Movie Review: Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

The 18th James Bond movie adventure maintains the momentum regained by the series re-boot that GoldenEye provided. The action is sustained, the characters dynamic, the humour appropriately dry, and the set-pieces deliver. The package may be familiar, but Tomorrow Never Dies nevertheless provides shiny entertainment with creative touches.

Megalomaniac media tycoon Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) has a simple plan for world domination: create the news and be the first to report on it. He deploys his resources to build a combat stealth warship, and he hires master criminals Henry Gupta (Ricky Jay) and Stamper (Gotz Otto) to do his dirty work. Gupta has in his illegal possession a highly coveted piece of American military hardware that allows him to manipulate satellite signals, and Carver uses this gizmo to trick a British warship into straying into Chinese territorial waters, sparking a bloody international incident that threatens to erupt into World War Three. A side-benefit to Carver's war plan is the decapitation of the Chinese leadership, the installation of a Carver-picked new leader, and securing exclusive Chinese broadcast rights for his media empire.

Both the British and the Chinese intelligence services send in their agents in the form of James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) and Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) to foil the plan. Bond is re-acquainted with an old flame called Paris (Teri Hatcher), who is now Mrs. Carver. After Paris pays the ultimate price for betraying her husband, Bond and Lin start to work together to bring down Carver's empire and to fight off the countless goons on Carver's payroll, including the sadistic Stamper. They also need to stop Carver from launching a massive killer missile that the Chinese will blame on the British.

Tomorrow Never Dies does suffer from an overtly cartoonish villain. Jonathan Pryce as Elliot Carver quickly steps into over-the-top histrionic territory, and makes no attempt at cultivating quiet nuance or controlled menace as the evil mastermind. Carver is outright nuts, and he is totally nuts from his first scene. Also blatant is the BMW-obsessed product placement, with the Munich firm supplying both Bond's four-wheel and two-wheel rides.

But the weaknesses are easily outweighed by the strengths of the movie, and Tomorrow Never Dies enjoys some terrific highlights. The pre-credit sequence with Bond spying on a terrorist arms bazaar is gritty and explosive. Bond navigating his BMW by remote control in a multi-level parkade while being chased by bad guys armed with machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades is ridiculously fun. And the best sequence features Bond and Lin handcuffed together in Vietnam, having to escape by motorcycle from Carver's henchmen and a killer helicopter.

Roger Spottiswoode directs with a light touch, complemented by brisk but seamless editing work and excellent use of the Bond theme music. Two years after his Bond debut in GoldenEye, Brosnan is fully into his stride as the smooth agent, effortlessly dispatching enemies and seducing ladies. Michelle Yeoh holds her own opposite Brosnan's Bond, matching him in innovative combat and steely-eyed determination.

Tomorrow Never Dies does not stress the intellect, but it does celebrate Bond at his action-packed best in the spy series that never ends.

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Movie Review: The World Is Not Enough (1999)

The strongest Bond chapter with Pierce Brosnan in the role, The World Is Not Enough benefits from locales that are gritty rather than glamorous, two suitably dangerous villains, and a plot that, within Bond's context, remains grounded and actually makes some sense.

Directed by veteran Michael Apted, The World Is Not Enough features brisk but controlled pacing, rational editing and a complex, multi-faceted conspiracy.  Sir Robert King, an oil tycoon and a friend of M (Judi Dench), is assassinated right inside the MI6 headquarters in London.  Bond heads out to the oil fields of Central Asia to protect King's daughter Elektra (Sophie Marceau), who has inherited his empire and may be the next victim.  Elektra had already survived a kidnapping masterminded by Soviet terrorist Menard (Robert Carlyle), but that does not stop her from becoming Bond's latest bed companion, although it's not clear in this case if he is the seducer or the seduced.

Bond soon uncovers a Menard plot to steal a nuclear bomb with the intention of triggering an explosion that disrupts global oil supplies. As M gets personally involved, Elektra is revealed to be not all that she seems, and Bond needs to save his boss, eliminate two evil masterminds, and stop the destruction of a major oil pipeline node.

