Moby has just released a turbocharged techno version of the James Bond theme. (Curiously enough, it's never heard in the movie, which would benefit from this kind of headlong energy.) It's far savvier than the leaden version of the Mission Impossible theme by those guys from U2, with a guitar line straight out of Shaft and a soundbite from Goldfinger that makes me giggle.

JAMES BOND: Do you expect me to talk?
GOLDFINGER (chortling): No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!

Ah. That's the kind of wit that made the original Sean Connery James Bond cycle such a gas, and a good example of what's gone missing in the latter years of the series. 1995's Goldeneye stumbled, I think, in taking itself just a wee bit too seriously. As far as self-image goes, 1997's model positions itself firmly in comic book territory. When Bond (now played by Pierce Brosnan, who has given him an interesting goofball streak) is locked in a soundproof room with four burly guys who aim to beat the crap out of him and winds up punching and kicking all of them into submission, we may as well be watching a Batman movie.

Actually, this scene could be a good springboard for an especially sly and unpretentious Batman movie. As seen over the shoulder of another heavy who's not paying attention to what's going on in the next room, it's furious and funny. It's also a welcome relief, a sort of promise to the audience that we can stop worrying about plausibility and just enjoy the show.

And after spending better than three hours on board the Titanic, who couldn't use a little gratuitous violence, especially with the sensational Hong Kong action star Michelle Yeoh (nee Khan; you may have seen her in Jackie Chan's Supercop) doling out some punishment to the villains as Chinese superagent Wai Lin? Tomorrow Never Dies is actually pretty inventive, upping the ante with set piece after set piece until it finally collapses in the boring piffle that is the climactic showdown against nefarious media mogul Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce). My favorite is the long sequence that begins with both Bond and Yeoh held captive at the top of Pryce's Bangkok headquarters and winds up with them blazing through the city streets on a motorcycle (still handcuffed together) with a very low-flying helicopter in close pursuit. (OK, so the centerpiece action sequence from just about any Jackie Chan movie crushes this one like a grape, but you can't say their heart wasn't in the right place.) Tomorrow Never Dies even invents a way to get rid of Teri Hatcher, who could hardly be a less interesting love interest, early on.

Too bad nobody besides Brosnan has anything to do. As a Rupert Murdoch type who has hatched an elaborate scheme to secure exclusive Chinese broadcast rights by starting World War 3 (no, you shouldn't ask), Pryce plays the same upper-class twerp from those Infiniti commercials, except with fewer social graces. As the movie grinds toward its tedious climax, he gets to ridicule Yeoh's impressive martial arts moves, doing a parody of her fighting technique and then declaring it "pathetic." If there's ever been a clearer indicator that one character was going to get the shit knocked out of him by another character before the movie's end, I've never seen one. So you can imagine how depressed I was when I realized that even arrogant media moguls must come to the same tediously gross ends as all Bond villains, and they do it at the hands of James himself ... never at those of (snort) a Bond girl. In every scene she's in, even the acrobatic martial arts squabbles, Yeoh's wings are clipped.

It's typical of this evergreen franchise that not only would it hire middlebrow pop doyen Sheryl Crow to insist that "Tomorrow Never Dies," but it would also refuse to tweak its formula. The regimen remains the same -- a lot of gunplay and gadgetry, a little skin, some wisecracks, and at least one smutty double entendre. I look forward to the James Bond movie that's bold enough to start knocking down the icons that the series has created. When Bond's familiar tricks start to fail him in the new world, it will be very interesting to see how he manages to survive -- and I think Brosnan may be just the guy to make this character real again. Until then, the newest entries in the series will likely remain suitably routine time-fillers. Nothing more.