The World Is Not Enough (8/10)
The World Is Not Enough is a James Bond film. The rest of this review is optional reading, since you now know all you need to.
The film, the third in the series to star Pierce Brosnan as 007, is the familiar mix of outrageous globe-trotting action, eye-popping gadgets and unfeasibly beautiful girls. The plot is hardly worth mentioning since you've seen it 18 times before, the traditional lunatic villain played this time by Robert Carlyle. The whole thing is utterly barmy, but if we accept that the best the Bond series can offer is a silly but stylish romp, then James Bond XIX succeeds as well as any of its predecessors.
We know what to expect from a Bond film, and the production team has to balance the need to deliver the goods against the danger of the formula becoming stale. There never was a time when the Bond films were realistic - they have always taken place in a world constructed in the fantasies of teenage boys, so the film-makers also have to preserve Bond's timeless quality yet make the film relevant to a modern audience. The team behind this Bond have got it just about right. Director Michael Apted is better known for his documentaries and character-based films such as 'Nell' and 'Gorillas In the Mist', and he handles this change of pace well, although much of the credit should probably go to editor Jim Clark and second unit director Vic Armstrong.
Pierce Brosnan is at least the second-best Bond there's been, but it's probably sacrilege to even suggest he might be better than you-know-who. He brings a cool, suave viciousness back to the role that went out of fashion for a decade or two but can work again in our ironic post- feminist post-modernist post-everything world.
There are three main female characters. We are meant to believe that Christmas Jones (Denise Richards) is a physicist helping to dismantle nuclear weapons in the wastes of a former Soviet republic, but our credulity is severely tested by her jaw-dropping Lara Croft costume which barely contains her jaw-dropping Lara Croft figure. Given the concentration demanded of the work she and her male colleagues are carrying out, her T-shirt would surely have been banned on grounds of safety. Pleasing on the eye though Dr. Jones is, she is a depressing throwback to the Bond bimbos of the past, and like the character she plays, Denise Richards is pretty but pretty useless. Thank goodness for Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), a much better-drawn and more complex female character than those 007 usually encounters. The other leading lady, and the classiest of the lot, is the wonderful Judi Dench, who in her third outing as M gets more involved in the action that the character ever has before.
Despite its lapses into some unfortunate features of Bondage past, The World Is Not Enough confirms that the dismal days of the later Roger Moore films are now just a bad memory, and the franchise that once seemed culturally if not financially bankrupt is once again in good shape. But then again, it is just a Bond film.
--
Gary Jones
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