The venturing of M into the danger zone, and her kidnapping as the drama unfolds, provides Judi Dench with her biggest role yet in a Bond movie.  While this is welcome from the film's perspective, it is highly unlikely that the head of MI6 would ever get anywhere near as personally involved.

Denise Richards as Dr. Christmas Jones, a nuclear physicist who helps Bond, is unfortunate at so many levels.  Richards as an actress is never more than eye candy, and stuffing her into tight shorts and mid-riff baring tank tops at every opportunity does nothing to dispel the theory that casting her in a ultra-brainy role was a joke that missed its target.

The World Is Not Enough survives these less than perfect moments thanks to the unusual real-world intensity of the unfolding drama and the effective, seductive menace that Marceau brings to her role as Elektra King.  Bond has rarely had to tangle with women as strategically powerful, evil, and conniving as Elektra, and she is a welcome upgrade compared to the interchangeable men that typically pull the strings of the nefarious plots.

The World Is Not Enough is Bond at his best, one of the rare instances where the series pulls together its best elements, dumps most of the diversions, and delivers hard-nosed entertainment.

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Movie Review: Die Another Day (2002)

Just like it did in Moonraker in 1979, the James Bond series takes a very wrong turn towards the outer reaches of technological boundaries, stretching what is already an incredible premise into the realm of the ridiculous.

Die Another Day, the 20th Bond movie adventure, features human recreation using DNA technology; an invisible car; a battle between two cars packed with enough missiles to obliterate a small country; a killer satellite capable of zapping earth with laser weapons; and a most awful computer-generated Bond escape involving surfing with a parachute. Bond is always expected to be outlandish; Die Another Day unintentionally crosses into the territory of cheesy science fiction, and the cheese does not smell so good.

In Pierce Brosnan's fourth and final outing as Bond, he is captured, held prisoner and tortured in North Korea.  Exchanged for another spy, Bond is deactivated by MI6 and strikes out on his own to seek revenge on those who betrayed him.

His quest leads him from London to Cuba and then on to Iceland and back to North Korea, all on the trail of Sir Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens), a mysterious and wealthy diamond baron intricately connected to bad guys from the secretive North Korean regime.  MI6 agent Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike) has already infiltrated Graves' organization and is working with M (Judi Dench) using less lethal tactics than Bond.  Also pursuing Graves is the agent known as Jinx (Halle Berry), who both hinders and helps Bond before she finally teams up with him to bring down Graves. Jinx and Frost take turns sharing Bond's bed, as he wastes no time making up for the female deprivation he suffered during his time as a guest of North Korea's prison system.

Graves as a villain is exaggerated to comic book proportions.  The dialogue exchanges between Bond and Jinx are embarrassingly sophomoric.  And Frost is one of the blandest ladies ever to catch Bond's attention.  Director Lee Tamahori brings a couple of interesting artistic touches with effective use of brief slow motion tactics, but mostly he seems to be lost among all the outrageous technology.  And both the opening sequence and the title song, by Madonna, are weak.

Die Another Day forced another reboot of the series with an new lead actor and a back-to-basics ethic in  Casino Royale (2006).  Some of the films in the series may be duds, but Agent 007 always lives to fight another day.

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Movie Review: GoldenEye (1995)

A full six years after the previous Bond film, GoldenEye represented a significant franchise re-boot. A new Bond (Pierce Brosnan), and new M (Judi Dench), and the first ever Bond movie set and released after the end of the Cold War.

It's a new world, and M does not think highly of Bond -- she calls him "a sexist, misogynist dinosaur", and "a relic of the Cold War." Still, when control of a Soviet-era military satellite system capable of destroying cities with an electromagnetic pulse falls into the wrong hands, M sends Bond after the mysterious Janus Crime Syndicate.

