The franchise never dies
- Review By:
- tpb
- Date:
- February 1, 2009
- Movie:
- Tomorrow Never Dies
- Director:
- Roger Spottiswoode
- Released:
- 1997
- Good Guy:
- James Bond
- Played By:
- Pierce Brosnan
- Bad Guy:
- Elliot Carver
- Played By:
- Jonathan Pryce
- MPAA Rating:
- PG-13
- Family Friendly Ages:
- Young teens
You'd think by now, forty-six years after 'Dr. No', the Bond franchise would have fizzled and died. Thankfully, not yet. Unfortunately, though, Pierce Brosnan has left the role of 007 to a new crop of Bond impersonators. Brosnan, like Sean Connery, has just the right balance of strength, wit, callousness, brutality, intelligence, and sex appeal to comprise the perfect James Bond. He delivers his post-kill quips without the stand-up comedy of a Roger Moore, or the too-hard edge of a Timothy Dalton. Brosnan and Connery have it all as Bond... the rest are perfectly adequate at carrying the story and using the gadets; foiling the megalomaniacal evil world dominator wannabe and getting the girl; and rubbing elbows with the upper crust and sneaking into the impenetrable fortress. But Brosnan and Connery bring a certain "je ne sais quoi" to the role. A certain carelessness that makes getting the girl seem only slightly more important than saving the world.
In "Tomorrow Never Dies" Brosnan is out to save the world, yet again, and ends up getting two girls in the process, Paris Carver (Teri Hatcher) and Wei Lin (Michelle Yoh). Hatcher appeared as a character on a "Seinfeld" episode in 1993 where she said "They're real, and they're spectacular!" She plays the sophisticated, gentile, eye-candy love interest. Yoh, who starred as a martial arts expert opposite Jackie Chan that same year in "Supercop" (1993), plays the capable, hellion, secret agent love interest. They are both spectacular.
Jonathan Pryce is the evil villain Elliot Carver, a Rupert Murdoch-Robert Maxwell composite, who seems to be enjoying himself immensely as he carries out his fiendish plans surrounded by banks of television monitors and murals of himself. Ricky Jay is Henry Gupta, the evil villian's uber-techno-competant lackey and Gotz Otto is Stamper, the evil villian's ultra-sadistic, nazi, sidekick, head of security. Together, as they have done in various incarnations of these same characters in the twenty-two plus Bond movies that have been made over the last half century, they manage to employ thousands of highly-trained idiotic mercenaries who, though they cannot seem ever to shoot anyone but their own kind, are only too willing to die for world domination.
It's not necessary to review the plot details in "Tomorrow Never Dies". It's all Bond all the time. It's a little shaky and a little stirring - and that's exactly what makes it so appealing. And while Daniel Craig may not be the best Bond ever, so what?
