Tomorrow Never Dies

Tomorrow may die, but it doesn't seem James Bond ever will. The deadpan double-entendres and cartoonish energy of the good-hearted '60s have given way, perhaps inevitably, to the impersonal destruction and niggardly realism of the mean-spirited '90s. This time out, 007 has to stop media mogul Elliot Carver (Rupert Murdoch? Robert Maxwell?), who not only foments war between the Brits and the Chinese à la Blofeld in You Only Live Twice but manipulates government policy through his worldwide satellite network and his Tomorrow newspaper. (It's easy to print tomorrow's news today when you're creating tomorrow's news.) The road to action-adventure armageddon leads through Hamburg -- where this installment's "Kiss the Girl and Make Her Die" lady, Teri Hatcher playing Carver's wife, meets the inevitable untimely end -- and on to Saigon, where James teams up with Wai Lin (Hong Kong martial-arts star Michelle Yeoh) to stop the presses.

Pierce Brosnan has a modicum of Sean Connery's steely gaze and dry wit in a more-than-creditable performance, Jonathan Pryce as Carver is a memorably malevolent villain, Desmond Llewelyn is his usual irrepressible, irreplaceable self as Q, and Bond's new BMW 750 is a star vehicle. But Hatcher shoots blanks, and though Yeoh hardly makes a misstep, she's in the wrong movie -- Brosnan needs the softer touch that Isabella Scorupco provided in GoldenEye. There's some dreadful musical mush, too -- it's not a good sign when your series's most recent recallable theme is Duran Duran's "A View to a Kill." And the filmmakers blunder badly when James can't read Wai Lin's Chinese-character computer keyboard -- Bond took a First in Oriental languages at Cambridge. Still, 007 always rises to the occasion, and Tomorrow Never Dies will make you think twice about what you read in your, uh, newspaper. At the Opera House, Showcase, Tri-Boro, and Woonsocket cinemas.

-- Jeffrey Gantz