If there were a marriage of Goldeneye and Tomorrow Never Dies, The World is not Enough would be the progeny produced. While there are action scenes aplenty, they are buffered with the slow building of character and a Bond who seems to feel genuine concern for Electra (Sophie Marceau), the young oil heiress that he is asked to shadow. In addition, the villainous Renard (Robert Carlye) is the best that we’ve seen since A View to a Kill’s Zorin (Christopher Walken). He at once seethes charisma, nefariousness and sympathy. His quest is to die by sacrifice because his life has lost all meaning since a bullet pierced his brain and removed any sensation of pain from his body.
While some may see this is a superhero-like ability, Renard can no longer enjoy the small things in life, and without the pain, the pleasure is hardly discernible.
So, as I approached this film as the 19th in the series, I wondered why I dreaded watching it. The action is well done, the acting on the parts of Brosnan, Marceau, and Carlyle (let’s not forget Judi Dench) is solid and believable, and the story is clever and intriguing.
And as the film progressed, I wondered why my first viewing nearly fifteen years prior was my only.
And then Christmas came. Christmas Jones. Dr. Christmas Jones, a nuclear physicist played by Denise Richards. The character herself makes sense to the story. She’s the good Bond girl; she’s the person who helps Bond when he’s about to drown, and she provides the otherwise unlikely exposition about nuclear energy, etc.
However, Richards is terribly overmatched by all of her fellow thespians. I don’t remember her lines being so poorly cadenced or delivered in previous films like Wild Things or Starship Troopers. And while neither of those movies are stellar parts of any canon (though I do think Starship Troopers is overrated), I didn’t leave either one thinking that she would prevent me from watching them again.
The World is not Enough was plenty for about fifteen years.
To be fair, she doesn’t destroy the movie, but she disjoints a rhythm and a clean flow. As a character, Jones is an authority that refuses to be objectified, but it seems more apparent that the filmmakers wanted Richards to be a sex object who delivers lines that hint to authority. This is not necessarily a new trope to the Bond franchise. A number of the female characters have been there solely as candy, but this was hardly the case in some of the better Bond films like The Spy who Loved Me, Thunderball, or Goldeneye. In these films, the women were sexy but strong. They demanded attention for a number of reasons. In The World is not Enough, Jones demands attention because of her propensity to wear white t-shirts, conveniently in a water-logged submarine.
This truly is unfortunate for both the film and for Richards. The film suffers from the annoying existence of Jones, and Richards is unfortunately typecast as a sex bomb, but one who needs to be able to hold her own. Here, she does not. Instead, we wait painfully for the inevitable use of Christmas in an innuendo-laden line. And it does, well too far into the movie to be funny, and unfortunately, it becomes the last thing we remember.
