The World is not Enough

Released: 1999
Produced by: EON

Best Line:
"R" (John Cleese) briefs Bond on his new BMW speedster with titanium armor, missiles, "and six cup holders."

Worst Line:
Any number of Bond's lines as he flirts with the women. He sees Denise Richards' character, Christmas Jones and he alludes to "having Christmas in Turkey." He asks for "one last screw" when Elektra is garroting him. He puts a cigar tube upright on Moneypenny's desk and she says, "I know where that goes." (Even Roger Moore would cringe.)

But the worst? The last one. It's bad when they name a character something ridiculous just for an end line.

It Ain't Over 'Til the Garbage Lady Sings

The video to the title song, performed by Garbage, is a reprise of an idea that Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess first devised in his draft of The Spy Who Loved Me.

In the SWLM script (which was eventually discarded), a nuclear device is planted in the appendectomy scar tissue of a beautiful Australian opera singer. It is timed to go off as she dances the "Dance of the Seven Veils" in Strauss' Solome.

In the video, Shirley Manson of Garbage is actually an android with a bomb inside of her/it, which explodes as she/it sings in a crowded opera house. Hopefully it's the only time that TWINE bombs in a theater.

Plot

When a rich oil tycoon is killed in an explosion at the British Foreign Intelligence Agency, James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) becomes the bodyguard for his daughter, Elektra King (Sophie Marceau).

007 eventually discovers that the villain is a psychopath named Renard (Robert Carlyle) who is immune to pain because he has lost all feeling after a bullet became lodged in his brain. He plans to take over the world by means of a complicated, convoluted, slightly illogical plan to control the planet's oil supply.

Denise Richards plays Dr. Christmas Jones - a nuclear physicist. Her breasts appear to have been exposed to too much radiation, as they are swollen and glow in a lot of the shots.

Carslyle's character was first dreamed up in Tomorrow Never Dies. The henchman in the first draft of that screenplay was also supposed to be immune to pain, but it was either forgotten about and lost in rewrites or saved for this film. Personally, I don't find a man who can't feel pain scary -- I mean, he'd almost be easier to kill. But what do I know? If you told me a guy throwing a bowler hat with a razor brim was scary, I'd laugh at that, too.

MI6's Embankment HQ makes its first official appearance on the screen by permission of Foreign Secretary Robin Cook.

Good Cuts

Actually, here's what they should have cut: The opening teaser is fifteen minutes long! You feel like you're right in the middle of the film, then suddenly the titles start! The audiences is jolted back into reality, and the film has to start up all over again.

In an obvious future cut, 85-year-old Desmond Llewelyn ("Q"), introduces a successor. The "new young man" is played by Monty Python's John Cleese. He, of course, plays -- you guessed it -- "R". Sigh...

Once again, the script is overwritten and punned to death. For example...

Here's an exchange from an early Dana Stevens draft:

ELEKTRA: "Do you ski, Mister Bond?"
BOND(smiling): "I've been known to."

Here's the exchange in the final film:

ELEKTRA: "Do you ski, Mister Bond"
BOND: "Well, I was anticipating a chilly reception."

Does any of the filmakers think that was a good joke? I can't imagine they did. It's just there because they're counting punchlines in Bond's dialogue. (Can't he talk like a real person once in a while?)

Brosnan himself had a hand in script revisions: Apparently he hated the previous film, Tomorrow Never Dies, and wanted Bond to become a three-dimensional character again (two would have been an improvement). Brosnan told the Scotland Herald that his demands led to bitter rows over the script. "I kind of got a little despondent," he admitted, "because I thought 'Where am I? Where is he?'" So Brosnan finally spoke up: "It was a constant to-ing and fro-ing of phone conversations and faxes and heated discussions, with me calling Bruce Feirstein (one of the writers) every name under the sun and saying, 'You didn't effing well listen to me,' and 'What the hell is going on?' And him saying: 'But don't worry, I'm going to give it to you.' And two days later you had a wonderful scene . . . so there's a good healthy interaction."

Now, for a good cut. Let's see... the cut of Richards' tank top t-shirt is pretty good (see poster).

