As usual, this has little to do with the main plot line. The main one, in which Bond and Wai Lin escape on a motorbike through the streets of Hanoi from the villains in a helicopter, is excellent.
(Part of a trend of giving Bond girls a more active role, in contrast to the earlier films in the series where they were required to do little other than look decorative.) 3. Apart from Michelle's striking looks, she is also an accomplished martial arts performer, and her skills are put to good use in this film. (That's how it's spelled, although the pronunciation used in the film suggests that the name should actually be transliterated as Wei Lin). Michelle Yeoh, however, is superb as the main female lead, the Chinese secret agent Wai Lin. Admittedly, Teri Hatcher is rather wasted as the secondary Bond girl Paris Carver, Elliott's wife and a former girlfriend of Bond.
There is also a good performance from Gotz Otto as Carver's brutal German henchman, Stamper. Although he puts a liberal, metaphorical interpretation on these two concepts, the audience is left in no doubt that he means what he says quite literally.
Particularly noteworthy is the speech where Carver states his ambitions as being 'power' and 'world domination'. At first sight the silver-haired bespectacled Carver seems mild-mannered and soft spoken, but soon reveals the raving megalomania which is the hallmark of the Bond villain. Although Pryce's Carver is more restrained than some, it falls within this tradition. Bond villains have always provided scope for some splendidly over-the-top displays of acting, going back to Lotte Lenya's Rosa Klebb and Gert Frobe's Goldfinger. The reason is to facilitate the accession to power of his ally, a renegade Chinese general who has promised to give his organisation exclusive broadcasting rights in China. Jonathan Pryce plays Elliott Carver, a newspaper and media tycoon intent on whipping up a war between Britain and China. It is, nevertheless, in my view one of the better entries in the Bond canon, for a number of reasons beyond the fact that Pierce Brosnan is the best Bond since Connery. 'Tomorrow Never Dies' contains all these formulaic elements. The story will always end with a shoot-out, normally in the villain's headquarters, in which Bond manages to avert the threatened disaster at the last minute. The villain will always have a small army of henchmen ready to do battle on his behalf. There will always be at least one other beautiful girl, either as a secondary heroine or as a villainess. The main character, apart from Bond and the villain, will always be a beautiful young woman who helps Bond in his quest and who will end up by falling for him. It will always involve at least one extended chase sequence, and possibly two or more. The main story will involve Bond thwarting a dastardly plot by some megalomaniac bent on world domination.
They typically start with an action sequence before the opening credits that has little or nothing to do with the film that is to follow. Despite this, one can watch the latest offerings with as much pleasure as the original Sean Connery films from the sixties and seventies. The franchise started with 'Dr No' in the early sixties, and 'Tomorrow Never Dies' amounts to 'James Bond XVIII', or 'James Bond XIX' if one includes 'Never Say Never Again' in the total. The Bond films, however, seem to me to provide the most striking exception to this principle. Subject to these exceptions, however, there seems to be a law of diminishing returns to the effect that the more sequels a franchise spawns, the worse they become. (There are also a few standard exceptions to this rule, such as 'The Godfather Part 2' and the second and third parts of the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy). One of the standard received ideas of film criticism is to say that sequels are almost never as good as the original film.