Rich people wanting richer.

Another villain with a bomb. Another hero who must defuse it. That’s what the twisty confusing plot boils down to in the James Bond actioner THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH.

The cold open features a rather tame, though humorous, escape for a Bond movie, as Bond easily rappels down an office building (tied around a man’s waist at the top) – until we see the real cold open excitement: a powerboat chase of a damaging brunette in red leather (featuring Maria Grazia Cucinotta, who would also appear this year in THE SOPRANOS as “Isabella” S1E12). Featured gag is Bond’s boat doing a corkscrew jump out of the water (homage to the corkscrew car jump in THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, 1974). After Bond damages more property and endangers more lives than any bad guy, the girl blows up (–awwww! What a waste of hotness!) and the opening titles slink in…

… with naked girls writhing in oil, while Garbage performs The World Is Not Enough.

Pierce Brosnan returns a third time as MI6 agent James Bond 007. Judi Dench is once again ‘M’ the boss, and Colin Salmon and Michael Kitchen return as office agents.

Desmond Llewelyn: The REAL secret weapon.

Desmond Llewelyn as weapons expert Q introduces “the young fellow who’ll be replacing me…” – John Cleese, who brings his A-game for the cameo! The producers wanted to film a farewell to Llewelyn in the last film (TOMORROW NEVER DIES) in case he retired, instead filming a quick goodbye here – and well they did, for 85-year-old Llewelyn would die tragically in a car accident one month after WORLD premiered. Bond even looks sad when he asks Q whether he is serious about retiring.

We did not know it at the time, but sadly, Llewelyn’s last words in a Bond film would be, “Always have an escape plan,” and as he descends out of sight, it would be the last we would see of him. The saddest cut of all is that Llewelyn expressed a desire to be in one more Bond film.

What would a Bond movie be without a car supplied by Q that shoots missiles? Bond uses such a car… and for the first time, when the car is ultimately destroyed, Bond makes a callback to his cantankerous pal: “Q’s not gonna like this!”

He might have provided the secret weapons, but all this time Desmond Llewelyn himself was the Bond series’ secret weapon.

Directed by Michael Apted (EXTREME MEASURES), this caper is set in motion when M’s personal friend is killed, leaving an oil empire for his daughter, Elektra (sultry Sophie Marceau, BRAVEHEART, 1995). A shoulder injury almost prevents Bond from pursuing the killer of Elektra’s father, but Bond plonks his hot doctor (Serena Scott Thomas) for a clean bill of health.

He makes contact with Elektra as a protector and ends up as an injector, if you take my meaning. On bedsheets that are getting progressively less concealing as the decade moves toward a new millennium. What I’m saying, boys, is – yes, there’s some nip slip…

As the hot chicks pile up, movie loses all credibility when it introduces Denise Richards as a physicist [record scratch]— named Christmas Jones, garbed in crop top and hot pants – because that’s how physicists dress. You read that right: Denise Richards is a Doctor of Physics — with not one scintilla of acting ability, as the producers discover when they mistakenly try to force lines of physics dialogue through those lubricious cupid-bow lips (“We’re safe from the radiation as long as the reactor coolant doesn’t burst!”) which were purposed by nature only for carnal intercourse grunts.

Christmas works for Elektra, who is trying to build an 800-mile pipeline “through Turkey, past the terrorists in Iraq, Iran and Syria.” Terrorists in those three countries? You don’t say! So they were praising allah and blowing up civilians back in the 90s, just like they are now? And 5,000 years ago, same. And I’m betting it will still be the same 10,000 years from now. Proving that there’s no cure for religious fuckheads.

A physicist arrives at work.

Some Bond movies snap our necks with all the unnecessary locations – WORLD is one of them. It just seems like writers Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Bruce Feirstein are thinking up vignettes to keep the story kinetic, yet not giving a toss on how or why the characters would find themselves in those situations. Like Bond and Elektra skiing down a mountain pursued by “parahawks” (guys in snowmobiles, suspended by parachutes). Choppered to the top of this mountain to supposedly “check the survey lines,” Elektra has brought no equipment except her skis and panties, no camera, no tools, not even one stinking clipboard to take notes. What kind of “surveying” are you doing, woman? It’s just a romantic interlude for these two, interrupted by Parahawk Action Sequence, which we would find out later has no meaning to the plot anyway.

At the Azerbaijan oil fields, Bond sees a helicopter outfitted with five circular saws hanging below it, cutting through trees, clearing land. Like THAT isn’t foreshadowing. (It’s what cuts through Q’s car later!) Part of the story is set in Istanbul, but a real life terrorist bombing there forced the filmmakers to do those scenes at Pinewood instead. (Thank you SO much, religious fuckheads!)