Reviews

Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times: "'The World Is Not Enough,' the 19th James Bond movie, is in the 'Mission: Impossible' tradition: It presents action, adventure and romance with maximum sophistication and spectacle and minimal clarity."

Roger Ebert: "A Bond picture that for once doesn't seem like set pieces uneasily glued together, but proceeds in a more or less logical way to explain what the problem and solution might be . . . My favorite moment? A small one, almost a throwaway. The movie answers one question I've had for a long time: How do the bad guys always manage to find all their equipment spontaneously, on remote locations where they could not have planned ahead? After the snow chase sequence, a villain complains morosely that the para-sails were rented, and 'were supposed to be returned.'"

Alexander Walker, This is London: "From its opening minute, The World Is Not Enough, the 19th James Bond film, is determined to take our breath away - and not let us draw it again for another 125 minutes. Far from being "not enough", Bond's world this time round feels much too much. Brosnan stands up to his third outing without showing fatigue, but the non-stop action gives him no chance to show anything else except incredible feats of physical endurance."

Stephen Hunter, The Washington Post: "Once, all the world went gaga over James Bond. Now, James Bond is going dada all over The World Is Not Enough. It's true. The new Bond movie is pure nonsense art of the dadaist school; it follows the rules of the ridiculous as it turns narrative convention, thriller formula and special-effects set pieces into a manifesto of the purest gibberish. To see it is to walk out of the theater scrambled, wondering where in the hell you are, if you are anyplace at all, and even that is in doubt."

"It must be a giant joke played on us by those merry pranksters at MGM. Or perhaps Pierce Brosnan is angry that his excellent remake of The Thomas Crown Affair made so small a dent at the box office that he has decided to give the public what he thinks is appropriate to its IQ: two hours of 'splosions and speedboats and machine guns arranged randomly, lacking beginning, middle or even end, or any connective tissue, while spotlighting some of the most vapid dialogue and some of the most vacant performances in history. It's pure dada, as revolutionary in its way as Marcel Duchamp's stunt of painting a mustache on the 'Mona Lisa' to stun the bourgeoisie."

James Verniere, Boston Herald: "Bond's wristwatch is featured so prominently in a lovemaking scene with Marceau it's almost a menage a trois."

Andy Seiler, USA TODAY: "... The news that Braveheart's Sophie Marceau, who stars as an oil-rich orphan in need of a little super-spy loving, is one of the most talented actresses to play a Bond girl will not be as exciting as the information that Denise Richards, who plays a rocket scientist exactly the way she played a trooper in Starship Troopers, is the absolute worst. Ever. Richards plays perhaps the first rocket scientist to mispronounce the word 'atomic' (she says 'a-tome-ic')."

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: "Most of all, though, I wondered how much longer people will pay to see a walking, running, driving, diving, punning, smirking, swimming, skiing, shoorting, parachuting corpse."

BBC2's Late Review: Germaine Greer complained that the film was "too noisy," and that it would only appeal to those "small minded individuals with a short span of attention" and that "during the first hour nothing much happens"

David Elliot, MSNBC: "Sort of topping the show, or at least starting it, is the title song performed by Garbage. Not quite garbage, really, but you can imagine Ian Fleming turning on a spit, grimly absorbing the lyrics: 'We know when to kiss, we know when to kill / If we can?t have it all, nobody will.'"

"No...more...stupid...puns... You can't make me..."

Undercover

Much of Elektra's physical seduction of Bond had to be censored due to the PG-13 rating, which Brosnan was not happy about. Brosnan talked about the film's sex scenes during a press interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills:

"It's such nonsense. You're dealing with 14 takes of Sophie, and I'm in the bed trying to get it right, not that we're getting it wrong," Brosnan said. "It's just that we're seeing her lovely nipples, and you can't show her nipples. You know the censorship is pathetic."

Denise Richards felt the opposite way about her sex scenes: "Well, it's always awkward. It's abnormal to go to work and lay in bed with your co-worker," Richards said. "I was nervous and Pierce is a really nice guy and he obviously wanted all of us to feel comfortable and in doing that, it's always uncomfortable."



Films, main The Nineties


Main Page



Return to COMEDY ON TAP