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Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)  Bond: Pierce Brosnan The Evil Mastermind: Jonathan Pryce as Elliot Carver The Henchperson: Gotz Otto as Stamper The Bond Girl: Michelle Yeoh as Wai Lin Director: Roger Spottiswoode IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120347/ Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndi2cSiSopg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ndi2cSiSopg Movie summed up in a quote: "No more absurd than starting a war for ratings." -James Bond (Tomorrow Never Dies) How do you capitalize on the success of "Goldeneye" after the box office disappointments of the Dalton movies? The answer is, of course, don't mess with that which is not broke. If you follow that thinking too carefully though, you end up making a movie that is not able to stand out as something that comes into its own. This is a very pedestrian Bond film, where the 007 formula is followed to the letter, without any attempt to do anything interesting or creative at all. The script really needed some polishing and the dialogue tends to be uninteresting and some of the jokes that are forgettable or aren't very good.There's also so much product placement that I half expected a google ad to slide from the bottom giving me intructions on how to order the item currently on display. If the script just followed all of the Bond trademarks without trying anything new, it might still be forgivable, but there's just too many illogical elements that start to get annoying after a while. Carver (Jonathan Pryce) is obsessed with camera surveillance, but doesn't have any security watching a room with a 300 million dollar satellite? His henchman thinks he has killed Bond, and doesn't even bother to check the body which falls right near to him, after failing to kill Bond on previous occasions. Or how about the villians reporting back that there is no way to break into Bond's car, and yet when a battle begins, they smash the windows with relative ease. Clearly, the laziness of this script is beyond the pale of being insulting to the average viewer. The other element of this movie is the heavy use of CGI to liven up the action sequences resulting in scenes that are facepalmingly bad. Two examples of this are the banner ripping scene (Wai Lin thought this would be a good escape plan because when the banner ripped, they would...what??), and the extremely ludicrous helicopter chase scene where the pilot flies the helicopter almost verticle to use the blades as a weapon. When you have a scene so far fetched from reality, then you just get pulled out of the moment regardless of the quality of the computer enhancement. This is a trend that develops in full force with this movie, and tends to get worse through the Brosnan era, culminating in the rediculous surfing scene in "Die Another Day". Even the Moore's Bond never did anything as incredulous as that.  Bond figures out how to enjoy two of his passions at the same time. As for the cast, Wai Lin (Yeoh) is able to fulfill her two main requisites, to clearly define all asian stereo types, and to be constantly be in need of rescuing to provide the screenwriters with a lazy excuse for plot development. Obviously Michelle Yeoh is capable of more but this is a Bond film, so you can't really ask for too much. We should be happy enough that she has something to do beyond being a being a pleasant distraction like Terri Hatcher is here. She makes the most of what she has been given, but there is zero character development in the script at all. Who is Wai Lin? - We will never find out. This movie would have been a lot more interesting if Wai Lin was the main focus, and Bond took the back seat for a change. Maybe they should have made a franchise out of Wai Lin instead of the aborted attempt to make a franchise out of Jinx (Die Another Day).  Carver's attempt to win "Britain's Got Talent" did not go as planned. Carver on the other hand is a rather tedious antagonist devoid of any interesting qualities. He is something of an enigma -it appears they were trying to create a facade that he was a closet homosexual with his effeminent mannerisms and bizarre shouting of things like "delicious!" when something bad happens. There was the faint idea that it would be entertaining if the main villian was a puppeteer pulling the strings from behind the scenes, but Carver doesn't make any attempt to do anything clever at all, and does his best to stay in the spotlight. The concept could have been interesting if Carver was a true genius, outthinking Bond at every step, but all he really manages to do is demonstrate his aspirations to be an outlandish poof. If he was even half as smart as he is purported to be, he would have made every effort to keep the conflict going as long as possible to milk as much media coverage as he could, instead of escalating things towards World War 3 -who is going to watch his programming when everyone is dead? Also the villian Chang (Who??..oh, yes, the villian who doesn't even bother to show up on screen) would have just sent the entire Chinese military fleet after Carver after siezing power. In reality, Carver isn't very bright at all - why does he only take one cruise missile, when he could have had more as a backup plan, or to defend himself when his plan is exposed??  Where upon Commander Bond shows her his junk. The exceedingly dull henchman is Stamper, who is completely disposable and lacking in anything of interest at all. The only interesting villian is Dr. Kaufman (Vincent Schiavelli) who plays a hilarious professional hitman, providing one of the only bright spots in the script. Here is a man who really believes in taking his time to murder someone in the right way, and he takes great pride in his work. He gets all the best lines, and it's a tremendously a funny scene, so I won't spoil it here. Interesting Trivia: The original title of the movie was "Tomorrow never lies", which ultimately makes more sense, given Carver's modus operendum. However, there was a careless typo in the screenplay that gave this movie its final name, giving credence to the illogical nature and lack of effort put into this steaming pile of celluloid. This is a pretty bad movie, and I don't really care for it. If you are a fan, you may like it, but for everyone else, beware. The Good: Michelle Yeoh is welcome, and there are some good action scenes, notably the chase scene where Bond and Wai Lin are handcuffed together. The Bad: This movie is burdened with a illogical and lackluster script that does little to make it stand out from the other Bond films. The Ugly: Gupta's non-stop Goon appeal. FINAL SCORE As a Bond Flick:   As a movie in general: Yabanjin fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Oct 14, 2009 |
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Oct 9, 2009 10:11
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 07:47 |
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