by Curtis Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org
The James Bond movies are sometimes described as formulaic, but that's not quite right. A formula is more exact, more scientific. You mix so many cubic centimeters of one substance with so many milliliters of another substance and you get the same number of joules or watts or whatever-it-is every time. Bond movies are a lot more like recipes. You have the same ingredients every time, but if the ingredients are stale or you have too much of one thing and not enough of another, whatever it is you're cooking doesn't taste right.
Here, in The World is Not Enough, most of the ingredients are there for a successful Bond movie. In fact, you can almost run them down in a checklist -- Roger Ebert did exactly that in his Chicago Sun-Times review, in fact. We've got Brosnan as the best Bond of the decade, the redoubtable Dame Judith Dench as M, the new Iron Lady of the United Kingdom, and the winsome Samantha Bond as Moneypenny in the front office. John Cleese joins Q (Desmond Llewellyn) in the gadget shop (although the bad guys have the best gadget, a helicopter chain saw thingy that can even deal with the titanium armor on Bond's BMW). The clever product placements are still around (including a Visa card that gets Bond everywhere he wants to be). The sultry Sophie Marceau, whose only fault is that she is not Elizabeth Hurley, steams up the screen quite nicely as the Bond Girl. The chase scenes are here, too, but they're nothing special. An imaginative race inside an oil pipeline is the best of them.
Only one ingredient is missing from the Bond recipe here, and it's arguably the most important. The Bond villain is, at least in my cookbook, the key spice that makes the recipe work. Without a compelling bad guy to be Bond's foil, the movie doesn't work as well. Take away the bad guy, and 007 might just as well spend the movie doing paperwork.
The bad guy in The World is Not Enough is a schmuck. His name is Renard, (Robert Carlyle) and he has a bullet in his brain. Apparently, the bullet is destroying the part of his brain that makes him feel pain. One wonders, though, if the bullet also hit the part of his brain that makes him interesting. Sure, he can hold hot rocks in his hand, and he has a cool scar, but he's got no charisma, and takes no joy in his evil work. Most Bond villains are over-the-top, but Renard is about a hundred feet under the top and sinking fast. He's supposed to be a nihilistic terrorist, which should be interesting, but he's so blah and dull that he might as well be a crazed accountant. (Brad Pitt's character from Fight Club would be a welcome relief in this part.)
A better bad guy would have added to the movie immensely by counterbalancing some of the more ridiculous aspects of the movie -- that is, the plot. The plot is dreadful -- not interesting enough to be fun, just complicated enough to give you a headache. And the complications aren't there for any good reason. Like the nonsense about the Trade Federation at the start of the new Star Wars movie, the plot is just there to stitch the action sequences together.
It is arguable that the victory of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the West in the Cold War deprived James Bond movies of good plots. I think it runs deeper than that, though. The world today is still a scary place, even without the Soviets. But the scariness comes from many different parts of the world, most of which we're not familiar with. (The World is Not Enough spends a lot of time in the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan -- and manages, somehow, to make believe that Baku is the Russian Riviera, complete with casinos and fancy villas.) And the geopolitical scariness is of a different order -- cyberterrorism and biological warfare and the like -- that the Bonds of this world are ill-equipped to deal with. It ought not to be that much of a stretch to come up with some plausible way to blow up the world, but the writers here can't figure it out.
The other flaws in the movie show up as well. Denise Richards is not given much to do as the second Bond Girl, and despite her supposed status as a rocket scientist (insert joke here), she's just given master-of-the-obvious lines like "The ship is flooding!" (She's given one line of Russian -- which I could actually follow, meaning that her character has the same bad accent and poor grasp of Russian that I do.) Bond is given a shoulder injury that only manifests itself when he is in the clutches of the bad guys. Robbie Coltrane, who would have made a fine replacement of Q, is only marginally effective as Bond's ally in the Russian Mafia. The opening chase scene is dull and overlong -- so much so that the credits seem out of place, almost as if Monty Python were doing the editing.
Anyone who has ever tried to replicate their grandmother's stuffing for Thanksgiving will sympathize with The World is Not Enough: a good recipe gone wrong. This holiday season, James Bond has served up a turkey.
-- Curtis Edmonds blueduck@hsbr.org
Movie Reviews: http://www.hsbr.org/buzz/reviewer/reviews/bdreviews.html http://www.epinions.com/user-curtisedmonds
"Oh, if life were like the movies, I'd never be blue." -- Alan Jackson, "Here In The Real World"
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