Tomorrow Never Dies (1997, Dir. Roger Spottiswoode):
I don’t regard James Bond precisely as a hero, but at least he does get on and do his duty, in an extremely corny way…. My books have no social significance, except a deleterious one; they’re considered to have too much violence and too much sex. But all history has that.
— Ian Fleming, 1962
Words are the new weapons; satellites, the new artillery.
— Bruce Fierstein’s pitch to the Bond producers for the Tomorrow Never Dies script
What deserves more appreciation — a film that aims high and falls short of its goal, or a film that shoots at the lowest common denominator and hits the bull’s-eye? It’s a valid question when it comes to the Bond movies, particularly when it comes to reviewing a film like Tomorrow Never Dies. 007 may have the code name “White Knight” in the pre-title sequence, but this is as white-label as the Bond franchise gets. Coming off the success of GoldenEye, which posited the question of whether Bond was relevant in the modern world (answer: Duh), Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson could now get on with it, which in this case meant following the traditional template to a T. Forget all those cutting remarks in GoldenEye on Bond’s misogyny or his post-Cold War usefulness: in Tomorrow, M looks close to shedding a tear when Bond’s presumed dead in the pre-title teaser (is this really the same woman who snapped, “I have no compunction about sending you to your death” one film ago?). When we catch up with him after the main titles, he’s having a shag-adelic time with a Danish language professor who can’t be a day over 24. “You always were a cunning linguist, James,” Moneypenny cracks. It’s like the ’70s never ended.
Tomorrow Never Dies may be glossy on the surface, but the film went through a particularly painful gestation period. As has often been the case in the Bond series, a successful entry demanded a rushed follow-up, and the filmmakers had to hop to it after GoldenEye. However, the Bond machine didn’t have the cache (or the ambition) to go after top-notch talent at the time. Enter director Roger Spottiswoode, whose career up that point was most notable for Turner and Hooch (the one with Tom Hanks and the slobbering dog) and Sylvester Stallone’s Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. Once upon a time Spottiswoode was a hot young editor working under Sam Peckinpah on Straw Dogs, and he wanted to bring some of Peckinpah’s hard-hitting, edgier style to Bond. Suffice to say that his vision clashed with the Bond house rules, prompting a multitude of script rewrites by Bruce Fierstein. It was originally planned for the movie to coincide with the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and use the handover as part of the plot, but as usual (and on the advice of Henry Kissinger), the producers ultimately decided not to play politics. Still, the Asian influence remained: Fierstein envisioned an evil Rupert Murdoch (if that isn’t a redundancy) fomenting a war between the Chinese and the British, all in the name of television ratings and lots of mullah. Thus a villain of the moment was born: Eliott Carver (Jonathan Pryce), a spoiled media baron who happens to have armies of thugs and a stealth ship at his disposal. With the villain and the plot squared away, the path seemed clear, but production would be dogged by a variety of events: Vietnam’s eleventh-hour refusal to let the crew film there, the last-minute casting of Teri Hatcher as Bond girl Paris Carver, a tight release date and rushed filming schedule, and a head-to-head showdown against James Cameron’s Titanic for the 1997 holiday season (Tomorrow eventually did quite decently at the box office, although Titanic walked away with the big money and all the kudos). Even the title was a mistake; it was originally meant to be “Tomorrow Never Lies” (in reference to Carver’s newspaper Tomorrow), but a publicity team misprint resulted in the more generic current title, which is just as well.
The resulting product, warts and all, is the last Bond movie that can be called a “traditional” affair. The progression of events is classical: Blow-out pre-title sequence introduces a sliver of plot that will be followed up on later, the baddie and his scheme are revealed, Bond is put on the baddie’s trail, Bond is captured, Bond escapes, Bond teams up with beautiful heroine to kick some ass and save the world. In its plot mechanics, Tomorrow Never Dies is nowhere near as knotty as GoldenEye, and this slickness is to its benefit and detriment. Like a vodka, it goes down without a fuss; like fast food, it’s eminently forgettable. Spottiswoode is hell-bent on pushing the pace, and the film doesn’t dawdle for a moment, clocking in at under two hours. The standard M briefing is done in a speeding car, and poor Q must pose as an Avis rental agent (yay for product placement — this film is chock-full o’ them) at Bond’s destination to provide him with the requisite magic automobile (a BMW, natch). Apart from a few lovely shots of Halong Bay off Vietnam, Spottiswoode doesn’t have much interest in travelogue — faceless modernist buildings in Hamburg lead to faceless industrial buildings in Thailand (standing in for Saigon). Emphasis is saved for the movie’s three action setpieces: a remote-control car chase in a parking garage, an escape by motorcycle (a BMW model, of course) through a crowded Saigon marketplace, and a final conflagration aboard Carver’s stealth boat. As choreographed by second-unit director Vic Armstrong, these sequences are brawny, noisy, and not especially fleet.
