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

“Just TRY and take our fine assortment of leather mugs!”

Mel gets medieval on our asses…

When the Legend becomes fact, print the Legend.
— from THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE.

War is Mel.

Reprising his MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME hairdo, donning a slimming skort, pumping up the man-ceps and dropping an accent that is either Scottish or some form of Indonesian elvish, Mel Gibson brings the thunder as revolutionary Scotsman William Wallace, historical figure made mythical mantoy in BRAVEHEART.

Scotland’s cucumbers are yours no more!

Every man dies. Not every man truly lives to wear a skirt.

Written by an actual descendant of the Scot warrior, Randall Wallace, and directed by Gibson’s massive arms, BRAVEHEART takes us to 1300’s Scotland, as Wallace, with his mullet set on stun, leads Scots and Irish forces to free Scotland from the stranglehold of English King Edward Longshanks (Edward I, played by Patrick McGoohan with delicious contempt).

BRAVEHEART is one of the last great epic battle films, if not the last, to use actual people in crowded combat rather than computer blips – the battle scenes are some of the best you will ever see for choreography, editing, kineticism, brutality – yet the movie does not shirk on sterling characters, nuanced acting chops, moral ambiguity, political treachery, heart-aching romance, and a soundtrack by James Horner to match its majestic sweep. BRAVEHEART is truly Mel’s masterwork, all legend, extra cheese, thundering hooves, swampy castles, weak-chested nobles and iron-thewed warriors covered in layers of kilt and poo. Mel is not so much worried about recreating history as recreating the way the light slopes off his muddied deltoids.

Returning to his village after being raised by his uncle (Brian Cox, looking like a rugged Billy Connolly), Wallace finds his beloved homeland cringing under the iron fist of English garrisons. Longshanks considers Scotland “his” land, joking with his court, “The trouble with Scotland – is that it’s full of Scots!,” his delivery hilarious in its haughtiness. He plans to “breed the Scots out” by instigating prima nocte – a right given to his English commanders to have “first night” with new Scottish brides married in their jurisdiction.

To avoid prima nocte, Wallace marries his sweetheart Murron (Catherine McCormack) in secret. It makes no difference, as the English (portrayed as perverse pigs in this film) try to rape Murron anyway. Despite Wallace fighting off the soldiers, Murron is captured and callously murdered by the garrison commander, to draw Wallace out.

In a berserker rage Wallace decimates the garrison almost singlehandedly in a hand-to-hand battle which presages the lethal beauty to come – ruthless, wide-eyed and vicious, his vengeance palpable, his kinsmen following his lead; impact weapons, mallets, maces, clawed spears, and Wallace kicking the garrison commander against a pole and slitting his throat as emotionlessly as the commander slit Murron’s.

The English retaliate. And any notion that Wallace had of avoiding political squabbles and raising crops peacefully is dashed, as he finds himself leading a growing army of Scots in repelling the English from Scottish lands, then taking the battle to English soil by invading York and beheading its prince, to quell Longshanks’s ambitions at their source.

…And Mel looked out over the breadth of his domain and wept,
for there were no new arses left to paint blue.

The great Brendan Gleeson is Wallace’s best friend, Hamish; rugged James Cosmo is Hamish’s father and unstoppable battlehound, Campbell; Sean McGinley is Murron’s glowering father; Angus Macfadyen is suitably regal and simultaneously limp-principled as nobleman Robert the Bruce, with a crazed recluse father who looks like Gerard Depardieu in leper makeup – Robert will be Wallace’s Judas; an eccentric performance by David O’Hara as Stephen the Irish loon; Tommy Flanagan is the wronged husband of a prima nocte wife.

