Tomorrow Never Dies

The second Brosnan Bond outing is the beginning of the end of this series. Here is where the cracks in the house of Bond become less like quirky issues and more like glaring evidence of the dilapidated state of the house.

Tomorrow Never Dies opens with Bond thwarting some sort of Russian arms deal, making a quip and a pun in within the first 20 minutes (ugh). However the bad guys get away with a decoder, a classic piece of 1997 technology

It’s later revealed that the decoder is vital to who I lovingly refer to as evil Steve Jobs, a media mogul and grade A megalomaniac. ESJ (Evil Steve Jobs) has a dastardly and complex plan to incite war between China and England by antagonizing them and covering his tracks with the decoder. He does all of this in order to provide coverage of the unfolding event and increase his power and wealth.

Bond is tasked to investigate the sinking of an English battleship and finds ESJ’s plan. With the help of Chinese agent Wai Lin, Bond goes to China to stop ESJ and his subsequent plan for war.

Like I said in this intro, the issues in GoldenEye that annoyed me begin to upset me and make me laugh in Tomorrow Never Dies. The writing, the plots, and the Brosnan get slightly more dumb here.

The writing is still bad, but here is where they begin to make scenes up so Brosnan can make Puns (or at least I suspect that what they do). Example: when he kills a dude in a printing press and says “They’ll print anything these days”. It got to the point where I began to mark every instance he made a joke, and it ended up being nearly half of his dialogue. One can only make so many jokes before he becomes a joke himself.

Brosnan is just not good here. His interactions with any and every villain are composed in a way that made to seem like he might not succeed, which is how it should be based on his actions and competence. Yet he always prevails due to his wacky overly specific gadgets and sheer luck. He just doesn’t seem good at his job.

Michelle Yeoh is wasted as she could have been a female counterpart to Bond’s “suave spy”. However she is relinquished to yet another Bond Woman and is less pf a badass and more of another, slightly more talented, prize to conquer. It’s utterly disappointing, but unfortunately expected.

Tomorrow Never Dies is problematic to say the least. The only things I liked were the over the top ESJ and the car scene chase in the parking garage with his remote control BMW (seen here)