The World Is Not Enough
Cast & Credits
Actor Character
Pierce Brosnan James Bond
Sophie Marceau Elektra King
Robert Carlyle Renard
Denise Richards Christmas Jones
Original running time: 2 hours and 8 minutes
Directed by Michael Apted
The World Is Not Enough
After his first two performances as James Bond, I was still undecided about how I felt about Pierce Brosnan in the role of James Bond. I remember seeing him in Remington Steele and saying to myself that I could see him in the role of 007. I was excited to see him in GoldenEye and while it was a very good movie it looked as though he was a bit cautious and uneasy in his portrayal. Mr. Brosnan couldn't be blamed that much though since it is such an iconic part and one wouldn't want to make a mess of it in his first attempt. In Tomorrow Never Dies it seemed as though he was becoming more of a comic book hero and I don't really think that the script did him any favors. All of the hype leading up to The World Is Not Enough claimed that this film would explore Bond as a man more than the previous two movies and that they hired director Michael Apted who was known for his work as a dramatic director and had never filmed an action film. Very interesting. This time we would hopefully get to see Brosnan's interpretation of the character.
After the gunbarrel sequence, the film starts with Bond walking into a Swiss banker's ofice in Bilbao, Spain. Bond is trying to get back money that was taken from a man named Sir Robert King. Another Double Oh agent was killed over it. The office also has a sexy cigar girl (Maria Grazia Cuccinota) and a couple of other men. It turns out that James has walked into a trap and is held at gunpoint. Thankfully, his reading glasses turn out to be a gadget from Q that give him the upper hand and allow him to take out the men that had their pistols fixed on him. Just as 007 is about to get information out of the banker, Cigar Girl throws a knife into the back of his head and quickly escapes. As the door is about to be broken down and 007 is about to be captured, he jumps out the building with a rope attached from himself to the banker and rappels down to the ground with the briefcase full of money. Cue title sequence. No wait... there's no title sequence? I'm confused.
Bond returns to MI6. He and M return the money to Robert King. After King leaves the office, M explains that she and King were classmates in law school and old friends. As Bond starts sipping his drink he notices that it is starting to foam and deduces that there might be a chemical on the money that he was handling. Yeah, that's the conclusion anyone would have come up with. This causes Bond and Q to chase down King and then we cut to Cigar Girl pressing a button that transmits a signal to the pin that King's wearing which in turn reacts with the chemicals in the money which in turn causes an explosion. Part of the MI6 building is blown away and Bond looks out of the huge gaping hole only to find Gigar Girl standing on a speed boat with an automatic rifle fixed on him. I guess that she just figured 007 would look out of the hole and was waiting. Bond barely misses being gunned down and borrows Q's speed boat that he drives out of MI6 HQ. It's a good thing that they have speed boats ready for situations like this. What happens next is that we have a boat chase down the River Thames which leads to Bond's boat doing a barrel roll, submerging, taking a shortcut through the streets of London, and travelling at high velocity through a restaurant. Bond has the time to straighten his tie while underwater and make a gesture towards his mouth indicating how good the food is at the restaurant. People that say that Roger Moore is too campy and like Pierce Brosnan really need to look at this. Anyhow, Cigar Girl (that's the only name she's given in the credits) tries to escape in a hot air ballon and James jumps out of his boat onto a rope hanging from it. They are soon surrounded by helicopters and she points the gun towards a gas tank on the basket. 007 tells her that he can protect her. She says, "Not from him" and puts a bullet into the tank (I'm not to sure if killing this attractive and interesting character before the credits is a good idea. Hmmm). James jumps before the explosion on top of the Millenium Dome and grabs onto a support cable. Finally, cue title sequence.
The title sequence features drops of oil falling down which form into beautiful women models made out of oil. They are dancing in an ocean made out of oil and later we machines pumping oil. There seems to be a common theme here. I guess that the titles are okay. I prefer the old ones. In the background the theme song by Garbage is being played. In my opinion it's the worst theme song in the series. Yes, worse than the Madonna one. My problem with it is that it's boring. A song by Barry Manilow probably would have more energy. The soundtrack by David Arnold is really bizarre. The "dramatic" scenes in this movie sound like something out of a Julia Roberts movie and the action sequences sound like something that John Barry would have done... if John Barry was rolling on ecstasy... at a rave.