In the celebration scene where an English soldier claims Flanagan’s wife, we realize Mel’s filmmaking talent – for what he leaves OUT. He allows his characters “silences”; Flanagan’s wife whispers to him sadly as she is led away – we hear nothing but the heartbreaking soundtrack. Again, at the marriage of Longshanks’s willowy son, Prince Edward (Peter Hanly) to French princess Isabelle (buttery Sophie Marceau), wordless glances between characters reveal the prince’s manboy proclivities; earlier, at the funeral of Wallace’s father, the cute little girl playing young Murron gives the young boy Wallace a thistle, wordlessly; as tears edge his eyes, she alone notices his pain and makes this gesture, which we discover later, he will cherish all his life. As she totters off, we start to cry. Well, at least I did. When mulleted Mel later tells Murron flippantly, “I love you; always have,” we understand the depth behind his nonchalance…

Ahem – But how about them battle scenes, eh?!

Stirling: a baptism by fire, as the amassed Scots want to turn tail, faced with English “heavy cavalry, and armored horse that shake the very ground.” But Wallace shows that he was not just a master tactician, he was also a charismatic cheesemaker, as he throws down an iconic speech that is not lifted from the Inspirational Movie Speeches Handbook, but which has since been included as a modern classic:

Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you’ll live, at least a while. And, dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days, from this day to that, for one chance – just one chance – to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take – our FREEDOM!

And all while painted blue.

We are there, as the English armored horse canter toward the kilted Scottish battle formations; we smell the wet grass underhoof, we sense the pounding thunder as they close in bent on massacre; as tree-spears lie at our feet – a surprise attack in full view – Wallace calls, “Hold!… hold!… hold!…” (“The smell of acrid smoke and horses’ breath / As we plunge on into certain death” – The Trooper, Iron Maiden) And just before the equine tsunami breaks upon us in banshee ululation – we raise the tree-spears. Into horse flesh.

And all Mel breaks loose.

Longshanks returns from France to find his son and his unmentioned lover Philip (Stephen Billington) dressed like peacocks, having done nothing to quell Wallace’s invasion of England. Except invade each other. When Longshanks takes delivery of the Prince of York’s head in a basket, Philip – oh, aquiline-nosed, girl-cheekboned Philip – pipes up, “We must stop him!” to which Longshanks asks rhetorically, his trigger-temper at this point a mushroom-cloud-layin’ motherfucker, motherfucker, “Who is this person who speaks to me as if I needed his advice?”

Prince Edward replies, “I have declared Philip my high counselor.” Philip backs it up with, “I am skilled in the arts of war” (if by ‘war’ he means 10 guys gettin’ medieval on his ass in the latrine). And we just know someone’s going to get thrown out a window…

Inventing the Slow Walk Away From Explosion, 1300’s represent!

With all the brutality and political intrigue and everyone smeared in poo, we overlook the excellent prologue to this film – Wallace as a small boy (promising young actor, James Robinson) waking to find his father and brother tricked to their deaths by Longshanks. His father’s advice would inform Wallace’s life: “I know you’re a good fighter, but the wits make the man,” “Your heart is free. Have the courage to follow it.”

BRAVEHEART is not a historical document, and doing the research will only muddy the truth about William Wallace… (like the Battle of Stirling Bridge being fought on a bridge rather than a plain; like a warrior named Andrew Moray being equal to Wallace in the story of Scotland’s wars of independence; like Robert the Bruce being the actual guy known historically as “Braveheart” – d’oh!) …Rather, Randall Wallace and Mel Gibson have crafted a stylistic juggernaut tribute to a man who heavily affected Scotland’s history. And if we are to believe this film, he also sowed his seed with princess Isabelle, so he affected England’s history as well. And it’s an incredibly brave performance by Mel, considering he can’t do a Scottish accent.

Wallace is brought down by betrayal, and his execution cry is – “FREEDOM!” But the concept of personal freedom was alien to peoples who were inculcated to believe their ruling royalty was emplaced by God. He might as well have shouted “DEMOCRACY!” – another concept as alien to the people of the times as democracy is to the American presidents who prop up dictators around the world and pretend like it’s the oppressed country’s fault that they don’t have democracy.

As BRAVEHEART’s opening narration tells us, “History is written by those who have hanged heroes.”

He doesn’t mean US, does he?

END