...suffers from a plot that meanders, a villain with little to accomplish, heroines we care nothing about, and a frenetic tempo that ends up more tedious than stirring.
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A few days after watching "The World Is Not Enough" in a theater, a friend asked me what it was about. I had trouble remembering. I kept getting its plot confused with Pierce Brosnan's previous two Bond outings. It's that kind of film, a middling exercise in the continuing exploits of the world's most famous super agent. Even its DVD extras are middle-of-the-road, surprising considering the attention MGM have been lavishing on the series. Maybe they know more than they're letting on.
This entry is short on sense and story but bigger than ever on chases and explosions. It's all about revenge, involving the death of an oil tycoon, Sir Robert King, and the subsequent plight of his daughter, oil heiress Elektra King (Sophie Marceau). It unfolds that Elektra was kidnapped by a terrorist named Victor Renard (Robert Carlyle) some time before, but she managed to escape. Now, Renard has apparently killed Elektra's father for reasons of his own, and Bond feels responsible for not heading it off. In consequence, Bond takes it upon himself to be the young woman's protector from further harm. As things develop, Renard steals an atomic missile, captures M (Judi Dench), and attempts to blow up the city of Istanbul.
Renard is an intriguing but hardly compelling villain, and without a compelling villain a Bond flick has no fizz. The bad guy's gimmick this time is that he has a bullet in his head desensitizing him to pain, and since he knows he's dying, he doesn't care what chances he takes. We're also told that until he dies, he will continue to grow stronger. Why a bullet in the head would make someone grow stronger is one of life's many mysteries. Still and all, Renard is brutish without being sinister, and he has no grand scheme in mind for his evil machinations short of the aforementioned senseless blowing up of a city and the possible control of an oil supply. He's the kind of guy who in the old days would have been assigned henchman status, an Oddjob or a Jaws. It's this very vagueness that permeates the whole film.
Elektra is an enigma to Bond and to the audience, an enigma that could have been played out further but isn't. As a secondary female interest, Denise Richards gets the unlikely task of playing a nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones. She is perk and pretty and given nothing to do except act as the butt of obvious jokes on her name. Maybe if she were given a surfboard.... Dame Judi Dench has a more substantial part than usual, and she is as solid as ever. So is Robbie Coltrane, reprising his big-time Russian gangster, Valentin Zukovsky. At least he's colorful with his silly accent and lounge-lizard clothes. And Pierce Brosnan continues to impress in the title role. He is suave and handsome, to be sure, but he is also more comfortable and self-assured with his character. If he appears less rugged than other Bond actors, he more than makes up for it in debonair confidence.
New at the wheel of a Bond vehicle is director Michael Apted, whose films have included "Coal Miner's Daughter," "Agatha," "Gorillas in the Mist," "Nell," "Thunderheart," and "Gorky Park." He had clearly never made a full-blown action-adventure movie before, and his idea of doing so is to involve as many people chasing one another and as much stuff blowing up as possible, most of it recycled from earlier Bond epics. The hero pursues or is pursued in cars, in boats, in balloons, on skis, on foot, you name it. When he's not running from or after someone, he's outstripping fire storms. Frankly, I found it rather tiring.
The best sequence in the film is one at Zukovsky's caviar factory, with Bond and Jones inside and a helicopter trying to slice the building in half with a gigantic buzz saw. Unlike Apted's frenzied, MTV pacing of most other scenes, the caviar factory segment shows undoubted ingenuity and develops real excitement, with a strong feeling of dark, brooding atmosphere besides. But more often than not Apted relies on an array of Bond gadgets and gizmos to keep things alive--a rocket-firing sports car, an underwater speed boat, a lethal pair of eyeglasses, some old-fashioned x-ray lenses, and an uncommonly versatile credit card.
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