The World Is Not Enough (1999)

A Good Idea in a Messy Film

The World Is Not Enough has one of the best ideas in the Bond series and wastes much of it. Its central twist, that the woman Bond is protecting and falling for is in fact the villain, is daring, and Sophie Marceau makes it work. Around it, the film is cluttered with a confusing plot, a disappointing secondary villain and one of the most mocked pieces of casting in the series.

Michael Apted directed it, an unusual choice for a Bond film, best known for dramas and documentaries like the Up series. It came out in November 1999, did well at the box office, and received mixed reviews. I give it a 6. It has real ambition, several great sequences and a strong emotional core, and it doesn’t come together.

It’s also a film with more emotional weight than most Brosnan Bonds. It’s about a daughter betrayed by her father’s choices, a spymaster forced to face the cost of her decisions and a hero who falls for a woman he eventually has to kill. That’s rich material, and the best scenes treat it seriously. The trouble is everything around them.

The Thames

The pre-title sequence is the longest in the series and ranks with the best. It opens in Bilbao, where Bond retrieves money belonging to a British oil tycoon, Sir Robert King. Back in London, the money explodes inside MI6 headquarters, killing King. Bond spots an assassin on the river and gives chase in a prototype jet boat built by Q.

The chase down the Thames, past London landmarks, through the streets of Docklands and into the Millennium Dome, is a brilliant sequence: fast, funny and full of practical stunts. It ends with the assassin blowing herself up in a hot-air balloon above the Dome, and Bond, hanging from the balloon, falls onto the Dome’s roof and injures his shoulder. It’s a spectacular opening, fourteen minutes of nonstop invention, and the rest of the film never quite matches it.

The sequence is also a showcase for the series’ commitment to real stunts. Much of the boat action was performed for real on the actual river, with the city’s landmarks rushing past, and the practical stunts give the chase a physical weight that computer effects rarely match. It set a standard for Bond openings that later films would struggle to top.

Elektra King

Sophie Marceau plays Elektra King, Sir Robert’s daughter, who has inherited his oil empire and is building a pipeline from the Caspian Sea. Years earlier, she was kidnapped by a terrorist called Renard, and M advised her father not to pay the ransom. Elektra escaped, and now M assigns Bond to protect her.

Elektra is beautiful, brave and wounded, and Bond falls for her. Then the film reveals the truth: she was never Renard’s victim. She fell in love with him during her captivity, turned him to her side, and she blames her father and M for abandoning her. She arranged her father’s murder, and she’s planning to destroy a rival pipeline with a nuclear explosion in Istanbul, to make her own oil empire indispensable.

It’s a brilliant twist, and Marceau plays both sides of Elektra with real skill: vulnerability and cold calculation, often in the same moment. She’s a standout villain of the Brosnan era, far more interesting than the men around her, and she’s widely regarded as the first woman to be the main villain of an official Bond film.

Renard

Robert Carlyle plays Renard, the terrorist whose brain has a bullet lodged in it, fired by an MI6 agent sent to kill him after Elektra’s kidnapping. The bullet is slowly killing him, and in the meantime it has left him unable to feel pain. That makes him stronger and more dangerous with every day.

That’s a promising idea for a villain, and Carlyle is a fine actor, and the film does very little with either. Renard is supposed to be the main threat until the twist, and he never feels as frightening as he should. His inability to feel pain is mentioned and shown a few times and then barely matters. It’s one of the film’s biggest missed opportunities.

The twist also undercuts him. Once Elektra is revealed as the real mastermind, Renard becomes a lovesick follower, doing her bidding, and his menace drains away. There’s a sad, interesting story in a dying man who loves a woman who is using him, and the film only hints at it.

M Under Fire

The film gives Judi Dench’s M more to do than in any previous film, and it’s the first to treat her as a person with a past instead of a voice issuing orders. It was her advice that led Sir Robert not to pay Elektra’s ransom, and she carries the guilt. Later, Elektra kidnaps her and imprisons her in Istanbul, and M spends the final act as a hostage, using her wits to help Bond.

That’s a welcome change, and Dench is excellent, playing M as a woman who made a hard decision years ago and must now face its consequences. Her relationship with Bond, sharp and increasingly affectionate, deepens here, and it laid the groundwork for Skyfall. That film built an entire story around M’s past decisions.