Note to David Arnold:
Dear Mr. Arnold,
I doubt that John Barry has ever done ecstasy and James Bond doesn't hang out at raves so please stop making sondtracks that sound like this.
Sincerely,
amp316
My point is that it sounds like two completely different scores from one scene to the next and it sounds like two bad ones. Sadly, this guy is going to do all of the soundtracks from here on out (this is probably his worst one). Thankfully, he has been replaced for Skyfall. Let's hope that this is an improvement.
We next meet up with Bond with a sling in the doctor's office where he convinces the female doctor to give him a clean bill of health by offering her sex. This works approximately one in ten thousand times if you're a man and aprroximately five in every ten thousand if you look like Pierce Brosnan so this is highly plausible. After being cleared, Bond meets up with Q for what is by far the best scene of the movie. He introduces James to his assistant which James quips must mean that he's R. As bad as that is, most of the dialogue in this movie is worse. Bond is given yet another BMW ( I don't have to explain what's wrong with this again, do I?) and a jacket that when you pull the string forms a gigantic protective inflatable ball around him. Q hints at retiring and disappears into the floor. Sadly, this is the last that we would see of Desmond Llewelyn as Q. He tragically died in a car accident about a month after the movie was filmed. He was in every official Bond movie except Dr. No and Live And Let Die. That's 17 Bond films and I would like to take the time to say that he meant as much as anyone that was ever involved in this franchise. Connery, Moore, or Brosnan might be your favorite Bond, but everyone loved Llewelyn as Q and he is greatly missed. Now back to the movie...
M tells Bond that the number one suspect for King's murder is a terrorist named Renard. He was shot in his medulla oblongata and has a bullet lodged in his head. Apparently, he can't feel any pain and also supposedly makes him stronger and he can push himself harder. Now this is the type of ridculousness that I like in a Bond film and certainly there will be an awesome knockdown drag out brawl later. I can't wait! It turns out that Renard had abducted King's (King was an oil tycoon, by the way) daughter Elektra and held her for ransom. Bond deduces that the amount of money that he picked up earlier was the same amount as the ransom and that it was a message from Renard. M also tells Bond that she feels guilty because she told Robert King to not pay Renard the ransom and she was physically tortured. She eventually seduced and murdered the guards.
Bond is sent to meet Elektra at the King pipline in Baku to be her bodyguard. She says that she doesn't need him, but he insists that he get a closer look at the lines which coincidently involve skiing to get to them. The view in the mountains is breathtaking and this is the only scene in the movie where I feel that the director actually uses the location well (i.e. If I were the producers, I would punch director Michael Apted in the face for only using the background of the beautiful city of Instanbul briefly. It was practically a character in From Russia With Love). Too bad the upcoming action sequence is lousy. Parahawks come out of nowhere and start to fire on the skiers. They throw grenades on the ground that explode about 100 yards away. The parahawks move slow and the skiers aren't much faster. This is the first skiing scene in this series that is blah. I'll take the beginning of A View To A Kill over this. It is slow paced and never does Bond appear to be in danger until a mini avalanche occurs and guess which gadget he uses? Later, they predictably make love.
Bond goes to Valentin Zukovsky's casino to have a talk with him. Cool! He was great in GoldenEye. Bond shows off his ex-ray glasses, gets into a minor scrape, and after meeting Zukovsky asks what he knows about Renard. He repilies that he is a former KGB agent that may be working for oil barons that may want the King pipeline destroyed. Next, Elektra shows up and loses 1 million dollars in the casino on one hand of WAR. That's right high card wins! That's what this series has become. This leads into a scene where Renard meets with Davidov (Elektra's security chief) and a man named Arkov (a nuclear weapons scientist). Renard isn't pleased that Bond wasn't killed and forces Davidov to hold a burning rock and shoots Arkov for not killing Bond. He orders Davidov to take his place and grabs the rock and says that he can't feel pain for the first of what seems like 9 million times. Seriously, he keeps saying it throughout the movie so the people watching it with IQs under 46 won't forget... I also, want to point out this is buy far the hardest Bond review for me yet since I had to keep backing up the DVD repeatedly to catch all of the dumb plot points that lead up to nothing.
