The World is Not Enough

(Here be spoilers if you are yet to see the James Bond movies...)

The Mission
The assassination of British oil tycoon Sir Robert King (David Calder) prompts MI6 to go on the warpath. James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) travels to Kazakhstan to protect King's daughter, Electra (Sophie Marceau), from her former kidnapper, an East-European terrorist named Renard (Robert Carlyle) - also the man suspected to be responsible for Sir Robert's death.

Jimmy Bond Yo!
Brosnan shakes off the effortless charm to play 'angry Bond' for the first time, turning in a less sympathetic performance than usual to give perhaps the least collected Bond interpretation the series has seen up until this point. Brosnan still gets to deliver all the usual wisecracks but he doesn't seem to be having as much fun doing it, giving off a slightly rattled vibe that suggests a level of character-depth that the script only alludes to in a vague fashion at best.

Bond gets used by Renard to literally deliver a live bomb into Sir Robert King's hands. It's never explicitly said that he blames himself for King's death, but he probably does. He doesn't let on about this for most of the film but it's susprising when he loses his cool for once after Renard pushes his buttons. He also gets very angry when he learns that Electra has sold him out, and even takes an almost sadistic pleasure in Renard's death. He avoids the question when asked if he has ever lost a loved one, and seems sad about having to kill Electra (Electra seems to think he is incapable of killing a woman, but he doesn't hesitate to do so)

He wears glasses as part of his disguise as an investment banker in Spain, and later impersonates a Russian scientist, accent and all. He can even speak fluent Russian if pushed. He's quite comfortable using computers but doesn't know how to diffuse a nuclear bomb. He seriously injures his arm quite early on in the film (giving him a weak spot for the rest of the movie) and doesn't want Q (Desmond Llewelyn) to retire. His family motto is "The world is not enough" (which we first learned back in On Her Majesty's Secret Service) and he takes some pleasure in using his assigned x-ray glasses to have a perve.

Villainy
Renard is a shaven-headed Eastern European terrorist with a bullet lodged in his brain. This causes him to not be able to feel anything (including pain) but the bullet is also slowly moving and will eventually kill him. This lack of feeling has made him emotionally numb, nihilistic and frustrated. He has accepted his death as imminent and inevitable, making him fearless and a virtually unstoppable force. Much like 006 in GoldenEye, he's a combination of the master-villain and henchman roles in one character. Robert Carlyle plays the character in a coldly casual manner, like a man with nothing to live for, and curiously (for a supposed terrorist) he's bereft of fanaticism and is fairly calm most of the time.

The other major villain is Electra King. She starts out in the 'Bond girl' role, a self-assured and philanthropic heir to her father's empire. She was once the victim of a kidnapping plot orchestrated by Renard, and wanted revenge on her father and M (Judi Dench) for their poor handling of the situation. She has a talent for manipulating men and, in an allusion to the phenomenon of Stockholm Syndrome, took Renard as her lover. Renard's fatalism has made him a slave to her plans, and together they scheme to blow up a nuclear submarine (with Renard as the suicide bomber) in the Black Sea in order to control and monopolise the West's oil reserves.

There are also a couple of minor thug characters - Gabor, played by former Australian Gladiator 'Vulcan' (John Sebu); Bullion (Goldie), a gold jewellery-loving Turk working as a spy for Renard in Zukovsky's criminal organisation; and Giulietta Da Vinci (Maria Grazia Cucinotta), a female terrorist seen during the prologue.

Buddies and Babes
The main 'Bond girl' is Christmas Jones (Denise Richards), an American nuclear physicist working in Kazakhstan. She has a shady past and seems to be running from something but we never actually find out what this is. Richards is awful and highly improbable as a physicist, calling to mind some of the poorly cast girls of the older Bond films (such as Ursula Andress as a shell collector in Dr. No, and Britt Ekland as an MI6 agent in The Man With the Golden Gun).

M gets a bigger role in this film... Sir Robert was a close friend of hers and she takes his death personally. This is due to her involvement in negotiating the return of his daughter when she was kidnapped, something that she still feels guilty about. She actually goes out into the field (for the first time?) at Electra's request, and is lured into a trap. She isn't above slapping Electra in the face but seems disturbed and upset by Bond's aptitude for killing when she witnesses him in action for the first time. She seems naively scandalised by Bond's bedding of Miss Jones at the film's end, which doesn't really square with Dench's previous portrayal of the character as someone fully aware of Bond's womanising nature.

MI6 now looks more like an office (after the massive darkened war rooms we saw in the previous two Brosnan Bond films), not all that far removed from how it looked throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. Q retires from active service but is rather enigmatic about saying goodbye. He sees himself as a mentor to Bond and only appears in one scene due to Desmond Llewelyn's advanced age. Q also introduces his replacement, R (John Cleese), a rather uppity and slightly bumbling chap who's eager to take charge of Q division altogether.

