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Tomorrow Never Dies
Released:
1997
Produced by: EON
Best Line:
(In the printing room of Harmsway's
newspaper offices): "Bond rushes the man, KNOCKING HIM BACKWARDS INTO THE PRINTING
PRESS, pulling Sidney away at the last minute. The Guard is sucked up in the press
rollers, and? The pages running through the newsprint web suddenly turn BRIGHT
RED.
BOND: "He was bad news."
(unfortunately this line was changed in
the finished film to "they'll print anything.")
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Worst Line:
Any number
of Bond's lines ("Looks like he has an edifice complex"), or M's lines ("If you
have to pump her, James, pump her"), or Moneypenny's "cunning linguist" line,
which would even make Roger Moore groan.
Good Cuts
The first draft was reminiscent of Moonraker,
complete with a carnival scene and a ridiculous fight sequence in the Venice Medieval
Armor Museum -- in which Bond and an attacker use every weapon in the place to
knock a weapon out of the other guy's hand (don't they ever think of actually
hitting EACHOTHER???). A street chase in which Bond performs a "Batman" in-joke
with a cape (Bond, to himself, flexing his cape: "So that's how he does it.")
also reminded me of an Octopussy lowlight.
(BTW: On the bright side, the "Batman and Robin" script was MUCH worse.)
M: "What were you saying, Admiral? Something about this
'not being a job for a wine-sniffing, skirt-chasing playboy spy?'"
M: "Contrary
to what you may believe, 007, the world is not filled with mad-men who can hollow
out volcanoes, stock them with big-breasted women, and threaten the world with
nuclear annihilation."
(Okay, the sixties are
over, we get the message ? get on with the series, already.)
It was
also like Moonraker in that characters from
the previous film (Valentin, Jack Wade) reappeared with nothing to do. Wade asked
Bond about Natalya from the previous film, and Bond said she married a hockey
player. Fortunately Jaws is nowhere to be seen. BTW: Even in the finished film,
Wade is now no better than Felix Leiter in terms of
plot or character - just the American lackey - so why screw with Fleming? Show
a little respect for the original material and use Leiter (this is the eighteenth
Bond film - not just the sequel to GoldenEye).
Reviews
London Times: "Like all Bond films Tomorrow
Never Dies (a meaningless title if ever there was one) will pull in the crowds;
but it is likely to send them out into the world a little more desensitised, and
a little harder of hearing."
New York Times: "...It should fare best
in corners of the world where nobody knows how little the title means, or how
accurately it reflects the rest of the film's shallowness." (Janet Maslin)
San Francisco Chronicle: "Maybe for the next sequel, somebody could put
a little of this ingenuity into the title. While Tomorrow Never Dies has
the ring of a Bond title, it makes no sense. Like the movie, it's better not to
think about it too much." (Ruthe Stein)
Undercover
Writer Donald Westlake was originally hired to write the screenplay, but
a story treatment that he turned in was deemed inadequate. Bruce Feirstein was
then rehired after his doctoring of GoldenEye.
Once Feirstein had turned in a first draft, Nicholas Ray and several other writers
were brought in to fix his action scenes and the general story, which at that
time concerned the British handover of Hong Kong to China.
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Amidst
all of this chaos, Teri Hatcher, star of TV's Superman,
flew in from the United States to discover that her part has been reduced to three
small scenes. As a result, she has complained that it was not the role she had
signed on the perform.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Pryce clashed with the film's director,
Roger Spottiswoode. Pryce claimed that his character lacked depth and bore no
resemblance to the role as it was first described to him. Feirstein was brought
back on to beef up his part.
To make all the authorship issues even more confusing,
three screenwriters sued the makers of the movie, saying the whole thing was their
idea. Jeffrey Howard, Chris Beutler and Jay Schlossberg-Cohen said that they circulated
their screenplay for an action movie called "Currency of Fear" in March 1996,
to talent agencies, production companies, producers and studios. Among those requesting
a copy of the script, the lawsuit alleged, was Madeline Warren, wife of writer
Bruce Feirstein. Both Warren and Feirstein are named as defendants in the lawsuit,
along with MGM, United Artists, and Penguin Putnam books, which produced a companion
novel. "Defendant Feirstein has stated publicly that he wrote the first draft
of the script for the James Bond film between March and August 1996, immediately
after (he) obtained access to the script for 'Currency of Fear' through defendant
Warren," the lawsuit stated.
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The
Baltimore writers claim, "The James Bond film copies and appropriates the script
'Currency of Fear' ... concrete expressions of characters, plot, settings, dialogue
and other intrinsic elements of the script and treatment 'Currency of Fear."'
In an effort to prove their point, the writers list 11 similarities, ranging
from the main villain in the Bond movie, Elliot Carver, played by Jonathan Pryce,
to the "Tomorrow Never Dies" heroine, Wai Lin, played by Michelle
Yeoh. Feirstein claimed the charges were ridiculous, and derided the media
hype (I guess that's what he gets for making a media mogul a Bond villain).
But all of this really just begs the question: Why would anybody take credit
for this story??? GoldenEye was weak, but
at least it was about something (its theme of recovery and redemption).
This film isn't about anything except meeting a release date deadline. There are
no interesting characters. There is only the barest hint of a story. Most importantly,
there is no Ian Fleming. It doesn't feel like it's
the eighteenth film in the James Bond series - it just feels like a weak sequel
to GoldenEye.
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