This film used to be on the ‘weekend afternoon movie’ rotation and was highly recommended by my boss, a Vietnam veteran. The movie is about a ragtag group of pilots who were recruited to help run secret military operations in Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr. star as two of these pilots. There’s decent money to be made in running these operations, but they question whether it’s worth it at times to stick their necks out like they do. Ultimately they happen to discover that a US military officer is working with the enemy to secure a substantial amount of heroin trafficking.
Downey and Gibson end up cracking the case while putting themselves in mortal danger a lot. It’s based on true events, but paints an even nastier image of the Vietnam War, as it makes our military looks corrupt. And a big problem with the film is that it doesn’t quite feel like a Vietnam War movie.
It looks like Vietnam and it sounds like Vietnam, but it doesn’t feel like Vietnam. Perhaps because no one is walking around in retro military apparel, and maybe they characters hair and clothing styles look too current, but something is amiss, and that sucked me out of the film experience a good bit.
It’s an interesting movie, but it’s not fully engrossing nor fully engaging.
I really liked this film. It surprised me, I have to admit. I remember when Teri Hatcher was the “it girl” because of her role as Lois Lane on The New Adventures of Superman. This will spoil the movie for some of you, but to use her as a seemingly important Bond girl only to kill her off half way through was a very bold decision. The fact that she was ordered dead by her husband (the main villain) was equally surprising and I appreciated the boldness.
A lot of boldness strikes you with Tomorrow Never Dies. For the first time, the villain is very contemporary and not the stereotypical drug dealer, madman bent on world domination, or a Russian. The villain is a media mogul plotting to launch Britain and China into a war with each other, creating top subject matter for his new international news network, thereby making him the most powerful man in media and very, very rich.
True to form, Bond catches wind of this and uses all his charm and suavity to get information from said villain’s wife that helps him stop the war between two nations. While this plot is somewhat recycled (think You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me), the contemporary nature of the setup is appreciable. Bond teams up with a Chinese agent and they stop the bad guy (as if a Bond film would end any other way?).
Some very good stunt work really ups the ante for the series and really works the adrenaline; less gadgetry than GoldenEye helps root the film in reality; and the villain’s profession reflects the changing of the times and is well within the realm of plausibility. Tomorrow Never Dies asserts that just about anyone can be a villain, which is fine with me, as long as James Bond is on the case.
This film used to be on the ‘weekend afternoon movie’ rotation and was highly recommended by my boss, a Vietnam veteran. The movie is about a ragtag group of pilots who were recruited to help run secret military operations in Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. 