“Noisy” is the word that best describes Tomorrow Never Dies. Giving itself over to overblown action-film mechanics, the movie ups the ratio on explosions and machine gun fire; the pre-title sequence alone has more fireballs than the last half-dozen Bond films combined. When Brosnan isn’t busy running, jumping and shooting miscreants with his Walther PPK, he’s running, jumping and shooting miscreants with a Walther in one hand and a machine gun in the other. Starting a five-film run as series composer, David Arnold gives the people what they want: plenty of doses of the Bond theme, with a lot of brass and sturm and drang that replicates the bombast of the great John Barry, minus the lyricism. In the midst of the thunderous soundtrack and the deafening roar of gunfire, Michelle Yeoh (as Chinese agent Wai Lin) stands out. For the first time, Bond is teamed with a woman who could probably kick his ass, and Yeoh slinks through the movie with supreme confidence. Too bad the movie doesn’t know how to utilize her talents. Her kung fu scenes are sabotaged by Spottiswoode’s frantic cutting and her romantic chemistry with Brosnan is at near-zero, not that it’s easy to develop chemistry when your big intimate scene consists of jumping a motorcycle over a helicopter. In contrast to all this chaos, the film’s best moment is startling in its stillness: Bond with a dead woman on his bed, being held at gunpoint by an assassin (Vincent Schiavelli, hamming it up just enough). Their tête-à-tête is a reminder of an earlier age, in which one bullet is more than sufficient.
What separates the good Bond films from the mediocre ones are the incidental pleasures: the jet-setter locales, the flair of Bond’s approach, the come-hither sparks between Bond and his latest lady friend, a delicious line reading by the villain. Jonathan Pryce says “delicious” quite a bit, but otherwise he’s not up to snuff as the film’s prime baddie. Coming off as a childish blowhard every time he pontificates about his genius, Bond (and the audience) tend to ignore him. The idea of an evil media baron could have opened up the film for Network levels of satire, but apart fom a dig at Bill Gates (“The latest software is full of bugs, which means people will be forced to upgrade for years”), the filmmakers are too busy being brutally efficient to actually explore their ideas. The rest of the villains are small potatoes: Carver’s top goon Stamper (Gotz Otto) is a platinum-domed hulk out of Bond Central Casting, and magician Ricky Jay is completely squandered in a nothing role as a tech henchman (apparently Jay’s facility for cards was utilized in a deleted scene in which he flings them Oddjob-style at his targets). As Bond’s initial love interest/sacrificial lamb, Teri Hatcher kicks off an unfortunate trend of “popular, untalented American actresses of the moment” getting cast in Bond movies — here, she’s especially petulant and bedraggled, which is kind of a problem when she’s supposed to be one of the great loves of Bond’s life who got away. And those postcard locations? Not this time, sorry. Director of photography Robert Elswit (who would later go on to greatness with Paul T. Anderson) coats everything in smoky shadows, which works when you’re lurking around on a stealth boat, but it doesn’t make you savor the view in Thailand. The only element of play in the movie comes from Judi Dench’s line readings as M. When Bond displays reluctance over reconnecting with his old flame Paris in order to get at Carver (“I doubt if she’ll remember me”), M digs in the knife: “Remind her… and then pump her for information.” Sexist, misogynist dinosaur, indeed.
Speaking of our favorite sexist, misogynist dinosaur, Brosnan is both at home with and at odds with the film. More forthright than he was in GoldenEye, he’s quite comfortable playing an assembly-line version of Bond, and a quiet moment involving a hotel room, a bottle of vodka and a silencer hints at a more rounded portrait he had the potential to deliver. Ultimately though, he’s shown up by his own movie. The best Bond actors command your attention even when all hell breaks loose around them; Brosnan is too recessive and fidgety a presence to muster that same kind of charisma, and he’s all but subsumed by the film’s cacophony. Still, he looks awfully good when he’s double-fisting machine guns, and his “Oh well, I’ll just roll with this” attitude allows us to enjoy Tomorrow Never Dies for what it is: a perpetual action machine that occasionally reminds us that we’re watching a James Bond movie. ■