It’s also one of the first times the series asked whether the institution Bond serves is always right. M’s decision not to pay the ransom was sound policy, and it had terrible human consequences. The film lets both be true, and it’s a more grown-up idea than the series usually allowed.

Christmas Jones

Denise Richards plays Dr. Christmas Jones, a nuclear physicist working at a decommissioning site in Kazakhstan who joins Bond to disarm the bomb, and her casting is among the most mocked choices in the series. Richards, dressed in shorts and a tank top, was widely considered unconvincing as a scientist, and the character’s name leads to a groan-worthy final joke about Christmas.

It’s not entirely her fault. The script gives Christmas little depth and mostly uses her for exposition and eye candy, and her scenes sit awkwardly beside Marceau’s complex, compelling Elektra. The contrast between the film’s two leading women is a good illustration of its uneven quality.

Richards won a Razzie for the role, and Christmas Jones is regularly listed among the weakest Bond women. This is a shame, because the film had the chance to pair Bond with a genuine expert in the final act, and settled for a punchline instead.

Q’s Farewell

The most moving scene in the film belongs to Desmond Llewelyn, who had played Q since From Russia with Love in 1963. In his last scene, Q introduces his successor, played by John Cleese, and gives Bond some final advice about always having an escape route. Then he slowly descends through the floor on a lift and disappears.

It was intended as a farewell to the character, a gentle passing of the torch, and it became a real one. Llewelyn died in a car accident weeks after the film’s release, at the age of eighty-five. Watched now, his last scene is deeply touching, a graceful goodbye from the actor who had been part of the series for more than thirty-five years.

Cleese went on to play Q in Die Another Day, and he’s funny, but nobody has ever quite replaced Llewelyn’s exasperated, fatherly affection for Bond. For more than three decades, Q was the one person who treated Bond like a naughty schoolboy, and audiences loved him for it.

The Action

Beyond the Thames chase, the action is mixed. There’s an exciting ski chase in the snow-covered Caucasus mountains, a highlight among the series’ winter sequences, with Bond and Elektra attacked by paraglider-riding assassins, and a strong sequence in a caviar factory in Azerbaijan, where Bond, Christmas and the returning Valentin Zukovsky, played by Robbie Coltrane, are attacked by helicopters with giant circular saws.

The finale, aboard a nuclear submarine in the Bosporus, is confusing and cramped, and the film’s plot, involving pipelines, plutonium, stolen submarines and multiple double-crosses, is hard to follow. That’s a film full of good sequences that don’t add up to a coherent story, and by the final act, many viewers have stopped trying to follow who wants what and why.

The Ending of Elektra

The film’s most striking moment comes near the end. Bond, having been tortured by Elektra, confronts her with a gun. She mocks him, telling him he wouldn’t kill a woman he’s slept with, and orders Renard to detonate the bomb. Bond shoots her dead, without hesitation, and then stands over her body in silence. Then he goes after Renard, with no time to feel anything about what he has just done.

This is a cold, shocking moment, and it’s one of the darkest things Bond does in the Brosnan era. It hints at the harder, more damaged Bond that Daniel Craig would play a few years later, and it gives the film an emotional kick that the rest of its plot lacks, a reminder that Bond is, at bottom, a man licensed to kill. Brosnan plays it well, with a flicker of grief after the shot.

Where The World Is Not Enough Falls Short

The plot is too complicated, Renard is wasted, Christmas Jones is weak, and the film tries to do too many things at once. That’s a good Bond film buried under a messy one, with a script that seems to have been rewritten too many times, and the good parts, Elektra, M, the Thames chase and Q’s farewell, are separated by long, confusing stretches.

It’s a 6. It’s worth watching for Sophie Marceau’s performance, Judi Dench’s expanded role and Desmond Llewelyn’s goodbye, and for a twist that was braver than most Bond films dared. It points toward the darker, more emotional Bond films that followed, even if it doesn’t quite get there itself.

Craft Note

The Verdict on The World Is Not Enough

Yes, with modest expectations. It’s a 6, with a top-tier Bond villain in Sophie Marceau’s Elektra, a great opening chase and Desmond Llewelyn’s moving farewell. Its plot is messy, and its other villain and its Bond girl are weak.

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