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| Bond in freefall. How apt. |
The script is
arguably one of the weakest Bond scripts ever.
There is so much painfully clunky
exposition from the very beginning. All the books and articles about TND describe a ‘troubled production’ –
spin for absolute fucking chaos behind the scenes – and it really shows when
actors are saying things like “He
practically invented techno-terrorism” and “Able to topple
governments with a single broadcast”. One suspects some of the later drafts
were, in fact, written in crayon.
Oh my God, who
hired Teri Hatcher?
She’s woefully miscast as someone
who has a deep emotional connection with our favourite secret agent. Instead,
she phones it in. From a hillside with a dodgy signal, presumably. And why did
she need to get her be-knickered bottom out and show off her suspenders? It’s boorish,
classless and seedy. “What’s the matter, James? Did I get too close?” Nobody
cares, Teri.
Michelle Yeoh on
the other hand...
She is a revelation: tough and
independent, the banter between her and Bond is genuinely enjoyable, and she
knows one end of the gun from the other. The strongest Bond girl since Anya
Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me.
Occasionally
brutal.
There are a few nice touches of badass
Bond in TND and at least gives us
hope that director Roger Spottiswoode is trying to keep a cruel and clinical
edge to the central character. The way Bond knifes a baddie squarely in the
chest at the start of stealth boat assault – and especially Elliott Carver’s
death at the hands of his own drilly thing – are a throwback to Connery’s Bond,
and this is no bad thing.
Rely on Pierce
Brosnan to fuck up an accent.
Remember in Goldeneye when Bond rocks up to the Casino in his DB5, he
greets the valet with a mangled “Bon
soir, Pierre, ça va bien?” That’s nothing to his terrible ‘Mein Büro hat ein Auto reserviert”
in the airport in this film. I got a C at GCSE German and even I could do
better than that. All that money and they couldn’t get that any better?
Reprehensible
plot holes.
At the end, aboard the stealth
boat, Carver is in full flow with his ‘I-may-as-well-tell-you-all-my-maniacal-plans’
speech and Bond takes Gupta hostage and demands the return of Wai Lin because
her and Bond are going to ‘finish it together’. Carver shoots Gupta and Bond
blows everything up, not even caring about her. The
whole thing is just nonsense – and there are far too many of these foggy
interludes.
Odd choice of
locations.
We’re not bowled over by exotic
vistas but Hamburg looks nice enough. I might go there one day.
Who did they want
to play Carver before they hired Jonathan Pryce?
He looks like a desperate
last-minute booking in place of the actor they really wanted. I have never ever seen an actor so obviously phoned
on a Friday afternoon and told to report to set the next Monday morning. And
the worst thing is, Pryce is not a terrible actor, but even he can’t pull off
the material given to him. He’s not sinister at all but he tries, bless him, overacting
as if his pay check depended on it. Notable mention must go to his terrible
typing-acting while writing headlines on his big screen. Just like with
Pierce’s accents, couldn’t they have done something to make it better?!
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| Put it away, love |
Needless and lazy
puns abound.
And they don’t even really work
95% of the time. “You’ll have to kiss it off”, “You always were a cunning
linguist”, “It’s amazing what they’ll print these days” are among the worst
offenders.
Easily one of the
best things about this film is the soundtrack.
David Arnold really hits the
ground running with his first Bond score. It’s lush, brash and sophisticated
when so much of the rest of the film isn’t. The pre-credits sequence, the car
park chase and the helicopter flight into Saigon are strikingly good, but it’s
the kd lang song over the closing titles that steals the show,
soundtrack-wise. I have ranted elsewhere on this blog (
here, in fact) about my theory that kd
lang’s Surrender was replaced as the main theme by Sheryl Crow only because the
latter was more bankable. Good job, David.
Very
well-executed chase sequences.
The set-piece action scenes are
one of TND’s strongest features. The
pre-credit sequence, the printworks chase, the car park chase and the motorbike
chase through Saigon are rollicking good fun. Yet again, the Bond stunt team
show their worth to the franchise. Oh, and the banner surfing down the side of
Carver’s skyscraper is pretty neato as well.
Explain to me
what Dr Kaufman is for, please.
I suspect that he was a good idea
on paper: a creepy and evil doctor of death. The on-screen result is altogether
more pantomime-ish and weirdly pitiful. And for someone so apparently skilled
at killing, he looks like he can’t even hold a pistol properly. Thank God his
death was swift and cold-blooded. I couldn‘t have stood much more of that.
Really? Is that
how Bond behaves ‘under cover’, insulting and provoking his host?
At the Hamburg channel launch, Bond
comes across as a right dick when he meets Elliott Carver. We know Carver’s the
bad guy, Bond knows he’s the bad guy but Bond is unnecessarily provocative and
doesn’t behave like the banker he is supposed to be. Think back to when Bond
met Auric Goldfinger at the golf club. It was sparky and understated. He didn’t
get all up in his shit and then make lazy jibes. Yet again, TND lets itself down by its inelegance.
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| "Don't go for second best, baby..." |
Did you know?
Nichola McAuliffe – Sheila
Sabatini in the excellent 90s medical sitcom Surgical Spirit – is the voice of Bond’s BMW. You’re welcome.
Is it me or is
Pierce Brosnan ‘wider’ than he was in Goldeneye?
No, he is. The excellent book The Making of Tomorrow Never Dies by
Garth Pearce quotes his personal trainer, Richard Smedley: “Pierce was about 20lb heavier than in Goldeneye
and he wanted a strong look”. The sort of strong look brought about by...
pies?
End titles. kd lang
to finish, saving the best for last (see above).
So what
conclusions can we reach about Tomorrow Never Dies?
It has buckets of promise and
delivers occasionally, but is let down by a patronising script and a leaky
plot. Too often, I found myself wincing at the dialogue. The action sequences
are top notch. It’s just a whopping shame about the bits in between.
And I never got round to discussing...
i)
Carver never changing his shirty-coaty thing;
ii)
All the now-famous actors on board the British
ships (half the cast of Downton Abbey and Gerard Butler); and
iii) Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer acting together
as if As Time Goes By doesn’t even
exist!
Do you agree with my review? Let me know below or on the
Twitter.
