Synopsis: James Bond returns to Her Majesty’s Secret Service to prevent a media baron from starting World War Three between Britain and China.

Description: Pierce Brosnan, Jonathan Pryce and Teri Hatcher star in Brosnan’s second outing as 007.

Review: A Bond movie that is desperately trying to make contact with a modern audience Tomorrow Never Dies centres around a war induced only to boost the earnings of a media conglomerate: gone are the communists and evil geniuses; instead we have Elliot Carver (Pryce), an ambitious millionaire who owns his own broadcasting company and is married to a rather desperate housewife. Aside from newspapers and TV shows Carver has a passion for world domination and futuristic, not to mention untraceable, Stealth warships. Right from the get go Tomorrow Never Dies is just feels like it’s trying a bit too hard.

Like the really keen kid who sits at the front of class and gets very excited about Algebra, Tomorrow Never Dies has its endearing qualities but the only thing that makes it stand out particularly is the can-do attitude that inevitably produces the fairly average results. Pierce Brosnan has already had a chance to acclimatize to the role of Bond and of course no one expects him to fill either Connery or Moore’s shoes, but Brosnan’s portrayal is just fairly bland and indistinguishable; he is little more than the American idea of Britain with a few fancy gadgets to set him apart from the rest of us.

Is that not all Bond always is I hear you say? In some ways yes it is, but the traditional James Bond image is what created that American stereotype, and at least Connery and Moore had style and personality; Brosnan has about as much presence as a damp cloth and it just makes the whole thing a bit of a waste of time.

 Had the current Bond boy, the gorgeous Daniel Craig, been cast in the role I imagine it would have given a little more weight to the story, making it seem clever rather than blindingly bloody obvious, but he was not and as such Tomorrow Never Dies seems like little more than a poor shadow of what Ian Fleming originally created.