The World Is Not Enough (1999)

Written by CinemaSerf on June 2, 2022

I am afraid I struggled with this film right from the get-go. Not that Pierce Brosnan doesn't turn in a decent enough effort as "007", it's the supporting cast that are pretty average and the story - it is just so weak. Arch-baddie "Renard" (Robert Carlyle) has been shot in the head so gets stronger every day until he dies (any physicians please explain how a bullet near your brain can make you nigh-on immortal?). Robbie Coltrane is ordinarily excellent as a comic actor, but somehow his performance here as Russian hard-man "Zukovsky" is the wrong kind of funny and we see way too much of "M" (Dame Judi Dench) and the woefully cast John Cleese as "R" - luckily because Desmond Llewellyn was still round to amiably, and briefly, fill the role of gadget master "Q". To her credit, Sophie Marceau tries hard in the spirit of the old "Bond" girl role, delivering a feisty and adequate performance that is sexy but also pretty potent, too, as she tries to get to the bottom of who killed her industrialist father and is now trying to hijack her oil pipeline through some pretty lawless terrain. That plot, though, lurches from the silly to the ridiculous before an ending that took for ever to deliver what we all knew was bound to happen. There is plenty of action, car chases and pyrotechnics but sadly, the characterisations are what makes the "Bond" franchise stand out. Here they needed much better writing and a stronger hand at the tiller than was delivered by Michael Apted.