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.