¡¯s pulchritude is on display often enough to keep our interest. If you debate my claim that the length of this final battle is excessive, simply imagine the lovely Ms. Yeoh being replaced by, say, Ernest Borgnine. How much of his homely kisser could you take before fervently calling for the ship to finally blow up. It's also a strange feature of You Only Live Twice and both of it's remakes that the main villain's remarkably large and remarkably taciturn henchman is dispatched by Bond in a totally anti-climactic fight at the end. Carver's henchperson Stamper here is only interesting in so far as a knock-down-drag-out fight occurs between him and Bond. Here, however, Stamper just roughs Bond up a little before Bond pulls a lever and the nuclear missile slides down the launch chute to trap Stamper's foot. That's pretty much the end of him as a physical threat, though I will admit that his tussle with Bond is possibly the best of the three anti-climactic fights mentioned above. As you might have guessed, however, that's not saying much. Carver himself meets a pretty gruesome demise at the hands of the undersea drill/torpedo used earlier to sink the British frigate, but it only comes after he rather implausibly gets the drop on Bond and decides to start jawing instead of shooting.
The unusual thing about this massive disappointment is that I think there is indeed one way that it could have been a good movie. Practically every problem with the film could have been solved by the simple expedient of turning the entire film into a starring vehicle for Michelle Yeoh. Freed from the current Bond movie straight-jacket and the expectations engendered by Bond, the filmmakers would have been free to experiment freely with Ms. Yeoh's character. What would have been Bond's fights could have easily been used as showcases for Ms. Yeoh's athleticism, and she could also have easily stepped into his shoes in the various vehicle chases as well. Even the agonizing ex-lover sub-plot might have worked in a film with a female lead and no prior expectations for the character. But to point this out only serves to show what a major failure this film is as a Bond film. The filmmakers here have truly done what I would have thought to be impossible. They have made a Bond movie in which the most unnecessary and uninteresting character in the film is Bond himself.
