Bond 18: Tomorrow Never Dies (1999)

Director: Roger Spottiswoode

Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Jonathan Pryce, Michelle Yeoh, Teri Hatcher

More info: IMDB

Tagline: The Man. The Number. The License...are all back.

Plot: James Bond heads to stop a media mogul's plan to induce war between China and the UK in order to obtain exclusive global media coverage.

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again? No.


Well, at least it's better than GOLDENEYE (1995), right? Right, but not by much. My same gripes from that one apply to this one except...

The FANTASTIC score by David Arnold. After that last abomination they decided to find a real life film composer with a reverence to John Barry's style and themes. Arnold clearly knows Barry's work and even though his Bond scores are more complicated than Barry's, you can feel Barry's influence throughout. His love theme is marvelous and one of the best of the series.


The opening theme song by Sheryl Crow is good. I like it but what you probably don't know is Arnold wrote a kick ass song in which he incorporated its theme into the score throughout the film. K.D. Lang knocks the shit out of it. It's got that Shirley Bassey/Goldfinger vibe to it that kicks Crow's song's ass up and down the block. But the producers felt that Lang wasn't hip enough with the kids and wasn't as marketable as Crow so her song got pushed to the end credits. I've often wondered how much different/better the opening credits would have been with her song instead...But wait! Someone married the two together so we can see!

And then there's the scene where Bond is drinking vodka and having a moment of reflection. He's clearly troubled and it's one of the few moments in the franchise where we get anything like this...and this is the 18th official film! It's sad that there's been so little character development with Bond over the course of 18 movies.


Those aspects are incredible but they aren't enough to save another film with an over the top villain, crazy set pieces that aren't believable and yet another villain hideout that blows up at the end. It's going to take three more pictures before the producers ground a film in reality for the first time since probably FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (1981) and even though CASINO ROYALE will earn the biggest box office of them all, they'll fuck it up bigtime and go back to being stupid for the sequel. Idiots.

Scorethefilm will return with his thoughts on...

The World Is Not Enough (1999)