If you can think of a bad movie with Michelle Yeoh in it, please comment below.  I am sure there are examples, but I have never seen them.  Before she switched to doing American films, she had a career in Chinese cinema.  Thus, there could be some stinkers during that stretch of her life in the movies.  As for her work after she made the switch, well, I have not seen The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008), but based on other entries in that series, I have my doubts as to its quality.  I did watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), and more recently Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), and I enjoyed those pictures.  Because of my appreciation for those roles, I was excited to see Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), which was her first American production.  If nothing else, it gave me something to look forward to after this, the eighteenth entry in the franchise.

Somewhere on the Russian border, which could nearly be anywhere, Tomorrow Never Dies begins with a weapons bazaar catering to terrorists from around the world.  Our favorite agent of British military intelligence, section six (MI6), James Bond (Pierce Brosnan), is monitoring the situation.  The camera he has set up is feeding images in real time back to MI6 headquarters, where it is being watched by members of the British military and the spy organization’s head, M (Judi Dench).  Based on everything they see, the naval officer in charge of the room feels there is enough there to warrant a missile strike.  Yet, as the ordinance is on the way to its target, James’ camera focuses on the fact that there are nuclear bombs on site.  Instead of waiting for orders, he jumps into action, stealing the jet loaded with the weapons of mass destruction, and flies off towards British held territory.  Meanwhile, in another part of the world, a different British warship is being watched by a mysterious stealth vessel.  At the same time, it is being overflown by Chinese fighters, which claim that the Royal Navy has violated sovereign waters of China.  The invisible boat launches a torpedo with a drill attached to one end, which the British interpret as an attack by the Chinese.  The same people who launched the torpedo also send a missile after one of the jets, destroying it.  To finish off the charade, the stealth vessel’s commander, Richard Stamper (Götz Otto), emerges from the side and guns down the survivors of the Royal Navy ship just sunk.  This all happens at the behest of Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce), the creator of the Carver Media Group, which has come to control nearly all news outlets around the world.  Back at MI6, James is summoned from his obligatory fling to be briefed on the emerging crisis in the South China Sea.  The Admiralty (the fancy term for the people leading the British Navy) want to send their fleet into the area.  The Chinese are threatening to respond in kind.  M pleads for a more restrained course of action, but is only given forty-eight hours to conduct her investigation.  As she drives away with James in tow, she reveals to her best operative that the suspected reason for the incident has to do with a mysterious signal that originated from one of the Carver Media Group’s satellites.  Since Elliot’s media empire is based in Hamburg, Germany, it is to the Baltic port that James is sent.  Posing as a banker, James attends a party where Elliot is to unveil his new global reach for his information conglomerate.  Doing so puts James into contact with Paris Carver (Teri Hatcher), Elliot’s current wife and James’ former lover.  She is not pleased to see him.  Neither is Elliot, who sends some of his henchmen to rough up James.  In classic Bond fashion, James gets the upper hand and disrupts Elliot’s feed.  Later that night, Paris comes to warn James about her husband, and they end up spending the night together.  She does give him a tip about how to break into Elliot’s building, which he uses to obtain a global positioning satellite (GPS) scrambler that had been stolen from the Americans.  Elliot had used this device to confound the British ship that he sank.  During the expected action sequence, James spots Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh), James’ Chinese equivalent, who is after similar information.  James is able to evade Elliot’s goons, but returns to his hotel room to find Paris dead and Elliot trying to pin the murder on him.  Once more James escapes, this time heading to the Americans to return the scrambler and obtain some assistance in getting to the wreck of the British warship.  While diving on the hulk, he once again encounters Wai Lin, and they must help each other get off the stricken vessel before it slips farther into the depths.  When they emerge, they are met by Richard and taken prisoner.  James and Wai Lin are handcuffed together, making coordination essential to defeat their enemies.  Though she tries to leave James behind, claiming to only work alone, he catches up with her and proves his trustworthiness.  Thus, they narrow down the location of Elliot’s stealth vessel and infiltrate it.  Elliot is in the process of provoking a war between China and the United Kingdom when James and Wai Lin come aboard.  There then proceeds the expected level of kicking, punching, and shooting as they work to prevent a missile being launched at Beijing, and bringing about World War III.  They are successful, and share an intimate moment on some of the floating debris of Elliot’s ship as the film comes to a close.

I enjoyed Tomorrow Never Dies, not just because Yeoh was in it, but because it is the least hokey of these movies that I have seen to this point in the franchise.  The villain, too, is an interesting one, and I say this also to set up my Catholic analysis.  His desire is power, and he does not bother masking his pursuit of it, though couching it in philanthropic terms, if that makes any sense.  His weapons are words, and his actions demonstrate the devastating effect they can have on the course of nations.  This is something the Catholic Church has known about for centuries.  Its conquests have not been accomplished by the sword, but by the Word.  I use that word in the sense of John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  This is something that Elliot knows, but he uses the written word as a god, which is different than what Scripture intends.  Biblically speaking, the Word is meant to be Jesus, who had been with God from the beginning of Creation, and who sent His Spirit into the world to bring about life.  St. John Paul II put this differently when he talked about God being love, the living embodiment of love, making the act of Creation one of ultimate love.  Elliot makes a mockery of this notion, being willing to sacrifice millions of people so that the part of society that survives will pay attention to the words his companies scribble in newspapers and on the internet.  In other words, he wants to be god, but what he does is not of God.  Applied in a broader sense, hopefully you will think about these things the next time you want to say anything.  If it is life-giving, then it is likely of God, and there can be nothing better.

Perhaps it has been because there have been so many bad Bond movies that I thought Tomorrow Never Dies to actually be good.  There is, though, a noticeable uptick in the intensity of the action sequences, though this could be the result of advances in moviemaking.  Either way, if you are in the mood for this sort of thing, you could do worse.