Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

The obvious pun in any review of Tomorrow Never Dies would be, “Well, gosh, why won’t it just die?”  And for a decades-old franchise that’s up to eighteen official entries, that might seem appropriate.  Tomorrow Never Dies is not a terminally ill film, though it does suffer from a very bad case of head-scratching villainy and a distinct identity crisis.

After a troubling crisis between British and Chinese military forces in the Pacific, M (Judi Dench) dispatches James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) to investigate media baron Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce), who published key details in his newspaper before they’d been made official.  Suspecting Carver’s involvement, Bond reunites with his former flame, Carver’s wife Paris (Teri Hatcher) before teaming up with Chinese spy Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) to stop Carver’s plot from triggering World War III.

As Brosnan’s second outing as James Bond, there’s much about Tomorrow Never Dies that does work quite well, and it’s largely due to the persona the franchise had previously assumed in Goldeneye.  It’s serious, but not lethally so; it’s fun, but not in the quantities we’d come to expect from the slapsticky Roger Moore vehicles.  Brosnan is still a more than capable Bond, equally at home in intense action sequences and in moments of levity, including my personal favorite “banter with Q” sequence.  And I very much appreciate the way Brosnan gives Bond a sense of backstory, without resorting to the heavy-handed “mention his late wife” trope the series usually employs.

The bigger problem with the film is that its central antagonist is a megalomaniac of the highest order whose plot centers on his willingness to endanger the entire world for media ratings.  It’s a viciously shortsighted plot, a scorched-earth approach that could truly eradicate the audience he’s conspiring to acquire.  Now there’s a bit of cleanup at the very end of the film to imply that it’s all smoke and mirrors, a “wag the dog” conspiracy, but for the most part Elliot Carver is a brutally cartoonish villain in the midst of an otherwise quite serious spy film.  Worse, the absurd scope of his plot makes everyone else look like loons for taking it seriously.  I’m not sure if it’s Pryce’s fault for overplaying the part or scripter Bruce Feirstein’s for undercooking the role, but it comes off like a less well-thought-out version of The Spy Who Loved Me (which also featured a submarine-eating aquatic headquarters out to spark global conflict).

The other thing about Tomorrow Never Dies – and this may be the thing that gets my goat the most whenever a film gets it wrong – is that it feels like two very distinct pieces.  At first, there’s a corporate espionage plot with war in the backdrop, but then the film shifts quite quickly into international conspiracy and terrorism.  Both of these could make very compelling Bond films, but they’re stitched together somewhat haphazardly, even marked by the fact that Bond has to change continents for no reason than just to get to the next act.  Once each of these halves is underway, it’s truly compelling stuff, but the seam in the middle is all too visible.

I think Tomorrow Never Dies had been my first Bond film as a child, and I came to it ready to recapture those rose-colored morsels of nostalgia, but I think I realize I was a somewhat uncritical child.  There is, to be sure, a number of very nice pieces in the film.  There’s a fantastic update on the “sinister henchman” Bond trope in the form of Vincent Schiavelli’s Dr. Kaufman, a torturer and forensics expert, and I don’t even mind that he only gets the one set piece.  It’s moments like that, and like the Lois & Clark-esque banter Teri Hatcher gets with Bond, her former lover, that suggest a much more compelling Bond film than is actually present.  Heck, even the remote-controlled BMW, as outlandish as the premise sounds, is played with such fervent earnest that it works far better than it ought to.  And let's give composer David Arnold a good heap of credit; his score is essentially a modern John Barry, in that he integrates the classic Bond theme with the film's main themes to give us some truly rousing music that works just as well outside the context of the film.

Having said that, if we’re willing to swallow the BMW, how outlandish must the villain’s plot be if it’s too implausible for this film?  Taken in macro, Tomorrow Never Dies just doesn’t work, but on a micro scale there’s enough enjoyable material to make this better than at least half of the Bond films I’ve already reviewed.

Tomorrow Never Dies is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of action violence, sexuality and innuendo.”  As per usual, there is a lot of shooting, exploding, and fisticuffs.  There’s not a lot of blood, but some of the violence is disquieting in the sense that it’s all very close and visible.  As usual, Bond beds several women, though we never see anything other than bare backs; as for the innuendo, TND is one of the racier screenplays chock full of groan-worthy puns.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of The World Is Not Enough (1999) on August 7, 2014!

