The World Is Not Enough (1999)

For those who play the role long enough, there’s a Rule of Three for Bond actors, suggesting that the performer’s third outing is his best.  Sean Connery’s got a perfect film in Goldfinger, Roger Moore has The Spy Who Loved Me, and Daniel Craig has the knockout Skyfall.  We’re at Pierce Brosnan’s third with The World Is Not Enough, which turns out to be the exception to the Rule of Three.  It is far and away Brosnan’s most boring outing with only a few redeeming features.

After the murder of a leading industrialist, James Bond (Brosnan) assigns himself to protect the dead man’s daughter, Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), while she moves to continue her father’s work on an oil pipeline.  Bond and M (Judi Dench) suspect that the terrorist Renard (Robert Carlyle), who had kidnapped Elektra years ago, is behind the new wave of attempts on her life.  Denise Richards appears in a soulless performance as nuclear physicist (ha!) Christmas Jones, whose skills include wearing tight clothing and wearing wet clothing.  (The less said about her, the better.)

In a franchise full of diabolical villains, gorgeous women, and legendary action sequences, the worst thing a Bond film can be is boring.  But for the most part, The World Is Not Enough is exactly that – horrifically dull.  It’s not quite as dull as, say, Octopussy; TWINE does contain what is, for my money, the best opening sequence in the entire film series, in which Bond dodges a sniper before giving pursuit in a half-finished Q-boat through the Thames.  It’s a great action sequence with a fantastic score by David Arnold.

It is, however, the only great action sequence in the film.  Judging on this movie alone, Michael Apted is not an especially gifted director of on-screen action.  Aside from the linearity of the boat chase opener, Apted’s action scenes are muddled by angles akimbo and editing which makes it difficult to tell from which direction the baddies are coming.  In one scene, aerial and ground troops attack a dockside caviar factory, and it’s downright dizzying trying to keep track of who’s firing on whom; the shots are arranged in no particular order and defy Eisenstein’s idea of the montage to the point where the viewer simply gives up on trying to make sense of the collision of images.

The film’s other action sequences are a bore – a sinking submarine, a ski chase that comes nowhere near The Spy Who Loved Me’s opener, and a subterranean tunnel shootout – and the rest of the film isn’t much better.  There’s a lot of talking about the plot and where it’s going, but there’s little in the way of development until the third act. 

It becomes impossible to talk about the film without spoiling the big twist, so step down to the next paragraph if you prefer to remain unspoiled.  For those that are still here, I’m speaking, of course, of the reveal that Elektra King – ostensibly the Bond girl – has been conspiring with her former kidnapper to take over her father’s empire.  It’s actually a rather clever turn in the plot, and it takes the franchise somewhere it’s never really been; we’ve had evil women like Rosa Klebb and even most recently Xenia Onatopp, but the reveal that the Bond girl is also the Bond villain is quite smart.  As Elektra, Marceau is a very strong performer, and I wonder why her international career seems to have fizzled out.  In a better Bond film, Elektra might have been a top character, because Marceau handles the turn from performative victim to snarling villainess with ease.  As it stands, though, she’s a bit of a diamond in the rough here in the sense that the film insists on focusing on the thuggish Renard, whose fascinating character conceit – that he is a dying man who literally feels no pain – is fumbled and never given the life that a comparable character like Jaws had.

So between that and the memorable opening sequence, The World Is Not Enough simply lives up to its title – what we have in the film is not enough to be a winner.  Usually in moments like this, especially in reviewing the Bond films, I find that the good often outstrips the bad, as was the case with Tomorrow Never Dies.  But here there’s just not enough of redeeming value beyond a great set-piece and a great idea.  After a brilliant debut in Goldeneye, I do hope that Brosnan goes out with a bang in his next and final entry, but – spoiler alert – I’ve seen it before, and as I recall he doesn’t.

The World Is Not Enough is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of action violence, some sexuality and innuendo.”  Bond beds three women, one of whom wears only a strategically-placed bedsheet in two scenes.  There’s a series of sexual innuendoes, including a particularly graphic one punning on the frequency of Christmas, and as far as action violence is concerned it’s a lot of shooting and exploding but with little to no blood visible.

James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of Die Another Day (2002) on September 7, 2014!