The World Is Not Enough (1999, Dir. Michael Apted):
‘My father came from the Highlands, from near Glencoe. But look here…’
‘What’s that?’ Griffon Or looked at him in astonishment. ‘You are not interested in your line of descent?’ … He reached for another volume that lay open on his desk and that he had obviously prepared for Bond’s delectation. ‘The coat of arms, for instance. Surely that must concern you, be at least of profound interest to your family, to your own children? Yes, here we are. “Argent on a chevron sable three bezants.”‘ He held up the book so Bond could see. ‘A bezant is a golden ball, as I am sure you know. Three balls.’
Bond commented drily, ‘That is certainly a valuable bonus’ — the irony was lost on Griffon Or — ‘but I’m afraid that I am still not interested. And I have no relatives and no children. Now about this man…’
Griffon Or broke in excitedly, ‘And this charming motto of the line, “The World Is Not Enough.” You do not wish to have the right to it?’
‘It is an excellent motto which I shall certainly adopt,’ said Bond curtly.
— Ian Fleming, On her Majesty’s Secret Service
For those who think that James Bond movies are all the same, try a double bill of Tomorrow Never Dies and its follow-up, The World Is Not Enough. While the former is a balls-to-the-wall Bond adventure with the volume amped to 11, the latter is one of the rarer birds in the Bond canon: an endeavor to catch a breath, and invest the story with emotional stakes. It’s not a coincidence that the title of the movie comes from Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service — for the first time since that film, we’re presented with a Bond who is less than impregnable. That vulnerability is made clear in World‘s unusually long pre-title sequence, in which a ridiculous boat chase down the Thames leads to an assassin attempting to escape in a hot air balloon (like we said, ridiculous) as Bond holds on for dear life. With no way out, the assassin blows herself and the balloon up, 007 sent tumbling down the side of the Millennium Dome and into the opening credits, defeated and injured. At the time, this was explosive stuff — we’d seen Bond lose before (most notably at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), but never before had we seen him fail in the first 15 minutes. For a moment, just a moment, anything seems possible, which is a singular feat for a series that had reached its nineteenth entry.
Having portrayed Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies, a film tuned to explosions more than human interaction, Pierce Brosnan was getting anxious. For The World Is Not Enough, he lobbied for a story that would rely on intrigue and dramatic chops, and the producers obliged him by snagging Michael Apted (known for the Seven Up! series and The Coal Miner’s Daughter), one of the more distinguished directors in the series’ history. While Bruce Fierstein was still on hand to supply snark and odd Americanisms in the script, main screenwriting duties would be handled by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, two Brits well-versed in their Fleming. Honest-to-goodness thespians (with one major exception — more on this later) like Robert Carlyle and Sophie Marceau would take center stage, and Judi Dench’s M would have a more sizable role than ever before. The timing seemed right for a sober Bond flick; the franchise was now under attack from all sides, with Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible series rivaling it in derring-do and Austin Powers mining the Bond formula for scattershot satire. What better way to reestablish Bond’s supremacy than to remind audiences that Bond as a character actually had some depth and shade?
It’s a shame, then, that The World Is Not Enough is a mess of a film. It pins the narrative on an intriguing premise — what if Bond became emotionally involved with his quarry? — but like most of the Brosnan Bond movies, it lacks the courage to follow through on its convictions. The first act does offer some nice change-ups: a briefing in an MI-6 Scottish outpost (with a nice call-out to Bernard Lee’s M on the wall), a final meet-up with cantankerous Q in his lab (Desmond Llewellyn gets a muted but appropriate send-off in his last appearance), and even the unusual scenario of M having to come to grips with a past decision that is now haunting her (foreshadowing Skyfall). The object of all her angst is Elektra King (Marceau), the bereaved daughter of a British oil magnate. Years before, Elektra had been kidnapped by wily terrorist Renard (Carlyle), and escaped his clutches in spite of M advising her father not to pay the ransom. Now Renard is back in the picture, Elektra is in danger, and Bond, naturally being attracted to a “bird with her wing down,” as he often was in Fleming’s books, is ready to play protector. So it’s off to Azerbaijan, with oil derricks standing in for attractive scenery, and before long Bond is dodging enemy parahawks on the ski slopes with Elektra (dressed in costume eerily reminiscent of Bond’s late wife Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) when he’s not getting charmed into her bed. For once, though, not is all as it seems… suffice to say that with a name like Elektra, you have to expect daddy issues to come into play. [Spoilers ahead, by the way.]
