The Basic Plot in Five Words or Less: The name's Brosnan. Pierce Brosnan.
My Basic Ramblings: Remember that scene in Goldfinger when James Bond blows up the military compound and kills everyone with a big rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns? Or how about in From Russia With Love where he blows up the stealth boat and everyone who wasn't dead already dies a horrible wet and burny death?
Oh, wait. Wrong movies.
Something happened - Tomorrow Never Dies isn't a James Bond movie, it's a Schwarzenegger vehicle with a skinny Irish guy in the lead role. You never used to see big honkin' machine guns and big explosions and all that. But I suppose anything less than that and modern-day audience would get bored. I dunno. Plus, in the 60's you didn't really have big honkin' machine guns, like you do now.
That aside, here're my comments about the flick.
The beginning (not the teaser) of the film, with the sinking of the British ship brought back memories of Titanic. I was half expecting to see Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio hanging on to the back of the ship for dear life with soulful Celtic music or maybe a Celine Dion ballad.. (A little aside here: Can someone please explain to me the appeal of Leonardo? I just don't see it at all.)
So soon Bond is happily on his way to Germany to meet up with the guy from Brazil and Miss Saigon and, of course, the Infiniti commercials - Jonathan Pryce. (But, how many of you realize he also appeared on a few episodes of the British improv show Whose Line is it Anyway? Now you know.) Anyway, he's supposed to be some sort of Ted Turner/Rupert Murdoch on crack kinda guy, who wants to be in charge of news everywhere, even if it means creating his own. (Or something like that.) He's married to Teri Hatcher, who used to be Bond's girlfriend. Her sole purpose in the movie is to deliver information to Bond, have sex with him, and be killed. She does these so skillfully she deserves an Academy Award for best Ex-Girlfriend of James Bond.
So we have a few fight scenes, a chase scene in the parking garage with the remote control BMW. That,I admit, was really cool. I could use one of those now, since the driver's side door of my car won't open from the inside and I have to unroll the window to open the door from the outside. If I had Bond's funky little remote control, I could just drive from the backseat.
Then Bond goes to the waters where the wannabe Titanic sank and meets up (again) with Wai Lin, aka Michelle Yeoh. (She's on the Chinese side of this whole brouhaha.) Then comes the most unbelievable scene in the whole movie - they dive down to the bottom of the sea to check out the ship. Figure that's two, three hundred feet. At one point, they're trapped in the missile room and have to abandon their scuba gear. Then - think about this - they swim up to the surface (two, three hundred feet, mind you) without running out of air or getting the bends or anything like that. Is that even possible? It makes the Shelly Winters/Gene Hackman scene from The Poseidon Adventure look like child's play.
Anyway, lotsa stuff happens, Michelle Yeoh kicks people (she's cool - I like her), they get on the stealth boat (which, even though it's invisible to radar, is not invisible to the human eye, so why didn't the guys on the Pseudo-Titanic look out their windows when they were getting attacked and say "Hey, there's a weird ship out there?") and there's the big confrontational thing.
Actually, in thinking about what I said before about this being a Schwarzenegger vehicle, there is one thing that makes this a Bond movie. Jonathan Pryce has a gun on Bond and rather than just shooting him and leaving 007 brains all over the control panel behind him, Pryce feels the need to ramble on and on and on and on about his plans, leaving Bond time to activate the big evil-looking buzz-saw missle thing Pryce is standing directly in front of, and whose controls Bond is standing directly in front of. This is a typical Bond Moment, right along with the credit sequence of silhouetted women and guns and wacky post-death puns (which, this time around, seem pretty lame).
Here's a question: Why are Bond villians, with their evil villany, always so polite? They call him "Mr. Bond", not "Jim" or "Loser Boy." Joe Don Baker (of the classic MST3K episode Mitchell) is the only one who dares call him anything but "Mr. Bond" or "James".
So the movie ends, all the bad guys are killed, and Wai Lin, who's spent the entire movie pushing off Bond's advances, finally succumbs to his charms and they start making out as the credits roll. How's this for an ending: The ship comes looking for Bond and Wai Lin. They're too busy making out to respond. The ship leaves, Bond and Wai Lin slowly start to starve, and they have a fight to the death where the winner gets to eat the loser.
That would've been a cool Bond movie.