Tomorrow Never Dies was the first Eon Productions Bond film to be produced without Albert Broccoli, who passed away after the release of GoldenEye. Broccoli left behind a legacy that continues to this day and he helped to create a film genre that has become Hollywood’s most lucrative, and he created a tent pole franchise to which all others should be measured. But the franchise moved on without him, and the first film to be released after his death is a decidedly mixed bag of terrific action sequences and sloppy storytelling.

It actually starts off with a very good hook. In fact, Tomorrow Never Dies has one of the few prologues that sets up the rest of the film. Bond is surveying a terrorist arms bazaar, and that’s where we see Henry Gupta purchasing a GPS encoder that will help to set in motion the series of events that will eventually have Bond spring into action. The action in this sequence is awesome, as Pierce Brosnan continues his polished version of Bond, and never seems to be stressed out as the bullets fly around him, and he’s forced to steal a Russian jet so that it’s nuclear weapons won’t go off when the military ordered air strike hits.

A few scenes later, the GPS encoder is used to lure a British battleship into Chinese waters. A stealth battle ship then sinks the ship and shoots down a Chinese MiG, so that the two sides blame each other and international tensions can be lifted bringing the two countries to the verge of World War III. Behind all of this is Elliot Carver, a British media mogul who leads the next morning’s paper with the headline about British sailors being murdered and is manipulation these international events in order to expand his global media empire. M tells Bond that he has 48 hours, the amount of time that it will take the British fleet to reach the South China Sea, the investigate what’s going on and prevent a possible war.

This is classic Bond material, and sets up a story with incredibly high stakes that should be dripping with tension. The main problem with this film after that, to be perfectly frank, is a poorly written script. Much of Carver’s dialogue is on the nose and over the top. Jonathan Pryce took the over the top feel of the dialogue and took it even further in his acting. It almost felt like Pryce had been waiting his whole life to play a super-villain, and he was going to get every last drop out of it that he could. And I love Jonathan Pryce as an actor. Don’t get me wrong, but his acting in this film feels like the stereotypical super villain acting from an Austin Powers film or an SNL sketch. There are moments where he turns down the camp, and his character actually does become more menacing, but he’s so overblown throughout the majority of the picture that it’s just too hard to take him seriously as a villain.

And that is ultimately where the film fails. There are a lot of moving parts to a Bond film, but they can survive a lot of imperfections. One thing a Bond film cannot survive is a weak or ineffectual villain. Without a strong villain the rest of story falls flat. That’s really true of any film of any kind. The most important role is the one of the antagonist. Without the antagonist there is no conflict and without conflict there is no story. That’s Storytelling 101. It’s basic. It’s the one thing that has been consistent in all Bond films. Not every villain has been memorable, but every villain to this point has been effective. Elliot Carver is the least effective villain to this point in the series. Even the henchman Stamper is flat and uninteresting. Then when the plan comes more into focus and Carver’s main plan is to control the flow of information world wide feels too abstract. It’s an interesting idea, but they had to do too much explaining through dialogue which was famously satirized in The Incredibles when they talk about villains doing too much “monologuing”, which is exactly what happened in this film.

The Bond girl situation in Tomorrow Never Dies is interesting as well, as it uses motifs from earlier bond films with mixed degrees of success. At first it seems like Teri Hatcher is going to be the bond girl playing former Bond girlfriend and current wife of Carver, Paris Carver. But like Andrea in The Man With the Golden Gun, she is killed by her lover when he realizes that she’s betraying him to Bond. What’s unfortunate about it is that she’s killed before we really get a chance to care about her so that her death does little to create an emotional response or to advance the story. In fact, the would-be assassin Dr. Kaufman is played in a comedic way by Vincent Schiavelli, who is a comic character actor that you’d recognize as soon as you see him. What follows Bond’s discovery of Paris’ body is a bunch of witty banter between Bond and Kaufman while Paris’ dead body lies on the bed. Even Bond’s reaction to the site of his dead lover is muted, and considering Bond’s history of losing women he was unable to protect, whether it was Traci or Andrea or Jill Masterson, there was a missed opportunity for Bond’s darker side to emerge in a much more emotionally powerful way.

The motif of the second Bond girl harkens back to The Spy Who Loved Me and Anya Amasova. Like Amasova was an agent for the Soviets, Wai Lin is an agent for this film’s adversarial government the Chinese. Bond didn’t kill her lover in the beginning, but they’re competing to solve the conspiracy at first, before eventually working together. Played by martial arts master Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) Wai Lin is a strong Bond girl who clearly turns out to be Bond’s equal, until he rescues her during the film’s climax. But for the most part, she has moments where she rescues him, where she outsmarts him, and where he could not possibly do without her. She might not be the most beautiful Bond girl, but she’s the best fighter and the most resourceful and most independent of any Bond girl, and she deserves to be rated in the top ten of any Bond girl list.

One of the fun things about Tomorrow Never Dies is that there is a lot of not-so-subtle sexual innuendo, especially in the first act of the film. Moneypenny interrupts Bond’s linguistics lesson that was more of a romp and proceeds to tell him that she always found him to be a “cunning linguist”. Then there’s a scene a few minutes later when it’s revealed that Carver is now married to Paris, a former girlfriend of Bond’s, M tells him to “pump her for information”. As if that hammer that hit us over the head wasn’t heavy enough, Moneypenny then responds, “You’ll just to decide how much pumping is needed, James.” It’s all a reminder that if nothing else, this is a franchise that refuses to take itself too seriously and that attitude has helped keep the series from becoming too pretentious and has allowed it to remain popular.

Overall, this is a film that missed the mark in a lot of places, but makes up for it with some of the best action sequences in the series. What I think this film is, is a great example of 90’s film making where action films especially lacked any story and whatever story there was, was there to get you from one action sequence to the next. Clearly, the Bond franchise was not immune to a trend that would plague most action films in the latter half of that decade. Ultimately it’s a shallow film  that has decent entertainment value but little else.