In about 5 seconds Bond finds out that Davidov is a bad guy, goes to his office, and kills him. He then pretends to be the guy pretending to be the nuclear scientist and is taken by chopper to an underground Kasakhstan nuclear facility which is being dismantled. Here we find out that that Pierce Brosnan can do a Russian accent as well as I can dunk a basketball which is to say that he can't. Speaking of bad acting, we meet up with the head of the project, Dr. Christmas Jones (played by Denise Richards). Tanya Roberts, Gloria Hendry, Britt Ekland, and a few others have Denise to thank for taking the throne as undoubtedly the worst Bond girl of all time. Her being a nuclear physicist is about as believable as this review being mistaken for one of Roger Ebert's. Anyway, Renard shows up underground with some of his men and is stealing a nuclear missile. Renard uses a line that Elektra used earlier and knows where to grab Bond's collar bone. The next scene is just like the never ending shootout on the sub in Tomorrow Never Dies that I couldn't stand. Rambo - I mean Bond - shoots the place to hell and Renard escapes. There's a big explosion, Bond hangs from two chains, jumps through a closing door, goes up an elevator and barely gets away. Don't ask.
Bond returns to talk to Elektra who slaps him because he was using her as bait to catch Renard. He tells her that he suspects that she's up to no good since Renard repeated something she said and him knew ti attack his his collar bone. This leads to Elektra asking M to personally come out and look after her since she no longer trusts Bond. M agrees because apparently she thinks that she, a 60 something year old woman can do a better job than Bond. Also, the head of MI6 is such an idiot that she thinks that the head of the British Secret Service going into the field wouldn't be much of a problem. *My head hurts. Can I stop the review here? No? Crap!* This leads to a CGI filled action scene where Bond and Dr. Jones have to travel at high speeds in the pipeline to diffuse a nuclear bomb. That's right, Bond needs her to diffuse the bomb. I have already seen him diffuse one in The Spy Who Loved Me and in Octopussy, but he must have forgotten how to do it now. This is proof that Roger Moore's Bond is better than Brosnan's if you needed any. Dr. Jones tells Bond that half of the plutonium is gone and that he bomb won't go nuclear so they hop off and let it blow up to let everyone pretend that they're dead. Bond says a woefully bad line about how he and Elektra are now strictly plutonic. I'm not claiming to be George Carlin or anything, but I could have come up with puns better than this movie has. They're bad. Rocky and Bullwinkle bad. Sorry... I shouldn't insult Rocky and Bullwinkle like that. By the way, after the explosion, M is kidnapped by Elektra and her men and thrown into a cell. I told you it wasn't a good idea her going out there.
So we go to a scene where we see Elektra and Renard together. Surprise! Surprise! They make love and she antagonizes him for not being able to feel pleasure. He puts his hand through a glass table and says that he can't feel pain. *rolls eye*
Bond suspects Zukovsky of being involved and visits his caviar factory. This turns into one of the stupidest scenes on the history of the franchise. Two helicopters with several saws hanging from them start cutting the factory to ribbons. James gets into his BMW and shoots it down with a surface to air missile, but the other one cuts his car in half with him barely escaping. All of a sudden, about 10 men come out of nowhere with machine guns. Bond shoots them all dead with his Walther PPK. He must have a lot of ammo. Then he shoots a flare gun into a pipe that's leaking gas directly under the other helicopter. I swear I'm not making this up. Next, we see Zukovsky about to drown in his own caviar and Bond forces him to tell him why he took a $ 1 million pay off from Elektra King. It turns out the Valentin's nephew is a sub captain that is being paid to smuggle equipment into Istanbul for Elektra to a place called Maiden's Tower. Bond deduces that a nuclear explosion with the plutonium that Renard stole would be made to look like like an accident and could contaminate the Bosphorous River. This would would make the Russian pipelines useless and give Elektra a monopoly. Of course he's right as usual and Renard and his men kill Valentin's nephew and his crew.
