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The World is Not Enough, 1999. Directed by Michael
Apted. Pierce Brosnan, Denise Richards, Sophie Marceau, Robert Carlysle,
Judi Dench, Desmond Llewellen, Robbie Coltrane, John Cleese.
The nineteenth James Bond movie finds Pierce Brosnan settling into the role of Bond quite nicely. And good thing, too, because this is actually one of the weaker Bond efforts. Oh, sure, it has great stunt set pieces and the Bond girls this time out are absolutely gorgeous (including the series's first female criminal mastermind), and the plot is actually pretty good, but there is something off key about the whole thing. I suspect that director Michael Apted, who used his position as the director of this movie to leverage the release of the latest of his "Up" documentaries (42 Up), is entirely to blame for this. Like I said, the set pieces are pretty good, including an entertaining use of an airborn tree cutter, but the way in which these set pieces are strung together is clunky and disjointed. It moves in fits and starts. The plot isn't as world threatening as usual, which may actually hurt the movie, but it is hard to tell, really. It concerns oil pipelines out of Azerbaijan and stolen nuclear materials, and it gives us a bombshell of a nuclear weapons expert (named, in the best Bond tradition, Christmas Jones). It doesn't give us a good villain, though. Robert Carlysle's Reynard, a man who feels no pain (or sensations of any kind), is pretty lackluster--disappointing, even, given the build-up he was given in the film's pre-release buzz. And lacking a good villain and a cohesive integration of the other elements it has at hand, The World Is Not Enough falls apart in the end. Not the worst Bond movie, but not the best by a long mile.
Other James Bond movies reviewed on this site include: |