001. The plot

Media titan Rupert Mur-errr Elliot Carver plans to start World War 3 between China and the West, all so that he can gain global TV news rights and sell more newspapers. Like Lord Leveson with a licence to kill, Bond teams up with an agent of the Chinese Secret Service to stop a front page catastrophe in the making.

002. The villains

Jonathan Pryce is Carver, a media megalomaniac with the habit of creating the news rather than simply reporting on it. Equal parts Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch, and pantomime baddie, Carver is the sort of villain who’ll hack into your voicemails just so he can erase them and record a maniacal laugh in their place.

He’s assisted by Gotz Otto as muscular torture fetishist Herr Stamper, and Ricky Jay as bearded techno-whizz Henry Gupta, while Vincent Schiavelli is the darkly comic Dr. Kaufmann (who’s just a professional doing a job).

003: The girls

Michelle Yeoh is Wai Lin, the Chinese Secret Service agent who’s quickly presented as the female equivalent to Bond, right down to the storeroom full of gadgets and an ability to swiftly dispatch the agents from Carver’s rent-a-henchman mob.

Desperate Housewives star Teri Hatcher is Paris Carver, a thoroughly two-dimensional mid-film Bond girl (Hatcher later expressed her disappointment at how Paris was written). Despite a potentially interesting backstory with Bond, she serves as a beautiful plot-point more than a character, before being killed by her husband’s henchman Dr. Kauffman.

004. Best moments

The pre-title sequence in which Bond flies a set of nuclear missiles out of an exploding weapons fair is still one of the franchise’s most exhilarating and a fine slice of loud ‘90s action, setting the precedent for a film that rattles through the set pieces at a breakneck rate.

Bond remote-controlling his BMW, fisticuffs in a printing press, the handcuffed escape from Carver’s skyscraper and subsequent motorcycle chase on the streets and rooftops of Saigon all lead to a tense finale on Carver’s stealth ship.

005. Trivia

» Tomorrow Never Dies was initially titled ‘Tomorrow Never Lies’.

» Anthony Hopkins was originally cast as Carver, but was displeased that there was no finished script and walked away from production after just three days.

» Ricky Jay, who plays Henry Gupta, is a skilled magician and is an ace at chucking playing cards over long distances. In fact he’s the world record holder for the fastest throwing of playing cards.

» 15 BMW 750s were destroyed during production.

» Elliot Carver was originally called Elliot Harmsway. You can see why the scriptwriters changed it.

006. Quotes

» Stamper: ‘I owe you an unpleasant death, Mr Bond’

» Bond: ‘It won’t look like suicide if you shoot me from over there.’
Kauffman: ‘I am a professor of forensic medicine. Believe me Mr Bond, I could shoot you from Stuttgart und still create the proper effect.’

» Bond: [after killing a man in a printing press] ‘They’ll print anything these days.’

» Admiral Roebuck: ‘With all due respect, M, I don’t think you have the balls for this job.’
M: ‘Perhaps. But the advantage is I don’t have to think with them all the time.’

» Carver: ‘The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.’

007. The verdict

From Cold War to ‘hot off the presses’, Tomorrow Never Dies has a post-Soviet, mid-‘90s optimism about it, resulting in a lighter and more flamboyant affair than its illustrious predecessor. Managing to be fun without becoming ludicrous, it runs through the bond tropes and exciting action sequences at an impressive pace.

Brosnan, firmly established in the role by the success of GoldenEye, is clearly having tremendous fun as 007 as he destroys gadget after gadget and shares some sizzling onscreen chemistry with the redoubtable Yeoh.

A perfect cocktail of swagger, severity, and schoolboy innuendo, his Bond blends a little bit of every previous incarnation before him. That diversity of character serves well in an energetic script that neatly swerves from drama to levity faster than a motorcycle in the alleyways of Saigon.

What do you think of Tomorrow Never Dies? Let us know below…