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Before the opening credits for the 19th “official” 007 film have run, Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond has already made off with $5 million, outrun yet another country’s gendarmerie, blown up a couple boats, jumped off a building and out of a hot air balloon, loosed some torpedoes, offed a female assassin, dislocated a collarbone, thoroughly rankled his superiors, and dispensed a continual fusillade of limp sexist double entendres so lame they couldn’t get Ricky Martin laid in a Tijuana brothel, all while attempting to make p.c. statements about bad Germans and Swiss banks.
Things go downhill from there.
When the trailers came out for The World Is Not Enough, it appeared this installment (By the way, what did James Bond do to deserve so many movies anyhow? We haven’t had 20 When Harry Met Sally films, or a couple dozen more chapters of The Graduate.) might return to the leaner, meaner mood of the two Timothy Dalton 007 outings, which had the proper amount of gritty intrigue, if lacking the campiness of their predecessors...which Brosnan has in excess. And the supporting players -- Oscar-winner Judi Dench returning as “M,” Robert Carlyle (Trainspotting, The Full Monty) playing the bad guy, and John Cleese as a new gadget guru -- promised the best casting ever for one of these things. But all we get is the usual parade of geegaws, puns, and explosions, both pyrotechnic and hormonal.
The plot? Who cares? Something about Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), a rich industrialist’s daughter who, after her father is killed in a laughably complex techno-terrorist scheme involving killer cash, continues his plans to ease the world’s energy woes -- a frequent post-Cold War Bond theme -- by building a pipeline from the rich oil fields of the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. But evil freelancer Renard (Carlyle) -- who blew up Daddy and feels no physical pain thanks to a bullet in his brain courtesy of one of Bond’s fellow MI6 (which must stand for Macho Innuendo) agents -- has been hired by daughter’s competitors to steal a Russian warhead and meltdown Istanbul. In foiling the scheme, Bond battles and employs a familiar parade of armed transportation -- jet boats, morphing paragliders, a motorized pipeline luge, rocket-firing Bimmer, a purloined submarine -- all of which (except for a couple helicopters brandishing what look like giant industrial-strength weed-whackers) have turned up in previous exploits. He takes the usual time out from carnage to bed requisite silly-named pulchritudinous female set dressing (or maybe it’s the other way around), which in addition to Elektra include his doctor (“Molly Warmflash”) and a nuclear physicist (“Christmas Jones,” played by Denise Richards) whose government-issued nuke-defusing uniform comprises olive-drab short shorts and jogbra.
Dench and Carlyle try mightily to inject some interest into these recycled proceedings (Cleese is onscreen for only a minute or two), as does director Michael Apted (known for more serious fare, such as Nell and Gorillas in the Mist), but a script bearing the names of five authors gives them little to work with. The only marginally enjoyable character is capitalistic former KGB agent Zukovsky (Robbie Coltrane), returning from Goldeneye.
Maybe the reason it’s all so boring is that what there’s really not enough of in the world is room for both James Bond and Austin Powers. The latter continues to successfully parody the former, while recent 007 movies have only parodied themselves. Hopefully someone will come along to breath life into the franchise after Brosnan fulfills his contract with one more appearance. Until then, the upcoming Mission Impossible 2, directed by John Woo, looks pretty good. D
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