Janus turns out to be Alec Trevelyan, previously known as Agent 006 (Sean Bean), and formerly believed to have been killed while on a joint mission with Bond. Helping Trevelyan on his quest to destroy London is Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), who get orgasmic delight while killing people, particularly when she is suffocating her victims between her thighs during sex. Also among the bad guys is Soviet-era General Ourumov (Gottfried John) and techno-geek Boris Grishenko (Alan Cumming).

Meanwhile, Bond is getting help in and out of bed from Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco), a Russian computer programmer. Natalya repeatedly complains that Bond destroys every piece of machinery that he get close to, but that does not prevent her from falling into his arms at every opportunity.

The pursuit of the bad guys takes Bond from Monte Carlo to St. Petersburg, where he commandeers a tank to chase Ourumov through the city streets while being chased by countless army jeeps and police Ladas in one of the most fun chase sequences that the franchise has offered. The story reaches a climax at a hidden satellite control facility in Cuba, with the typical frequency and intensity of loud explosions.

Pierce Brosnan was born to be Bond, and he does not disappoint with his naturally suave persona easily slipping into the Bond world. Judi Dench gives M a new world spin, balancing the incompetence of analysts and accountants with the real threats to global stability. The rest of the cast has limited star power and the characters remain well within the thick lines of typical Bond villains and babes. As has become common, neither Scorupco nor Janssen were able to translate their Bond experience into significant international career success.

GoldenEye may not be a masterpiece, but it probably saved Bond from extinction -- and for that, secret agents and movie fans world-wide are grateful.

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Movie Review: Quantum of Solace (2008)

So here is the obvious little fact that seems lost to some movie-makers: when every scene is trying to be a highlight, none of them are.

The latest Bond movie is a mish-mash of attempted highlights, and they all fall into the been-there, done-that category: the car chase; the foot chase; the fight to the death in a hotel room; the boat chase; the airplane chase; the jump from an airplane without a parachute; the out-of-the-way high-tech building that explodes at the ho-hum climax of the movie. The scenes come one after the other at a dizzying pace with no attempt to take the time to build up any kind of thoughtful plot or character. We are left with a hodge-podge of ridiculous scenes that melt into one big mess of boring action.

Director Marc Forster does not help things at all in the editing room. His idea of introducing fake kinetic energy by micro-editing every scene, ensures that we never actually know what is going on. It is a lot easier to chop a scene into a million tiny incomprehensible edits than to actually plan an action scene into a truly visually stunning sequence. The lack of thought in the movie is therefore confounded by a lack of any truly stunning action moments, since no moment can actually be memorable if it lasts for all of 1/1,000th of a second.

So here are the broken pieces of the attempted story in Quantum of Solace: Bond (Daniel Craig) is still pursuing the shadowy evil organization Quantum that he was after in Casino Royale. He is a bit off-mission, since his attention seems to be just as focused on getting revenge on the killers of Vesper, his love interest from that Casino mission. Quantum has infiltrated the British Secret Service, so Bond and M (Judi Dench) do not know who to trust, as Bond runs around Europe and South America in search of the next chase scene.

This all leads to a Mr. Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a member of Quantum masquerading as a high flying environmental entrepreneur, whose latest scheme is to help overthrow the government of Bolivia, (with help from the CIA, naturally), in favour of ruthless military dictators in return for Quantum controlling a piece of desert -- below which runs the water supply for the whole country. Or something. The holes and unexplained developments are much larger than the plot itself, since the movie never actually pauses to give the unfolding story or any of the characters a chance to breathe.

The Bond girl, although remarkably there is neither sex nor even romance between her and Bond, is Bolivian secret agent Camille out to stop Greene from handing her country to the junta, but also pursuing her own revenge theme. As played by Olga Kurylenko, Camille is actually the most interesting thing about this movie. The airhead role goes to actress Gemma Arterton, playing an MI6 agent named, wait for it, Strawberry Fields. She does get into bed with Bond.

After the intense and emotionally involving Casino Royale, where the characters mattered and the plot was allowed to develop, this latest Bond outing is an unfortunate disappointment.






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