TOMORROW NEVER DIES

“The name is Bond. James Bond,” intones Agent 007 (Pierce Brosnan), who is posing as a banker, as he introduces himself to international media mogul-terrorist Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce), whom he meets in Carver’s media headquarters in Hamburg, Germany during an exclusive cocktail party held to launch Carver’s new 24-hour worldwide news network. As the longest-running film franchise in cinematic history, beginning with DR. NO (starring Sean Connery) in 1962, Producer Albert R. Broccoli’s James Bond films have a very predictable story formula with spectacular action scenes, advanced technical gadgetry and a glamorous love interest.

According to MGM-UA publicists, TOMORROW NEVER DIES is the eighteenth installment of the James Bond film series, with 1995’s GOLDENEYE grossing the highest profit of any James Bond film. In TOMORROW NEVER DIES, 007 must save the world from certain domination by evil media mogul Elliott Carver, who hatches a devious scheme to profit from the deluge of publicity stemming from the sinking of a British ship in the South China Sea. Carver boasts that his company, CMGN, will tell tomorrow’s news today. What he doesn’t say is that CMGN operatives incite the international incident in the first place, and that he intends to use his global satellite network for world domination.

As the movie opens, British Intelligence Officer, Agent M (Dame Judi Dench), joins other high-ranking US military intelligence officers as they watch a high-tech camera view of an international terrorist weapons bazaar in Siberia which Agent 007 is commissioned to destroy. M points out the evil American mercenary, Henry Gupta (Ricky Jay), who makes deals with various black market weapons dealers, but who escapes as 007 launches his one-man high-tech attack on the black market, blowing up some of the equipment and escaping in the only Russian jet unscathed by the mayhem, seconds before an American nuclear cruise missile blows up the area. Bond flies the jet away, but finds himself strangled by a terrorist hiding in the jet’s back seat. He ditches the assailant by ejecting him from the back seat and flies the jet home.

Bond returns to London, where British Agent Moneypenny recruits him for yet another highly dangerous assignment. Bond must foil the evil scheme by which international media mogul-terrorist Elliott Carver is trying to foment a world war by dispatching his and mysterious renegade Chinese General Chan’s soldiers to carry out a phony Chinese attack on a British warship in the South China Sea. Carver’s high-tech weapon du jour: a stealth ship, which conventional radar cannot detect, which launches a battleship-gutting boring torpedo, which bores through the metal armor of the British Frigate and sinks it within minutes.

First, of course, Bond must single-handedly distract Carver at his Hamburg, Germany headquarters of CMGN. He meets Q (Desmond Llewelyn), who teaches him briefly how to operate Q’s latest techno gadget: a new BMW which resists attack from almost any weapon short of a direct nuclear hit. As Bond attends the glamorous media network launching party, a team of goons tries to break and enter the BMW in which he has placed the all-important signal scrambler, which sent the British ship off course. They try every means possible, including hitting the windshields with a nine-pound sledge hammer, but the Beemer’s windshield’s stays intact. Bond beds Carver’s wife, who is his former lover, and escapes Carver’s HEADQUARTERS building unscathed as six submachine-gun shooting thugs fire at him, and, miraculously, miss him completely. However, he hits them all! In a German parking garage, Bond defeats another group of Carver’s thugs in a canny pyrotechnic display as he escapes, sitting in the back seat of his Beemer using remote control and computer-simulated visual guidance.

Of course, Bond has to team up with a glamorous female lead to defeat the bad guys. This time, she is Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh), a nimble, martial arts expert agent of the People’s External Security Force in Beijing, China’s equivalent of the British Secret Service. Wai Lin helps Bond escape from an impossible ambush in China, betrays him, then reconciles with him, as they work together to defeat the overwhelming evil of Carver’s CMGN conspiracy. Wai Lin is different from other Bond leading ladies in that she is not just adornment ( she holds her own in fights with the perpetrators and teams up with him in the battle to win the day.

With stunning action sequences and with lots of violence, TOMORROW NEVER DIES fulfills the James Bond audience’s expectations for an action adventure formula movie with intriguing gadgetry and a creative premise. Thirty-five years after DR. NO, the first James Bond thriller, even the film’s producer admits that it is becoming more and more difficult to top the last Bond film’s dramatic impact. Taking over from Timothy Hutton in 1989’s A LICENCE TO KILL, Pierce Brosnan is the fifth James Bond to play the part in 35 years. With his suave, sophisticated manner, Brosnan lends an appealing and urbane, if somewhat unemotional persona to the world’s longest running cinematic character. However, Beware of extensive violence, and Bond’s philandering, both implied and depicted.