The problems with World start and end with the screenplay; it’s been reported that Purvis and Wade’s initial draft was worked over by Fierstein and Michael Apted’s wife, Dana Stevens, and the patchwork final product is a classic case of too many cooks. For a movie in which Bond must feel his way towards the truth, narrative clarity is key, and World is nothing but murky. Key moments take place off-screen or are elided over completely. Character motivations are concealed until it’s far too late (we don’t even know the central villain’s raison d’être until we’re three-quarters of the way through). Nonsensical incidents crop up regularly — take the moment in which Bond corners a traitor (Ulrich Thomsen). Does he question the man? Try to get a clue about the big picture? Nope, just a bullet to the heart. The plot dithers about in bland control rooms, warehouses and safe houses, growing ever more distended when it should be sharpening to a fine point. Ditto for the character interactions — a twisted love triangle involving Bond and the two major villains of the piece hints at the surreal nastiness you’d find a Buñuel film, but the script can only come up with Lifetime-level melodrama. Thus Brosnan trembles with righteous anger and Marceau twirls about like an insane little schoolgirl. And poor Robert Carlyle: his best moment as Renard is the 3-D representation of his head hovering above an MI-6 briefing table. Invulnerable to pain because of a bullet lodged in his skull, the potential is there for the character to inject some anarchic glee into the proceedings, but instead he’s the mopiest bad guy imaginable. At Elektra’s beck and call like a woebegone Great Dane, he asks her after she sleeps with Bond, sorrow in his eyes, “Was he a good lover?” For the first time in the series, you actually feel pity for a Bond villain (no, that’s not a good thing). By the time Judi Dench is bitch-slapping Elektra and getting a long stay in a jail cell for her trouble (this was the filmmakers’ idea of better utilizing her?), it’s plain that the whole venture is off-key.
Off-key doesn’t even begin to describe Denise Richards, though. Let’s not be coy here: when she shows up halfway through the movie in a Lara Croft tank top and short shorts as Dr. Christmas Jones, it’s provocative enough. Then she opens her mouth and it all falls apart. Playing a nuclear physicist, she’s way out of her league — not that it’s impossible for a hottie to appear in such a role (in Bond, it’s pretty much de rigueur), it’s more that she seems to be the most dunder-headed hottie you could come up with. The script and Apted’s direction are too bereft of wit to even make fun of her casting; we’re supposed to believe that she’s tough, capable, and independent. (Good luck with that.) While the plot and characters aim for the lofty heights of seriousness, Richards sends the house of cards crashing down every moment she’s on screen, all in the name of having a hot young actress on board to attract the multiplex crowds in Peoria.
Richards’ presence is only the most glaring example of the compromises that afflict The World Is Not Enough. It wants to be a subtler, more absorbing film than Tomorrow Never Dies, but it ends up replicating many of the previous film’s faults when it comes to the action scenes. By this point the filmmakers were going to outlandish extremes to give their setpieces more oomph, and this movie has some doozies: a Q-designed rocket boat that skids across London city streets like a skateboard, parahawks that convert into snowmobiles (too bad they don’t come equipped with competent pilots — when they’re not accidentally blowing each other up, they’re running headlong into trees), helicopters brimming with buzzsaws. It’s often been joked that if Bond’s enemies really wanted to get rid of him, a simple shot to the head or well-aimed missile would have more than sufficed, but when one of the buzzsaw helicopters fires a missile at Bond only after it takes five minutes to shred a few roofs off buildings in the most inefficient display of collateral damage since The Naked Gun, what can one do but laugh? All of this stuff is beneath Michael Apted, and he knows it; clearly not giving a fig about how the action integrates with the rest of the movie, he lets second unit director Vic Armstrong go on a rampage with his usual lack of finesse. The result is a movie that alternates between sleepy drama and puffed-up explosions.
The World Is Not Enough doesn’t climax so much as it concludes with a shrug. The final confrontation between an injured Bond and an invulnerable Renard aboard a nuclear submarine is as dull as it gets — thrill to the sight of Bond trying to connect a hose to a nozzle while Renard shoves a hunk of plutonium into a slot! Even the obligatory shot of Denise Richards in a wet T-shirt can’t quicken the pulse. It’s a shame it comes to this, because there are some good isolated bits floating around, like flotsam in the wake of a catastrophe. Bond’s final scene with Elektra has more impact than all the action fireworks the film strings together, Robbie Coltrane makes a welcome return as the not-so-trustworthy Russian mob boss Zukovsky, and composer David Arnold provides what might be his most understated, underrated score. But as Bond beds down with Dr. Jones with a final smutty pun about Christmas, all the momentous events of the film seemingly brushed aside, one has to wonder where the Bond series was going. Financially, everything was rock steady — The World Is Not Enough made over $350 million at the box office, cementing Brosnan as the first billion dollar Bond. But after producing an undistinguished copy of a classic Bond film in Tomorrow Never Dies and a disheveled version of a more human Bond film in World, what was there left to tackle? The question would be answered in time for Bond’s 40th anniversary in 2002, and it would turn out to be a whopper.
