Which one is this? Sophie Marceau with a gun.
Who’s who in this one? Brosnan (Bond); Dench (M); Llewelyn and Cleese (Q and R); Bond (Moneypenny).
Where did you first encounter this one? In theatres on opening day in 1999.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? You’d think it would be Robert Carlyle as Renard, wouldn’t you?
Who are the Bond girls? But nope. In a plot from which The Dark Knight Rises cribbed wholeheartedly thirteen years later, the real villain of the piece is not the marquee thug who feels no pain, but rather the two-faced slattern with whom our hero has had romantic dealings: Sophie Marceau as Elektra King. She wants oil, power, and control of her father’s company. Marceau is terrific – but you’ve likely forgotten all about her, thanks to the other Bond girl, the black hole of suckdom known as Denise Richards as Dr. Christmas Jones, Nuclear Physicist.
Opening number? Garbage wailing out a poor copy of kd lang’s “Surrender” from the previous film, against a rather inventive opening title sequence that takes the rainbow colours of gasoline on water and spins them into a theme.
What’s memorable about this one? The opening boat chase. The clever notion of giving Bond a physical injury to hamper him throughout. Sophie Marceau with a gun.
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? 8. This is my favourite Brosnan Bond, though I know that opinion is unpopular.
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? My personal enthusiasm for this one wants to push the number higher, but it goes so completely off the rails that I cannot in good conscience scrape it anything higher than a 6. It is still my favourite Brosnan Bond – but that’s not saying much.
Yesterday I took my last tour with Mr. Moore in 1985’s A View to a Kill, and today I close off my relationship with Moore’s true successor: the flyweight, inoffensively genial Pierce Brosnan. It’s 1999, and the last Bond movie before the millennium is a messy dollop of fin de siècle madness called The World is Not Enough, which should properly be called Good Ideas Are Not Enough. This one swings for the fences, conceptually, but comes so completely unglued as it goes along that it’s amazing anything makes it over the finish line at all. Rarely in cinema has a movie more directly resembled a plane crash.
The director is Michael Apted (of the 7-Up series of documentaries, along with such fictions as Gorillas in the Mist), an unlikely choice. Apted puts paid any concern about his ability to direct an action sequence in TWINE’s enormous pre-credits sequence, which remains one of the best action scenes in the whole franchise, as Bond faces off against an assassin in a pair of jet boats on the Thames. It’s thrilling and visceral, and the scene just won’t end – every time you think you’ve come to the natural conclusion, the machine finds another gear and speeds up again. And so we dance from a bit of swashbuckling in Bilbao to a bombing at MI6 to the boat chase and beyond, and before you know it, we’re dangling over the Millennium Dome in a hot air balloon – and then, to top even that, Bond falls.
Here is the next of The World is Not Enough’s innovations. Bond hits the dome with a thud and spends the rest of the movie nursing a dislocated shoulder, which is a gangbusters idea even before the film introduces its purported villain – Renard, a terrorist who can feel no pain. Bond feels pain throughout, which is dandy; or at least, he should, except the film frequently tends to forget about the secret agent’s ailment, which derails the whole idea. Nonetheless, off this one stroke alone, I can see how Neal Purvis and Robert Wade gleaned their five-film run scripting the Bond series – it’s a good answer to an old question.
Directing, Apted also brings a surprising grit to TWINE’s dramatic scenes, of which there are terribly few; but nonetheless, we are reminded that Judi Dench (naturally) and (perhaps more improbably) Pierce Brosnan have a lot more under the hood than this franchise generally allows. This is the only film in his canon where Brosnan seems believably like he could kill someone. The first act of the film is chilly and mature, and suggests a throughline that, if exploited delicately, might have turned out an altogether more impressive Bond picture than either Goldeneye or Tomorrow Never Dies. The film keeps detouring, however, to slalom around what it perceives to be the requisite Bond beats. So, we lose momentum as we undertake the physical where Bond gets himself cleared by the lady doctor in spite of being unfit for duty; we get the goddamned Denise Richards, who I’ll get to later; and we even get the last Q scene – which, aside from its sentimental value, is unnecessary. (As Desmond Llewelyn disappears through the floorboards after an unprecedented seventeen Bond pictures, we might find ourselves surprised: Q and Bond do seem, for a moment, to share a real emotional beat. And then he’s gone.)
In attempting to hide the principle ruse of its plot, another area where The World is Not Enough categorically fails is in the establishment of Robert “Begbie” Carlyle’s villain, Renard. Hologram in the briefing room aside, Renard doesn’t appear until 49 minutes into the picture, and his hook – a bullet in his brain that has rendered him immune to pain – is never actually exploited onscreen in any particularly memorable, visual way. (Bond movies used to be better at working little ticks like this for thrills and tension.) Like much of The World is Not Enough, Renard is collateral on the table, left unspent.
Furthermore, I cannot, with any faculty at my disposal, work out why the decision was made to hire Denise Richards. The movie certainly does her no favours – the entire notion of “Dr. Christmas Jones” is insultingly lunatic – and immediately popping Richards into undersized shorts and a tank top, her gargantuan breasts scarcely able to contain themselves, only adds visual insult to proverbial injury. Jones sucks the life clean out of the picture every second she’s onscreen, a fact of which the filmmakers themselves seem patently aware. They cut around her relentlessly. Richards is in The World is Not Enough significantly less than you might remember, and is in all likelihood the least developed Bond girl in the whole series. But if the filmmakers were aware of Richards’ deficits to such a visible extent, how on earth did they see clear to hire her in the first place?
It is with a touch of sadness, then, that I must admit that the Bond movie with the worst Bond girl in it is also the one that features, quite likely, my favourite Bond girl of all time: Sophie Marceau as love interest/villainess Elektra King, who hits a kind of trifecta – she’s got the looks and the character and she’s also the villain – that pretty much no other female in the franchise has ever been able to hit. Women in Bond tend to be monofunctional. Marceau, on the other hand, is as beautiful a leading lady as the franchise has ever cast, while also being a credible actress, playing a character with a complete psychological profile, and a twist, who then gets to wield a gun, and torture Bond on a chair that slowly throttles him. As Bond’s erection rises as a result of the strangulation, Elektra straddles 007 with naughty glee and… enjoys herself. I suppose having all this be in the service of villainy and cracked daddy issues might take Elektra’s revolutionary power down a peg, but believe me, on film 21 of a 22-film spree through the Bondverse, Elektra qualifies hands-down as the most agented female character ever.
From A to Bond counts down the Bond movies, in alphabetical order, every day of the week leading up to the release of Skyfall. If you live in Toronto, The World Is Not Enough is playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on December 2. If not, the entire series is available on blu-ray.