Review of Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) by Mitchell B — 27 Feb 2016

Utterly preposterous, and if you're in the right mood, very funny. Rupert Murdoch's less evil English counterpart starts a global military apocalypse to give his news shows better ratings.

It's a glorious '90s throwback, in which newspapers actually have power, British and Russian generals briefly stand shoulder-to-shoulder, the TVs are monolithic blurry boxes and the mobile phones are just starting to become non-gigantic. The body count is GARGANTUAN (which nobody cares about), poor henchmen and even innocent bystanders are punched/kicked in the face just for the sake of it, and the #2 baddie is a Nazi posterboy literally named (I'm not joking) Mr Stamper. It's incredibly silly. It's incredibly fun.

It's also a big improvement on Goldeneye (in my opinion at least), with Bond able to communicate beyond one-liners, more memorable action sequences, steamier 'romance', more of a point to the plot, and a much better sense of humour.

Jonathan Pryce is maybe not the absolute most menacing baddie ever to grace the series, but he says "Mr Bond" better than anyone in quite a few decades. Other than that, the only real flaw as far as I'm concerned is that it's a bit long, so as often happens with Brosnan-era Bonds, you get some action fatigue towards the end. This is mitigated if you're a sadist like me who gets a kick out of seeing numerous terrible things happen to henchmen, however.