THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH
MGM
Starring Pierce Brosnan, Sophie Marceau, Robert Carlyle, Denise
Richards, Robbie Coltrane, Judi Dench, Desmond Llewelyn, John
Cleese, Samantha Bond, Serena Scott Thomas
Music by David Arnold
Photographed by Adrian Biddle
Written by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Bruce Feirstein
Directed by Michael Apted
The pre-credits action sequence always
makes or breaks a Bond movie. The most rousing set pieces have
often kicked off the best Bond installments (the fisticuffs of
On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the ski chase in The
Spy Who Loved Me), while the ones without much panache have
opened the weaker films (the chintzy teaser at Scaramanga's lair
in The Man With the Golden Gun). Sometimes, the teaser
is so excellent the rest of the movie can't quite equal it, like
1979's Moonraker, in which its opening skydiving bit was
its only highlight.
So I'm glad to report that the 19th
Bond installment, The World Is Not Enough, opens on a wonderfully
taut note — an improvement over the rather dull opening proceedings
in the last Bond outing, Tomorrow
Never Dies — and that most
of the rest of World, solidly directed by Michael Apted,
measures up to the spectacular teaser, the longest and most suspenseful
pre-credits appetizer in the series' history. In the span of what
must be 10 minutes, Bond (played again with both devil-may-care
attitude and depth by Pierce Brosnan), on a mission to retrieve
an oil magnate's money, makes a daring Batman-style escape out
of a Bilbao office building window and then returns to London,
only to get involved in a speedboat chase on the Thames River
that's so wild it spills over onto land. His quarry? Gorgeous
villainess Maria Grazia Cucinotta of Il Postino fame, in
a red leather catsuit (and in too brief a role). And in a series
rarity, the chase ends on a sour note when Bond injures himself
and actually fails his mission.
This opener is part of the Bond filmmakers'
move to humanize 007 and make him more fallible, in this installment,
as well as Brosnan's other films, and this approach has been blasted
by critics who argue that Bond should remain a superman, like
their favorite 007, Sean Connery. But they're forgetting that
his Bond, though more hulking than the Bond that creator Ian Fleming
envisioned, could be vulnerable too — remember the scene
in Dr. No when Bond had the, uh, living daylights scared
out of him by a venomous spider? I disagree that exploring 007's
psyche takes the fun out of Bond; I'd argue that it keeps the
series alive. Besides, these films weren't supposed to be so cartoonish
to begin with, but then the successes of Goldfinger and
Thunderball convinced the producers to make the series
more over-the-top and gadget-heavy.
Like 1981's For Your Eyes Only,
World is an attempt to take the Bond series back to its
gritty, fedora-and-trenchcoat spy-thriller roots after criticisms
about the previous installment's excesses (Tomorrow Never Dies:
too heavy on Rambo-style gunplay and too light on intrigue
and the series' trademark travelogue glamour; Moonraker:
too juvenile). The most plot-heavy Brosnan Bond outing so far,
World centers on Bond's mission to protect oil heiress
Elektra King (Sophie Marceau) from terrorists led by the impervious-to-pain
mercenary Renard (a rather underwhelming Robert Carlyle), and
it's a welcome return to good old-fashioned spying. It even delivers
on the promise of character development that Tomorrow Never
Dies ditched halfway for by-the-numbers action-movie noise.
Marceau is everything we want in a Bond girl — sultry, exotic,
mysterious, complex, commanding and a little kinky — which
is why she acts rings around Denise Richards, who was so perfectly
cast as a spoiled bisexual cheerleader in the Aaron Spelling-goes-NC-17
comic thriller Wild Things, but is clearly out of her element here. The
American Bond girls, from Jill St. John in Diamonds Are Forever
to Teri Hatcher in Tomorrow Never Dies, have never
been as interesting or as feisty as the foreign ones, and Richards
is just the latest example.
World is
a step in the right direction for the series; Bond was more action
hero than spy in the last installment. However, somebody's let
those Bond puns get out of hand. Tolerable in Brosnan's last two
entries, the puns have turned cheesy — in a Roger Moore kind
of way. Asked by Richards' nuclear physicist Christmas Jones about
his relationship with Elektra, 007 says, "It was strictly
plutonic." Groan. But even when working with such lame dialogue,
at least Brosnan is clearly enjoying himself, which couldn't be
said about Connery in his later films or the edgy, if a bit humorless,
Timothy Dalton.
© 2000 Jim Aquino