The World Is Not Enough (1999)

Official trailer

A Good Idea in a Messy Film

The World Is Not Enough starts from an idea that ranks among the best 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 a piece of casting that’s among the most mocked 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.

Few Bond films frustrate me like this one, because I can see the great film hiding inside it. Marceau, Dench and the Thames chase are as good as anything in the Brosnan years, and then the script buries them under pipelines, plutonium and a plot I gave up tracking somewhere around the caviar factory. I have a good time with it, and a headache comes along for free.

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 was the longest in the series until No Time to Die, and it 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 matches it.

The sequence is also a showpiece 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, a terrorist called Renard kidnapped her, 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.

The twist works, and Marceau plays both sides of Elektra with real skill, letting vulnerability and cold calculation sit in the same moment. I think she’s the best villain of the Brosnan era, far more interesting than the men around her, and I’d put her above most of the series’ male villains too. She’s widely regarded as the first woman to be the main villain of an official Bond film, and she makes that first count.

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, Carlyle is a fine actor, and the film does next to nothing with either. Renard is supposed to be the main threat until the twist, and he never frightens me. His inability to feel pain gets mentioned, shown a couple of times and then forgotten. That missed opportunity is the biggest one here, because a man who can’t be hurt should have given us at least one fight where that fact changed the outcome.

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 drew more mockery than almost anything else 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 takes more of the blame than she deserves. The writers handed her a nuclear physicist with nothing to do except explain the plot and look good doing it, and I lay that failure squarely on the script. 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.

Llewelyn’s goodbye is the scene I’d keep if I could keep only one from this film. It’s quiet and dignified, and knowing that the farewell turned out to be real makes that slow descent through the floor hard for me to sit through with dry eyes.

Cleese went on to play Q in Die Another Day, and he’s funny, but nobody has ever 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 high point of the series’ winter sequences, where paraglider-riding assassins attack Bond and Elektra, and a strong sequence in a caviar factory in Azerbaijan, where helicopters with giant circular saws attack Bond, Christmas and the returning Valentin Zukovsky, played by Robbie Coltrane.

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 memorable moment comes near the end. Elektra has tortured Bond, and he 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. It shows that Bond is, at bottom, a man licensed to kill. Brosnan plays it well, with a flicker of grief after the shot.

Where does The World Is Not Enough (1999) fall short?

The plot is too complicated, the film wastes Renard, 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 long, confusing stretches separate the good parts: Elektra, M, the Thames chase and Q’s farewell.

It gets 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.

The Verdict on The World Is Not Enough

Yes, with modest expectations. It’s a 6 because Marceau’s Elektra, the Thames chase and Llewelyn’s farewell deserve to be seen, and because the tangled plot, the wasted Renard and a Bond girl written as a punchline drag everything else down with them. I’d rate it higher if someone recut it around Elektra and M and dumped half the pipeline business in the river.

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