The Brothers Grimm (2005)

The Brothers Grimm is almost Kaufman-esque, in a way, as a story about stories. By extension, then, I suppose it's the Pirates of the Caribbean of Charlie Kaufman stories - it doesn't take itself too seriously. But at the same time, it's a Terry Gilliam flick, which means The Brothers Grimm is superlatively visually stimulating, but coherence is not to be expected.

Fortunately, The Brothers Grimm is to date the most accessible Gilliam movie (excepting the brilliant Monty Python and the Holy Grail) I've seen.

These ain't your momma's Grimm Brothers, that's for sure. As portrayed by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, Will and Jake - not Wilhelm and Jakob - are the 19th century equivalent of Ghostbusters, liberating French-occupied Germany from all manner of witches and demons. We quickly learn that the Grimm enterprise is a sham, as Will & Jake are staging superstitious happenings in order to reap the profits for "defeating" the apparitions. Their fraud is unearthed by the villainous French General Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce) and his Italian torturer Cavaldi (Peter Stormare, best known as the killer from Fargo, Karl Hungus/Uli Kunkel from The Big Lebowski, and rogue electrician Slippery Pete from "Seinfeld"), who force the brothers Grimm to solve the mystery of the missing girls of Marbaden, a forest town filled with every fairy tale denizen you can imagine.

Coherent? Certainly. Spectacular? Not quite. Fun? If you're into this sort of thing.

The fun in the film comes from two places: the cast and the script. The cast isn't quite impeccable, since they never manage to steal the show from the vivacious visuals Gilliam provides, but they all do a nice job of creating memorable if cartoonish characters. Damon and Ledger (both of whom can do no wrong in my book, though I would have liked to see the original choice for Will - Johnny Depp) are the stars, and they've got a real chemistry as brothers that suggests a long history between the two. Ladies man Will often clashes with bookish Jake, and both Damon and Ledger do a solid job of instantly creating a plausible characterization and sticking to it throughout. Ledger's accent, though, is a touch distracting, an interesting combination of Sean Connery and The Joker circa The Dark Knight. Pryce and Stormare are far grosser caricatures, underspeaking a typically British xenophobia of all things continental; Pryce is a knockout as always, and Stormare brings his conventional slimy foreigner aura to his role. Lena Headey (the queen from 300) is negligible as guide/love interest, but Monica Bellucci - as the eerie Mirror Queen - carries well the seductive cruelty of her witchy character.

The script, tangled though it is in places (and admittedly muddy in others) is fun because it's filled to the brim with references, homages, and nods of the head toward the more commonly known career of the Grimm brothers and the fairy tale canon on the whole. Keep your eyes peeled for Snow White, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel & Gretel, and even The Gingerbread Man (look out, cookie from Shrek). Of course, knowing the identity of the little girl wearing a red hood in the forest isn't essential, but it helps make the later joke - in which Jake jots down in his journal "Little Red Riding Cape" - more entertaining.

I admitted the film is muddy, and it's classic Gilliam mud. After knocking out essential exposition within twenty minutes, the film dispenses with most claims to a plot and instead focuses on the Grimm dynamic and the eye-popping spectacle sequences (like moving trees, cobwebbed horses, and mud with a face). Consequently, the movie gets a little difficult to follow, especially when the narrative jumps quickly from scene to scene with little but imagination to fill in the gaps. What saves The Brothers Grimm from being another Gilliam headscratcher is its existence in a fantasy world where normal rules don't apply. I often ask of a Gilliam film, "How could this happen? What exactly is happening?" Here, the film makes up its own rules as it goes along, answering the question by saying, "X happens because that's the way fairy tales work."

The Brothers Grimm might not leave viewers happily ever after, but you'll at least turn the page with a smile on your face.

The Brothers Grimm is inscribed with a rating of "PG-13 for violence, frightening sequences and brief suggestive material." Violence and terror come on the whole from spooky creatures and foreboding forest environs, which some younger viewers might find more eerie than entertaining. As for suggestive material, Will is implied numerous times to be quite the ladies' man, but this is subtle and not prevalent.