The World is Not Enough
Starring Pierce Brosnan, Robert Carlyle, Sophie Marceau, Denise Richards, Robbie Coltrane, and Judi Dench.
Directed by Michael Apted
So, with my Dad officially off on Christmas vacation, I knew it was the proper time to drag him on down to the theater to see the newest James Bond film. Seeing the James Bond movies has become our thing. We’ve seen GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies together, so it was off to see The World Is Not Enough!
Our story: the film opens with an attack on MI6 Headquarters, in which James Bond (Brosnan) is left with a broken collarbone. It seems the attack was set up to kill the head of the world’s largest oil company, who was there to recover some money that was stolen from him. Fearing that his daughter Elektra (Marceau) may be next, Bond goes off to be her bodyguard. The villain behind this whole thing is Renard (Carlyle), a terrorist who one attempted to kidnap Elektra, but things didn’t go his way, so he is now enacting his revenge on Elektra’s oil company. He has a bullet lodged in his brain that makes him impervious to pain. Along the way, Bond teams with nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones (Richards) and Russian crime boss Valintine Zukovsky (Coltrane), whom we first met in GoldenEye.
There seems to be two James Bond fans in the world: those who like the formula, and want to see what new things are brought to it, and those who wish that they’d scrap the formula and try something new. I’m still pretty new to Bond, so I like the formula. This film has some pretty spectacular stunts, like the opening boat chase, and when Bond and Dr. Jones go jetting through a pipeline in an attempt to diffuse a nuclear warhead. I know that this Bond tried to be more “character-driven” than the last few, and succeeded for the most part. Some good points: it does have a a surprising plot twist (as surprising as things get for Bond films), and David Arnold’s score just rocks! Some complaints: Richards doesn’t make the most convincing nuclear physicist (but I sure would have stuck with physics if all my colleagues looked like her!), and it does end with what has to be the raunchiest James Bond one-liner. All in all, a fun frolic for 007. Check it out.