Robbie Coltrane reprises his role as Russian gangster Zukovsky. (We met him in GOLDENEYE; he skipped a movie, he’s back again, though I’m sure his accent has become more schoolyard-Boris than his last go-around.)

Eventually we meet the terrorist behind the bomb, with his oomph-Bond-gimmick: “a stray bullet moving slowly through his brain, killing his nerves, so that he feels no pain, getting stronger until his eventual death.” Robert Carlyle, so impressive in TRAINSPOTTING and THE FULL MONTY, has nothing to do here as Renard, generic Bad Guy. His gimmick is never even utilized properly: when he and Bond eventually engage in hand-to-hand, over the thermonuclear device that Christmas can’t pronounce, Renard is not inordinately stronger than Bond, nor does he “feel no pain,” as every time Bond kicks him, he goes, “Oouf!” and “Aargh!” (Bovver boy Begbie was more resilient than this guy!…)

To further the annoyance at wasting such an ominous personality on generic punching, when Bond gets the drop on Renard – he’s the one now talking instead of shooting! You’d think he’d learn from all the talky villains who’ve gotten the drop on him, but maybe he thinks this is how international espionage is done?

At just over 2 hours long, we start to feel it, as the movie wends its way around the Middle Eastern world, especially when machine guns are popping off and bombs are blowing up and no one is getting hit except bad guys, and the air around Bond and Christmas.

When Elektra asks M to protect her personally, we have to ask ourselves what M can do that ten skilled male agents can’t. The trap is so obvious, it’s only a matter of time before M finds herself in an easily-escapable cell. But then, it would seem every trap for Bond is never designed to kill him either, but to put off his death, as Renard strands Bond in an exploding mine and Elektra ties him to a torture chair. (Maybe these people need more religion – to become better killers.)

The last sequence finds Bond and Christmas trapped in a sinking sub. Can’t get more claustrophobic than that. Well, you can if Denise Richards is saying her lines at your face like a first-year acting student. Really, couldn’t they have switched the Christmas role with Maria Grazia Cucinotta instead?! Tits AND brains.

– – – – – SPOILERS – – – – –

There’s a new villain dynamic in THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH – The Bond Girl is also The Bond Villain. (No, I’m not saying Robert Carlyle is a girl, I’m saying Sophie Marceau is playing both sides of the bed.)

Elektra was kidnapped by Renard when young, and embraced his ideology (Stockholm Syndrome, meet Patty Hearst), so even though Renard is the mad bomber, Elektra is his mad funder; he’s the muscle, but she’s the megalomaniac tactician calling the shots, aiming to rule the world through Big Oil, which, as we know, is a much more criminal enterprise than a simple kidnapper-bomber.

As usual, movie ends with Bond eating Christmas for dinner.

END

Out with the smug. In with the smugger.

The codes of a destructive satellite named GOLDENEYE have been stolen by Russian traitors working with a British traitor, Agent 006, who plans to use Goldeneye’s electromagnetic pulses to cause a global financial meltdown. James Bond must defeat the stronger agent, thwart the runaway satellite, and bang the Russian hotness.

new bond: brosnan, pierce brosnan

The first Bond that came to my young attention was Moore, Roger Moore. And I lavished the appropriate young-boy idolatry on this Real Man surrounded by gangsters, gadgets and girls. Upon learning of Connery, Sean Connery, it seemed only appropriate to then lavish the proprietary respect on He Who Came First – and let’s face it, he was quite the Man’s Man himself (meaning he was even more of a misogynist than Moore). Lazenby, George Lazenby, I never knew thee. And Dalton, Timothy Dalton, I was ambivalent at best about the choice, being young, dumb and fulla that white stuff.

I used to go around saying what a fine Bond that young REMINGTON STEELE fella would make; whatsisname? – Brosnan, Pierce Brosnan. Well, little did I know that wheels of fate were in motion: Brosnan was married to Cassandra Harris in 1981 when she did FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, and was introduced to producer Albert Broccoli… and thus he was, in fact, chosen to replace Roger Moore in 1987’s THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS – and lost the gig to Timothy Dalton due to NBC grasping like the tentacles on the S.P.E.C.T.R.E. octopus and extending Brosnan’s contract on REMINGTON STEELE due to the heat he would generate from being Bond. So Broccoli said Fuck NBC and hired Dalton instead…

Sadly, Cassandra would die of cancer in 1991 and would not see her husband become Bond.