Long story short, one of Valentin's men is a traitor and leaves yet another bomb in a briefcase to explode, Valentin is left for dead, and Bond is captured and tied to a chair of torture in Maiden's Tower where his wrists and ankles are held down by clamps and Elektra is turning a wheel from behind that is cutting off his breath and going to break his neck. Will Renard and Elektra get away with their plan? Will Bond and M make it out alive? Will... To hell with this. Normally I don't spoil any of the ending but this movie deserves it since I need to in order to express my displeasure.
SPOILER FILLED RANT! SPOILER FILLED RANT! DON'T READ UNLESS YOU REALLY WANT TO! I"M NOT USING SPOILER TAGS!
So as Bond is about to die, Valentin shows up and is shot by Elektra. As he's dieing, he shoots the clamp off of Bond's one hand in order to help him be able to free himself. For some reason Elektra can't hear the ping off of the metal clamp that could have been heard a thousand miles away and assumes that Zukovsky was trying to kill him. Bond frees himself in about two seconds (yeah right!) and takes off after King freeing M along the way. Then what comes up could have been one of the best scenes in the series but winds up being one of the worst. Elektra says that Bond can't kill her because he would miss her. He says, "I never miss" and shoots her. Awesome right? Nope. Brosnan - I will say Brosnan because no other Bond actor would have done this in my opinion - hovers over the dead Elektra, brushes the hair from her face, and looks like he's about to kiss her or cry while Renard is about to cause a nuclear meltdown in the sub outside. Now I'm not claiming to know everything about James Bond, but I have read all of the Ian Fleming books and watched all of the movies. I would say that I do know enough to know that this isn't James Bond and that Pierce Brosnan has no clue what the character is about. 007 is cold when it comes to making love and when it comes to killing people and his job comes first. This might turn a lot of people off to the character, but that's how he is. Sure, he has fallen in love before but do you remember Bond acting like this when he was responsible for the death of Fiona Volpe or Fatima Blush? Of course not, because those evil bitches wanted him dead, just like Elektra. Even after Vesper Lynd, who he fell in love with, killed herself and was found out as a double he replied, "The bitch is dead." People can argue with me to the cows come home about how Craig isn't Bond, but to me Brosnan is the one that isn't Bond.
END OF SPOILERS
So in the end the entire movie is just an excuse to see Denise RIchards in a wet T-shirt, for Renard to say the worst line in the franchise's history, and for Bond to say two really bad Christmas jokes.
I promised that I wouldn't do this, but I have too...
0 out of 5 - Why did I give it a zero? Because I got zero enjoyment out of it. Brosnan proves that he knows nothing about the character of Bond as I explained in the spoiler section above. The one liners are terrible and Brosnan is even worse at delivering them. To me he's Roger Moore Lite and the worst Bond ever. I don't care about his hair, that he's skinny, or any of that, but I do care that his acting stinks and that he doesn't know a damned thing about the character. He looks good in a suit though and that's all that matters I guess... Despite their best efforts, Sophie Marceau and Robert Carlyle aren't given much to work with. Especially Carlyle who has to repeat that he can't feel anything over and over... Also, M is made to look like a complete idiot (shame on the script writers). The story isn't very good, it winds up in a sub JUST LIKE THE LAST MOVIE,and the action sequences besides for the boat chase all stink. I like Zukovsky and would rather see him in a movie series than another Brosnan Bond but... Oh, and Denise Richards stops in the middle of all of her sentences to think. In case you haven't figured it out by now, I think that this is the worst Bond movie ever!
Cool thing to know: The title comes from the movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service where on the Bond family shield it saysd in Latin Orbis Non Sufficit which translates to The World Is Not Enough.
Another cool thing to know: The precredits teaser goes on for nearly 15 minutes and is the longest one. The reason it was so long is that originally the teaser was going to end after Bond jumped out of the office of the bank, but preview audiences gave a negative reaction so they put the credits after the second action sequence.
James Bond will return next Monday in Die Another Day.
Proud member of the SONIC SUPPORT SQUAD
Tag "Sorry man. Someone pissed in my Wheaties."
"There are like ten games a year that sell over a million units." High Voltage CEO - Eric Nofsinger
