Roger Spottiswoode, “Tomorrow Never Dies” (1997)
The second of four films that Irish actor Pierce Brosnan starred in as British wonder spy James Bond for EON Productions, “Tomorrow Never Dies” is competent enough but after accounting for the JB film formula’s requirements of megalomaniac villain, a super-violent henchman, two overlong chase sequences, two or even three flings with attractive women, product positioning galore and a convoluted plot set in various exotic locales that culminates in a mushroom-cloud explosion in the villain’s underground labyrinthine hide-out, the film has very little to commend it. Viewers can almost see the film going through a check-list of required plot detours and comedy mini-sketches to flog some life into a narrative about the power and influence of global media corporations and how they (and by implication, other private mega-companies) can deploy that power to change world politics and set international relations on new and dangerous courses.
In this film, the second made after the end of the Cold War, China has become a significant protagonist for Western intelligence agencies and MI6 especially to deal with. Global media mogul Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) plans to exploit the tensions between China and the West by using an encoder obtained online at a black market bazaar in Russia by his employee Henry Gupta to send a British frigate off-course into Vietnamese maritime territory in the South China Sea where it is ambushed and sunk by his own stealth (ie off-radar) ship which also steals a missile from the frigate. At the same time, the stealth ship brings down a Chinese fighter jet and uses Chinese ammunition to kill off the frigate’s crew. Carver’s media organisations broadcast the news about the crisis the sinking of the frigate has caused and M (Judi Dench) becomes suspicious. She sends Bond to investigate the Carver media empire because she knows that Carver’s wife Paris (Teri Hatcher) is an old flame of Bond’s.
Bond travels to Hamburg to seduce Paris and get information out of her to retrieve the stolen encoder. After the requisite violent encounters with various of Carver’s thugs and the seduction, Bond obtains the information and successfully infiltrates Carver’s newspaper printing press and recovers the encoder. While he is gone however, Paris is killed by one of Carver’s henchmen. The thug also tries to kill Bond but Bond escapes in a prolonged car chase through a car park with the encoder intact.
Examining the encoder at a US airforce base in Okinawa, Bond learns it has been tampered with and goes to investigate the sunken frigate where he meets Colonel Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh), a Chinese spy who is investigating the shootdown of the fighter jet and the theft of its ammunition. The two are captured by Carver’s No 1 henchman Stamper (Gotz Otto) and held prisoner in Carver’s tower in Saigon – erm, has no-one told the film-makers the city is no longer called Saigon? – but they escape by rappelling down the side of the tower and breaking into a lower floor and then evade Carver’s thugs through the streets of Saigon on a motorcycle. Deciding to work together, Bond and Wai notify their respective governments of Carver’s plans to push their countries into war, from which Carver’s media conglomerate will profit by obtaining exclusive broadcasting rights in China.
From then on the film grinds its way to the showdown between Bond and Carver amid the requisite capture and rescue of the Bond girlfriend, confronting No 1 henchman, blowing up the hide-out and romancing the girlfriend among the wreckage – which is presumably leaking radiation and toxic chemicals but don’t let those facts spoil the ending. Along the way the cast of actors have done the best they could with their scripts – Brosnan works at balancing his New-Age sensitive pretty boy persona with the tough gritty spy character and Yeoh basically updates the Bond girl stereotype with her HK martial arts action film persona. Pryce hams up his scenes as Carver where possible and Hatcher does well with her minimal approach to playing the embittered trophy wife. The “Saigon” scenes (actually filmed in Bangkok) probably do no justice to Ho Chi Minh City in the late 1990s and might actually be seen as racist in future years, otherwise the Asian locations in the film’s second half are among the better features along with the carpark car chase and the motorcycle chase of a pedestrian film in thrall to an overused and tired script formula.