November 19, 1999 | The World is Not Enough may be more than enough to impress most action-movie fans. But for long-time aficionados of the James Bond series, this latest product of the 37-year-old franchise will seem, at best, a middling effort. Out of a possible 007, I would give it 005½.
Don’t misunderstand: T.W.I.N.E. (as it’s known in teaser advertisements throughout Great Britain) isn’t a feeble fiasco on the order of A View to a Kill or The Man With the Golden Gun. Indeed, the new extravaganza is a Bondwagon built for speed, meticulously designed to careen wildly from one wild excess to the next. Starting with the pre-credits prologue – an extended mini-movie that begins with a shoot-out in Spain, continues with a jet-speedboat chase along London’s Thames River, and climaxes with a mid-air explosion just above the new Millennium Dome at Greenwich – and continuing throughout more than two hours of running time, this definitely is a movie that moves.
Trouble is, all this sound and fury signifies relatively little when a movie is so conspicuously lacking in substance, suspense and common sense. It’s true that people don’t look to 007 adventures for delicate shadings of character and plots propelled by watertight logic. But it’s equally true that moviegoers need a certain amount of information – What does this mean? How did that happen? Why is he doing those things? Did something important blow up? – to be at least partially engaged in the on-screen spectacle. T.W.I.N.E. is too busy maintaining its breakneck pace to ever adequately explain where it is headed at any given moment, or what will happen when it gets there. You can’t help suspecting that, even though three writers are credited with cobbling together the script, the filmmakers simply made everything up as they went along.
Pierce Brosnan returns for his third tour of duty as 007 in T.W.I.N.E., and it must be said that, more than ever, he appears thoroughly credible and comfortable in James Bondage. Timothy Dalton may have been more of the cold-blooded killer that Ian Fleming originally wrote about, but Brosnan has his immediate predecessor beat hands-down when it comes to cracking wise and moving smoothly. (Typical Bond bandying: “Let’s just skirt the issue,” Brosnan coos as he undresses a pliant beauty.) More important, Brosnan is becoming tougher as he gets better in the role, so that, on at least a couple of occasions here, he comes across as someone with a pronounced capacity for savagery.
Maybe Brosnan will have more opportunities to delve into Bond’s heart of darkness in his next big-screen outing. In T.W.I.N.E., however, Brosnan has enough to do just keeping up with a tangled conspiracy plot that carries James Bond from the highlands of Scotland to the oil fields of Azerbaijan, and from there to a decommissioned Soviet nuclear-weapons base in Kazakhstan.
It’s at the latter locale that 007 meets the chief villain of the piece and the mandatory “Bond girl.” Unfortunately, both supporting characters are bland ciphers. Despite the best efforts of Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty, Trainspotting) to inject a touch of pathos into his performance, he simply doesn’t have enough to do as Renard – a spooky-looking terrorist with a bullet lodged inside his head – and what he does isn’t sufficiently flamboyant. As Christmas Jones, a drop-dead beautiful nuclear-weapons expert – yeah, right! – who falls under Bond’s spell, Denise Richards looks terrific in a tank top and tight shorts. Every time she opens her mouth, however, you wish she’d stick to being silent eye candy.
T.W.I.N.E. has something to do with a plot to blow up a trans-Asian oil pipeline, and something else to do with the pilfering of plutonium from stolen missiles. Mostly, though, the movie merely recycles the time-tested formula of Bond, babes and ka-boom, with a minimum of innovation. Judi Dench returns as Bond’s boss, the stern-faced, no-nonsense M, and she has one or two juicy scenes in which she warns 007 not to get too personally involved in a mission that she herself takes very personally. But she isn’t the only woman of substance on view: Sophie Marceau – fully recovered from her co-starring stint with David Spade in Lost and Found – is nicely ambiguous as a gorgeous industrial heiress who remains traumatized after escaping from kidnappers (and who, of course, desires James Bond as a bodyguard).
The elderly but hearty Desmond Llewelyn returns as Q, inventor of the wonderful gadgets that 007 uses so carelessly. The big difference this time is, Q has a new assistant: R, a bumbling doofus played fleetingly by Monty Python veteran John Cleese.
And speaking of things that are completely different: The World is Not Enough (the Bond family motto, by the way) was directed by Michael Apted, an extraordinarily versatile filmmaker whose credits include documentaries (35 Up, Moving the Mountain), first-class genre films (Gorky Park, Extreme Measures) and high-profile star vehicles (Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist). Apted doesn’t really add anything to the 007 formula. But his involvement indicates that, as always, the James Bond movies offer the best production values that money can buy.
