Tomorrow Never Dies
Dir: Roger Spottiswoode
1997
***
Roger Spottiswoode was an odd choice of director for Tomorrow Never Dies, the eighteenth Bond film of the franchise. He had made some great films before 1997 including Straw Dogs and 48 Hrs but he'd also made Turner & Hooch, Shoot to Kill and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, none of which would suggest he was suitable for the job. His direction is adequate at best, without anything in particular that really makes the film stand out. Every Bond film to this point had something memorable about it, whether you liked the film or not, it would have a stunt, a line of dialogue or a certain character you'd remember but with Tomorrow Never Dies you have to give it some thought. However, Tomorrow Never Dies has what is probably the best Bond villain ever written. Elliot Carver is a powerful media mogul who controls politics and world events through his media outlets. He's basically Rupert Murdoch, although the producers try to make it as clear as possible that he is actually based on Robert Maxwell, but I don't believe a word of it. So how does such a great character make it into a rather dull story with a forgettable script? Elliot Carver and his idea of world domination was written by the brilliant Nicholas Meyer, everything else was written by Donald E. Westlake (a brilliant writer but totally wrong for Bond) and Bruce Feirstein (completely wrong for Bond, although his script for The World is Not Enough is pretty good). It's a case of inappropriately different styles of writing coming together and not working. Meyer's intelligent ideas are clear, Westlake's take on Bond doesn't quite fit his writing style, as brilliant as it is, it just didn't work here and many of the actors voiced their disappointment when reading the script. Feirstein's humor is also obvious and often falls flat, although the scene featuring the assassin Dr. Kaufman (played by the late great Vincent Schiavelli) is clearly his work and is one of the highlights of the film. Some of the worst elements of the film come from the fact that the Bond girls are so poorly written. I feel sorry for both Michelle Yeoh and Teri Hatcher as neither had great scripts or characters they could do anything with, it seems that the producers merely relied on their popularity at the time to win the audiences over, which is such a shame given the advance of female roles seen in GoldenEye. As much as I like him, I'm not sure Jonathan Pryce was right for his character either and to me it seemed that Brosnan was still trying to work out how he wanted to portray Bond and still not quite getting it right. Gotz Otto's henchman Richard Stamper is almost a carbon copy of Andreas Wisniewski's Necros seen in The Living Daylights, which in my opinion only highlights my belief that Timothy Dalton's first film had reinvented the franchise and Brosnan's had taken the characters films back two steps and it was now treading water. I did love the theme music though and I think Sheryl Crow's song is the last great original 007 song, everything since sounding forcibly Bondish. A key opportunity the new producers had to really make their mark on the film was in the title. All of Ian Flemming's titles had been used, it was decided that, in reference to the newspaper Carver owns in the film (Tomorrow) and also inspired by the Beatles song 'Tomorrow Never Knows', that Tomorrow Never Lies would be the best title. It makes sense and I think it works. However, there was a typo on a fax sent to MGM and even though they knew about the mistake, they decided to go with it anyway, even though it makes no sense, they thought it sounded better. This lack of thought runs through the whole film and shows the ugly side of what a franchise really is, uncreative producers trying their best to make money.