Bond's main pal in the field is Zukovsky (Robbie Coltrane), the Russian gangster last seen in GoldenEye, though this time around he's a lot friendlier with 007. He claims to now be a legitimate businessman with his own casino and caviar factory, but it's patently clear that he's not. His nephew is on the submarine stolen by Renard, which makes Zukovsky an ally to Bond by circumstance. He comes to Bond's rescue despite his shonkiness (and Bond's rough treatement of him) and gets killed by Electra, though he uses his dying gunshot to save Bond from death.


Locations
Literally all over the place. Part of the prologue is set in Spain, with some cool location work in the Basque region, and the other part of it is actually set on the River Thames in London (it's nice to see Bond in action on his home turf for once). There's also some brief location work in Scotland, and then the rest of the film is set around both the Caspian and the Black Seas. A lot of it is set in Kazakhstan but we don't see any cities or anything, so it could have been filmed anywhere (it was actually shot in Azerbaijan). The Istanbul sequences in Turkey are fairly underwhelming as well.

Gadgets and Tricks of the Trade
Bond has a pair of spectacle that can be used to activate a smoke-bomb disguised as a gun, and he later also uses a pair of x-ray glasses to detect hidden firearms (and admire female underwear). He absconds in the film's prologue sequence with an unfinished armoured speedboat powered by rockets... it's hard to tell in what way it's unfinished though as he's able to take it both overland and underwater without much trouble, and it also fires rockets. He laters gets another remote-control BMW with rocket-firing capability but he doesn't get to use it much before it gets completely destroyed. Bond also makes use of a special ski suit that turns into a massive cushion to protect the wearer in the event of an avalanche, and has a watch with a grappling wire in it.

Licence to Kill
Bond shoots up a storm. He shoots the following people - three guys in the Spanish office at the beginning, a Russian thug whilst infiltrating Renard's operation, Gabor, three men at the caviar factory, and Electra King. He also blows up a helicopter with a rocket at Zukovsky's caviar factory and uses a combination of gas and flaregun to blow up another helicopter. Finally, he steers a submarine offcourse in such a way that causes it to crash headfirst into the ocean floor, causing several of Renard's terrorists to tumble to their (presumed) deaths, and impales Renard in the stomach with a tube of plutonium.

Shag-Rate
007 seduces Doctor Molly Warmflash (Serena Scott Thomas) in order to pass his medical. She's familiar with his ways due to a past dalliance, but is naive enough to fall for his charms again. Bond also can't resist bedding Electra while acting as her bodyguard, and seems genuinely hurt when she betrays him. He also gets Christmas at the film's end (quote, "I've always wanted to have Christmas in Istanbul").

Quotes
JAMES BOND: Construction's not my, uh, specialty.
Q: Quite the opposite, in fact.

Q: Now listen 007, I've always tried to teach you two things - the first, never let them see you bleed.
JAMES BOND: And the second?
Q: Always have an escape plan.

JAMES BOND: Shadow operation?
M: Remember, shadows stay in front or behind, never on top.

JAMES BOND (after bedding Christmas Jones): I thought Christmas only comes once a year.

RENARD: You can't kill me, I'm already dead.

M (referring to Bond): He's the best we have, though I'd never tell him.

JAMES BOND (to Zukovsky): What's your business with Electra King?
ZUKOVSKY: I thought you were the one giving her the business?

How Does It Rate?
After the last two (fairly excellent) Bond films, the series falls back into something more familiar in terms of formula and tropes. The use of terrorism and oil could have led to further exmaination of the James Bond mythos in the modern world but there doesn't seem to be any clear subtext to it and there's nothing exciting or fresh about the way it's dealt with onscreen, apart from an offhand comment that MI6 refuse to negotiate with terrorists.

Renard is a cool larger-than-life villain, and his partnership with Electra King feels like new ground for the series, but their masterplan is just a mishmash of ideas with no clear aim. The way the film cold-opens on the main plot was nice too, but ultimately The World is Not Enough feels rather weightless despite Brosnan getting to show a darker side as a Bond enraged. Also, Denis Richards is atrociously vacuous as Christmas Jones, and she certainly isn't helped by the film's half-assed script either - we don't even get to find out why she's in Kazakhstan in the first place, despite some leading comments she makes in one single scene. How's that for an interesting backstory! It's positively non-existent.

The plot seems disjointed and confused a lot of the time, and is pretty much just an excuse to loosely string together some action sequences. The major problem with this is that the action is pretty lacklustre after the amazing stuntwork seen in the last three Bond films, and a lot of this The World is Not Enough's stronger moments seem to be cribbed from better Bond films (the speedboat chase, complete with comedy police, is lifted from Live and Let Die, and the heat-detecting satellite footage of Bond making love to Christmas Jones echoes the endings of The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker).

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DIRECTOR: Michael Apted
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Bruce Feirstein. Based on the characters created by Ian Fleming.
KEY ACTORS: Pierce Brosnan, Sophie Marceau, Robert Carlyle, Denise Richards, Judi Dench, John Cleese, Desmond Llewelyn, Samantha Bond, Robbie Coltrane, Maria Grazia Cuncinotta, Colin Salmon, Goldie, Serena Scott Thomas, John Sebu

RELATED TEXTS:
- James Bond previously visited Turkey way back in From Russia With Love.
- The character of Zukovsky previously appeared in the James Bond film GoldenEye.