1997 - Tomorrow Never Dies
Alternate Title - Tomorrow Is Just A Newspaper
PG13 - 119 minutes
Director - Roger Spottiswoode
Stars - Pierce Brosnan, Jonathan Pryce, Michelle Yeoh, Teri Hatcher, Joe Don Baker, Judi Dench
The movie opens with a scene where the most obvious spy camera is watching a Russian missile exchange. The people in the exchange are surrounded by white snow but Bond has set up the blackest camera to watch them and it’s pretty close. Everyone should have seen it. The military decides to blow the place up and Bond must escape via a jet containing nuclear weapons. Of course, since this is an action movie, there must be a time limit for him to escape. Will he escape? Will he make it in time? What? Of course he fucking will. It’s James Bond and it’s the opening scene. He’s basically the one character in all of cinema history that is guaranteed to live through the movie. He has the opposite fate that every actor that plays Jesus has. They’re not going to kill Bond when they have a franchise to run. They should have given him other stakes than his life to play with in that sequence. Like escorting someone important out of there. At any rate the movie rips off Top Gun after Bond escapes. Cue the shitty song and weird metal women dancing around.
Yay! Another Bond movie that starts with a ship and a submarine. Basically the ship is a British ship that is supposedly 11 miles off of the Chinese coast so Chinese jets are warning the boat that if they do not surrender they will be attacked. The bad guys are aboard a black submarine, all wearing black. They send this teeth covered metal thing toward the ship so that the people aboard the ship think that the Chinese attacked them. The ship starts to sink but before they abandon ship they send a missile to blow up one of the jets. They then shoot the shit out of the survivors from the ship. They basically tricked everyone into starting a naval war. During this scene we are introduced to Elliot Carver who is an evil media mogul. He basically is an evil Steve Jobs. He wants to start a war between China and the UK so that he can have the exclusive media rights to the story. I’m willing to bet that Bond is totally cool with the plan and is going to ignore it.
There’s a delightful scene in which Bond and Q role-play. Bond needs to pickup a rental car in Germany and Q pretends to be working at Avis and makes him fill out the paperwork. Of course, it’s a gadget car instead of a regular car. I don’t know why they had to go through all of this trouble to just give him a car. This leads to all sorts of unanswered questions. Did Q have to go undercover as an Avis employee for a few months in order to work on his cover? Did he simply steal a red vest? Did he kill the person that was wearing said red vest? Why didn’t they just have Q pull up to the curb at the airport and give him the fucking keys? They went so far out of their way for a half-joke of Bond staring at the red vest and trying not to laugh.
Bond has to use Carter’s wife, Paris to get information about Carter. Despite being married she decides to bang Bond in under a second. This leads to Carter sending Paris to get information out of Bond which results in Bond having to have sex with the emotionless face of Lois Lane. Carter finds out that his wife previously knew Bond more than she let on. Lois Lane gives Bond information about Carver. Bond gives her nothing to work with. It’s a web of….rumors? I’m not sure what the hell happened.
One thing I love about Brosnan as Bond is the dude looks good while shooting a gun. He just appears to have more experience using firearms than the previous guys. It’s even evident in his opening sequence with that weird gun/eye thing that they all shoot and turns red. Roger Moore wasn’t even aiming at the camera when he fired, hitting nothing. But Brosnan shoots right at your goddamn eyes and they even added an awesome gunshot noise that matches how dead you should be if it were real. The only downside is that he’s always giving a smirk like, “Can you believe this shit?” Timothy Dalton was always serious and Brosnan is the flipside of that coin. Even when Bond finds the body of Paris he handles it like it’s a goddamn joke. This is, of course, before he makes out with her dead neck some more. Super creepy.
Bond does a wicked Halo jump from a jet which is just basically throwing yourself out of the plane with an oxygen tank and landing in the water after using your parachute for less than a second just before you hit the water. How anyone has ever survived it is beyond me. Personally, the Vietnamese would have found my body, wrapped in the parachute and floating just off the coast. He does this just over where the ship from the beginning crashed. When he gets inside the ship he finds that the girl, Wai Lin is already in there. I haven’t introduced her yet but the movie sure as shit has. She’s basically a random Chinese girl that keeps showing up to fuck up Bond’s plans. They are both captured by Carter’s henchmen and taken to his building. Once there, Carter tells them that words are the new weapon and that he will control the world with his news network. This is not how reality works. At any rate, Carter is 50 in this movie. What’s the fucking point of it at this age? His maximum range of power would be 20-25 years and most of that will be really shitty years because of his age. I never understand elderly villains. If it hasn’t happened by the time you’re in retirement years then just give up, dude. It’s not happening. You blew it.
It was starting to become painfully obvious that Wai Lin is Bond with a vagina. Jenny Bond? Jamilina Bondella? Janelle Boobs? These are starting to stray away from the original name. She has all sorts of gadgets and Bond looks at her like he finally understands that women are actually people instead of warm holes he can put his penis in. The next scene is them boarding the weird submarine from the beginning that looks like a floating building. They exchange dialogue about their plan in the most unnecessary fashion. They both know what they are doing. Undoubtedly they talked about it on the drive over. Yet, as we watch they both give specifics to each other when they both know the fucking information already. I hate lazy exposition. It gets worse when we cut to inside the submarine and Carter again tells us his evil plan. He informs them again that confusion will lead the UK and China to fight and he will be telling everyone on his privately controlled media network. This is about the fourth time he has told us. We fucking get it. Although, another theory is that maybe he’s starting to go senile. If that’s the case, cut those 20-25 years of ruling the media down to about 4 months. At the end of that time he won’t remember that he even has an empire. Instead he will think everyone he talks to is his family from long ago. He then seriously tells us the plot again. That makes twice…in the same scene. He’s losing his shit at an accelerating rate.
Once he thoroughly ruins the submarine’s resale value, Bond kills Carter by using the strange teeth covered torpedo thing from the beginning which would have turned Carter into a stain on the floor of the sub. The henchman dies because he’s too stupid to know that if the side of your shoe is stuck by something, you can still remove your foot from the shoe. At the end, Bond chooses to bone Wai Lin on a floating piece of submarine instead of being rescued by a British ship. Dude, you’re in the South Asian Sea. Get the fuck out of there. You can fuck on the boat!
Overall, it was decent. It was one of the shortest in the series which is good because it barely had enough plot to even fill the time it had. I liked it because it wasn’t about a villain with plans to blow up the world for some shitty reason. It was just about a guy that wanted to run his own news network and he liked to remind everyone about that fact about every 20 minutes or so. I’d say it’s worth watching but you never get a feel for anyone or anything in the movie. The only two character with enough screen time are Bond and Carter and they only talk about one thing; pussy and running a media empire. I’ll let you guess which one is which.