But here we are at last, me being proven right on what a damn fine double-oh Brosnan cuts, in his first go-around as 007 at 42 years of age, in a film once again named so appropriately in the Bond vein, GOLDENEYE (maybe because we’ve been conditioned to accept the “gold” appellation, with GOLDFINGER (1964) and THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN (1974)).

GOLDENEYE is the first Bond film not lifted from an Ian Fleming Bond novel.  But there is a connection to Fleming: Goldeneye is the name of his estate in Oracabessa Bay in Jamaica. It was where he started the first draft to the very first Bond novel in 1952, Casino Royale.

Smugtastic!

GOLDENEYE grips us immediately with James Bond 007 (Brosnan) bungee-jumping off a massive dam in total silence to infiltrate a Russian base. With fellow MI6 Agent 006 (Sean Bean), they both spy around a bit before 006 gets killed by Colonel Ourumov (Gottfried John) and 007 escapes in another throat-gripping stunt – leaping a motorbike off a cliff runway to chase a taxiing single-engine plane off the cliff, with no pilot. The stunt is so audacious, it cannot be matched by anything that comes after it. The opening titles slink in with Tina Turner singing Goldeneye.

NINE YEARS LATER…

Bond is careening down a mountain road in an Aston Martin with a young woman, who nervously begs him to slow down, “James, I enjoy a spirited ride as much as the next girl, but…”  A luscious woman in a red sportscar overtakes them, openly flirting with Bond. Bond’s young woman asks, “Who’s that?” James: “The next girl.” (Ha! I love it! Shutup! So do you! It’s 1995.)

After meeting that sportster at a baccarat table (the delectable Famke Janssen at the height of her sex as Xenia Onatopp – all the better to innuendo her), the plot kicks into gear, with Onatopp and Colonel Ourumov stealing a techno helicopter, wiping out a Russian satellite base, and tying Bond’s knickers into knots.

We are introduced to a new actor playing Moneypenny the MI6 secretary (Samantha Bond, who would play the character through Brosnan’s four Bond films); not as luscious as Caroline Bliss heating up Dalton, and not an auntie like Lois Maxwell pining for Connery’s and Moore’s underpants, Bond (Samantha) is an attractive redhead who smugly informs Bond (James) that she was just on a date with another gentleman, and that Bond’s flirtations could get him charged with sexual harassment! (Just wait’ll she gets a load of #MeToo!)

There’s a new M – Judi Dench as MI6 director, taking the reins from Robert Brown (who took over from Bernard Lee and only did four Bond films prior to Dench). The first female M, she’s openly contemptuous of Bond, “You’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur,” as Bond is direct about his distaste for her as nothing more than “an accountant.” M matches Bond in smug, with a dash of anger – smug-anger? smanger? It sets up a contentious dynamic that would play right into the Daniel Craig era.

And there’s Q, the same old weapons expert we’ve grown to love – Desmond Llewelyn (a fixture since the 2nd Bond film, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, and would be till his death after 1999’s THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH). His role is pure comic relief, and we realize this whole bit about showing Bond new gadgets has become almost a satire within each Bond film.

Alan Cumming is Russian computer whiz Boris (although it doesn’t take much to hack these 1995 computers, basically some typing skills and figuring out sexual innuendo passwords).

And the Bond Girl in this 17^th EON Production Bond film – Izabella Scorupco as Natalya. She’s a computer programmer – because she’s a girl. Think I’m joking? Computers were coming into their own as plot drivers in movies, but note the attitude toward sitting and typing in 1995 – a task usually reserved for secretaries, a job usually reserved for women since time immemorial – all the Russian computer techs are women and doughy guys, and effete Alan Cumming is the head computer nerd. Real Men were still doing the punching and shooting. There is a moment where this disparity of effort comes across: Natalya must hack Goldeneye, and Bond gives her a look that says, “Wait – you’re actually going to sit there and TYPE while I do the real work of punching and shooting?!” It lasts for just a second – but it’s there, giving away the inborn misogyny of the filmmakers (writers Jeffery Caine and Bruce Feirstein and director Martin Campbell). There’s also another message in Bond’s look: that of a man unversed in computers (again – because they’re girly things).

Compare that 1995 attitude to Timothy Olyphant’s sexy computer mastermind in LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD (2007), or even Man’s Man Daniel Craig as 007 hacking M’s computer in CASINO ROYALE (2006).

