- Tomorrow Never Dies represents James Bond's big excursion into the mid-1990's information age, which means that Bond (Pierce Brosnan) must face off against GPS hacking, satellite networks, and a dastardly media mogul named Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce). Not content merely to print the news, Carver has decided to create it from whole cloth by fooling England and China into going to war over a set of false coordinates and a stolen missile. Incidentally, Carver's wife Paris (Teri Hatcher) used to date Bond, which seems like a pretty big coincidence until you realize that Bond has slept with about half of the world's population. Anyway, spy mastermind M (Judi Dench) smells a rat in Carver media and sends Bond to, as she puts it, pump Carver's wife for information.
- While all of this sounds like a pretty standard Bond plot, Tomorrow Never Dies adds an excellent new ingredient in the form of Bond's Chinese counterpart, Colonel Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh). With no disrespect intended to Brosnan and his predecessors, Yeoh is a much better physical performer than any of the Bond actors, running up walls and kicking badguys around like they're soccer balls. (Yeoh apparently did all of her own stunts and is one of the few action performers who never looks like she's pulling her punches.) She's also treated as respectfully as any woman in the series, which means that she refuses Bond's advances until the very end of the film when they inevitably make out on a boat. Surely you didn't expect the filmmakers to overhaul the franchise's entire formula, right?
- Although Tomorrow Never Dies' opening scenes feature a great abundance of explosions, its best action sequence is certainly the motorcycle chase through Saigon, in which Bond and Lin are handcuffed together while riding the same bike. To director Roger Spottiswoode's great credit, it looks like that's really happening despite the fact that such a feat would be incredibly dangerous in real life. While Pryce does his best with the villain role, Carver is not the most memorable Bond baddie, and his henchmen (Götz Otto, Ricky Jay) leave almost no impression at all, although Vincent Schiavelli gets in a funny scene as an executioner embarrassed by his employer's requests. Desmond Llewelyn delivers his usual humorous tirade, despite the fact that his gadgets are upstaged by those of Wai Lin. Joe Don Baker, in the role he was born to play, provides the film's obnoxious American.
