"You always were a cunning linguist, James."
Tomorrow Never Dies
Again, there's a great cast in this film: Jonathan "Brazil" Pryce, Teri "Yum" Hatcher, Michelle "Kickass" Yeoh, Ricky "Badass" Jay, Colin "More Badass" Salmon, Vincent "They Pushed Me" Schiavelli... We even have Geoffrey Palmer bickering with Judi Dench like they're an old married couple. Those two get more and more entertaining as time goes by.
There's also a lot of great action. Well, some great action. Well, a kickass motorcycle chase and a scene or two of Michelle Yeoh putting shoe to face. The bit with the remote controlled car in the parking lot, on the other hand, comes across as so much BMW wankery. And I really didn't care too much about the big finale, if only because the geography of the ship was such a mess.
What really stinks up this piece though is the villain. Essentially, he's Rupert Murdoch. And his big motivation for starting World War III is that he wants to sell more newspapers. I know that the print business is hitting hard times, but please. Hell, Why do we need to make this character like Murdoch, only "evil"? Murdoch's already evil! According to the IMDB, the original plotline had Carver as a British industrialist living in Hong Kong, who wanted to destroy the island rather than see it returned to the Chinese. That actualy sounds compelling. The end result is instead rather bland.
It's not a terrible film, but neither does it stand out from the pack. So far, this is the Bond film best described by the word Meh.