To be fair, the women are given their due in fighting skills – Onatopp, it seems, takes an equal amount of sensual pleasure in violent killing as raunchy fucking, and her signature move is wrapping her thighs around a man and crushing the breath from him. And when Bond gives Natalya a gun, asking if she knows how to use it, she quickly demonstrates how proficient she is. So, Ladies – we got your back (as long as it’s pearbottom).

Joe Don Baker’s first Bond appearance was in THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS as an American ex-communicated general who supported the Confederates; here he plays agent Wade, a more regular Ugly American, loud and obnoxious, Bond’s disrespectful sidekick (“Hey, Jimbo!”), who turns up wherever he’s needed so that Bond isn’t stranded. And Robbie Coltrane is Russian mafia, more for comedy than plot.

GOLDENEYE loses steam when 006 turns up back from the dead, as a British traitor, and tries to kill Bond and Natalya. This first murder attempt, where they are left in a helicopter with missiles headed for them, yet with the EJECT button within reach… was beyond laughable for a supposedly canny traitorous double-oh agent to have set up. Was the movie pulling our legs? So by the 5^th attempt on Bond’s and Natalya’s lives, we’ve checked out, figuring that 006 must harbor some love-that-cannot-be-spoken for 007 for all his half-hearted efforts in terminating him.

But it’s not all his fault – at one point, 006 sees Bond on a monitor and clearly says to his men, “Kill him.” Easy enough directive, right? Wrong. So the stormtrooper-trained baddies all machine-gun Bond’s general direction, hitting nothing but air, then when Bond steps out with his hands up, they point their guns at him as if that’s a threat. Idiots, you were just shooting at him enough to turn him into confetti, and now that he’s standing right in front of you, you STOP? They take Bond back to 006 – who proceeds to question Bond on why he won’t die. The first thing he should’ve shouted at his idiot soldiers: “Why did you morons bring him back here?! I SPECIFICALLY TOLD YOU TO KILL HIM!”

Movie devolves to TV’s THE A-TEAM when Bond chases Ourumov through Russian streets in a tank. Yes, I said TANK. It’s the coolest scene in the movie, with Bond driving a Russian T-55 tank blithely through buildings and landmarks (the amount of collateral damage! and probable death! But – good guy, so it’s okay) – yet every police car that impacts the tank and is turned over, crushed, or pushed off bridges, we see the occupants exit the cars in quick cutaways, for the PG-13 rubdown.

What about all those trained soldiers that run directly INTO the line of fire? Well, they fall down with no blood or brains spattering everywhere, as would be the case with the high caliber weapons they are being killed with.

Inexplicable interlude in the Caribbean, where Bond and Natalya seem to be spending a casual honeymoon. Skip–

James Bond fiercely guards his woman from progressive liberalism.

More could have been made of the competitiveness between 006 and 007. I imagined 006 was the veteran, having earned his license to kill earlier than Bond. The script plays them as old friends, with Bond BETWAYED. 006 sneers that he “was always better,” which means he has the inferiority complex. A climax above the dish of a radio antenna proves him wrong. However this outcome might have been more poignant had 007 always thought he was the inferior one and comes to realize, without fanfare, that in besting 006 he was, in fact, “always better” – the better agent, the better man, the better smug.

Timothy Dalton went back to the Ian Fleming 007 novels to inspire his take on Bond, but Pierce just looked to Roger Moore – and turned up the smug. Moore was 58 years old when his last Bond was released (A VIEW TO A KILL, 1985), and just didn’t have the smug-stamina (smugina? staminug?) to compete against a new generation of bad guys and badder girls. The franchise needed the younger Pierce to inject its smug into those bad people.

Except for the opening stunts, which are organic to the story, each outlandish action sequence is predicated on stupid things being done or neglected or coincidentally falling into place in the preceding action sequence, which means negating one small coincidence, or just having one of the 50,000 stray bullets hit its mark would put an end to this whole beargarden. The biggest recurring mistake is that no one will get smart and shoot Bond in the head point-blank, over the course of about 63 opportunities to do so. Seriously, you almost start rooting for the bad guys, the number of times this super secret agent finds himself in these embarrassing situations. If he was half the spy his legend makes him out to be, he wouldn’t wind up captured or in the crosshairs in the first place, and the story wouldn’t need the pathological procrastination and breathtaking bad aim.

The grandest, stupidest plot convenience of all must surely be Boris’s subconscious habit of clicking a pen three times while twirling it in his fingers, while he does his feminine computer hacking. Well, it’s a good thing Q just happened to give Bond an explosive pen that is armed when you click it three times. So, yeh… CONVENIENT. I mean, what are the odds?

About the same as someone shooting Bond in the head point-blank.

END