Screen Vistas: BONDATHON: THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH

There is a moment in The World is Not Enough, Pierce Brosnan's third outing as venerable superspy 007, where he stumbles onto a nuclear facility. As he takes the elevator down into one of Peter Lamont's huge sets, I figured that this must be the villains lair meaning we were entering the films last act. I then glanced down at the counter on my DVD player and realized with mounting dread that I wasn't even halfway through the film yet.

Let's go back to the beginning. It's customary for these films to have a pre-credit action sequence to help introduce the plot and maybe remind us of how cool Bond is with a spectacular stunt. This one has nice stunts, but damned if I know what was happening in it. Bond is trying to get some money back for reasons never really made clear, it all goes wrong, MI6 headquarters gets blown up and Bond ends up chasing a sniper down the Thames in a rocket boat he borrowed from Batman.

These prologues are often the best part of the film (even Moonraker had a decent one), but this one makes the pivotal mistake of not playing like a prologue, but like a sequence from the middle of a film. It's not just in that it starts out at such a high level of action that the film has to go to Toon Town to top it (we'll get to that), but that it's paced in a way that sub-consciously tricked my brain into thinking it was much later in the film. That said I do like the touch of having it end with Bond falling from a hot air balloon only to have his fall broken by the Danial Kleinman's outrageously 90's opening credit sequence.

Don't get any ideas Mad Men!

Before we move on, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the credits are set to one of the two or three best songs in the Bond cannon. The titular track by Garbage is a fantastic at subtly pointing out all of the shallow, soul eating ambition that it takes to be a Bond villain: "The world is not enough, but it's a very good place to start... If you're strong enough, together we can take tear this world apart." The irony is that the title inspiring that song isn't what the villain says before launching an atomic bomb but rather, the Bond family motto.

Anyway, Bond emerges from the credits mostly unharmed (he has a broken arm, sorta), and we start to learn about the convoluted plot involving former kidnapping victim/recent orphan/oil heiress Electra King (Sophie Marceau), the pipeline she's building and Renard (Robert Carlyle), the pain immune terrorist Bond must protect her from. After a brief visit with Q (Desmond Llewellyn in his final performance) to pick up some gadgets (X-Ray glasses, BMW, and a jacket that transforms into a dome for some reason) Bond jets off to Azerbaijan.

Normally Bond would try and seduce King immediately but this time he waits a whole ten minutes out of respect for her dead father or something nonsense. So while we wait we get predictable character development punctuated by a scene where the pair are attacked by flying snowmobiles (not as cool as it sounds). Bond later abandons his role as bodyguard so he can stumble around and find that aforementioned nuclear facility.

It's here that he meets the film's other Bond girl, Christmas Jones (Denise Richards), who lives up to her reputation as one of the worst recent Bond girls. It's not that Richards is miscast as a nuclear physicist (she is), it's that the film is incapable of making us believe that she's a professional of any sort. I'm sorry, but nuclear physicists, even the sexy ones, don't wear crop tops and booty shorts to work. It doesn't help that "nuclear physicist" is her only discernible attribute so there's no reason to care about her even a little bit even though she's the one Bond ends up with at the end. She's also completely useless for most of the film, making her the only damsel in distress in Brosnon's entire run. Furthermore, Jones's underwritten and lacking role is only underlined by all of the character development that Electra gets.

Electra, in the meantime is one of the more interesting Bond girls in a while. Late into the film we discover that the aloof, independent King is (Spoiler Alert) the secret evil mastermind, and a good one at that. She kidnaps Bonds boss, M (Judi Dench), and plans on nuking Istanbul so she can have oil pipeline supremacy. The film ends with Bond facing the choice of killing a woman he cares about to protect the world. In a better film, this might be an important turning point in the franchises mythology, making her the most important woman in the Bond cannon since his wife Tracy, but it's not a better film. Just once I'd like Bond to have some baggage that meant anything. (/End Spoilers)

The main issue though is the action. On the one hand we have some fairly authentic feeling Geo-political scrambling, but then we have action scenes that are ridiculous and cartoony even for a Bond film. In addition to the boat sequence and the flying snowmobile scene we also have a sequence where Bond and co. are attacked by helicopters carrying two-story buzzsaws to cut the building he's in in half. The latter is so big and grandiose, you assume it's the climactic ending, but it's not, not by a long shot. These increasingly silly action scenes are a dangerous president. This film goes too far with them and our next film in the marathon will go so outrageously far with them that it'll cause a massive shift in the series.

This film was directed by Micheal Apted, who may be the most interesting director to ever be allowed a crack at the series. He's done such diverse films as Coal Miner's Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist, but he's arguably most known for the Up documentaries, which has been slowly documenting the lives of the same group of Londoners from childhood through retirement and beyond. They are among the most remarkable experiences cinema has to offer. It's unfair to criticize a Bond film on that level, but you should see those instead.

Grade: C-

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Enjoy these other Bondathon entries:

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball / Never Say Never Again