Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
adult, 26 April 2009
I have been reading several negative reviews about this Bond episode and the only explanation I could give myself is that what so many people have hated is exactly what I have liked.
Admittedly this is not your usual Bond plot: why, of course there is plenty of action scenes, including the classical pursuit, this time Bond chasing a handsome sniper(ess) on the Thames; there is the usual plot to conquer/destroy the world, etc. but while some themes are called for as expected the general atmosphere is completely different, dark, gloomy, realistic.
That is my point, the plot is realistic: the villains' motives are perfectly clear and understandable from the point of view of general, globalised economy. In you put a decaying Russian empire with all its leaks of corruption, weapon trafficking, inefficient government. In you put the blatant inefficiency of the British (read Western) governments too.
Then we have two superb villains, both unquestionably evil, but the one, a splendid Sophie Marceau, who became such out of a desperate sense of abandonment and revenge, the other, the terrorist, who surprises us by being capable of loving tenderly and fully.
There is no black and white here, just a murky gray that contaminates everything and I can very well see how this adult vision may have displeased many Bond fans.
Five stars cannot be given to this glorious attempt though: the script is faulty and there are some really cheesy lines including, unfortunately, the usual love banter between Bond and the Beauty at the end of the film. Direction is not flawless either: here and there the rhythm falters and is regained with an effort. Bad.
Acting is not bad though, as stated by many. Brosnan is convincing and the Beauty does her job, served by the worst of lines, overshadowed by the gigantic figure of the beautiful Marceau.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Twenty-one Way Up, 21 May 2009
Michael Apted is probably the closest thing to a marquee director a Bond film has ever had. He's the biggest reason this one bucks so many of the bad trends set by most of its predecessors while simultaneously maximizing the clichés that have made the series so beloved.
WORLD is worlds above any other Pierce Brosnan entry, stronger than all Roger Moore efforts but THE SPY WHO LOVED ME; it surely surpasses the unfortunately mishandled Timothy Dalton vehicles, and dare I say it defeats most - not all - of the Sean Connery attempts? I dare. (I leave out George Lazenby because I think ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE is one of the best; also David Niven because his isn't a Bond movie, not really; also Daniel Craig, because his one version to date sucked, through no fault of his own.)
WORLD has what many Bond movies and most Bond books lack: a giddy, relentless pace. From the thrill-a-second pre-credit boat chase, Bond doesn't stop having sex, playing with dangerous toys, and disarming hydrogen bombs... except of course to ski. What's more, WORLD's James Bond has what nearly every movie 007 fails to inherit from the pulp character that spawned him: brutality. Shooting the woman he loves in the heart is maybe my favorite example of why this man has a license to kill. The reason is that he will.
Bizarrely, the movie's strongest actor is its weakest link : Robert Carlyle, so terrifying as Begbie, is less impressive as Renard, the only Bond villain advertised as already dead. Unfortunately, Carlyle plays him that way. He's a little flat, a little pat, certainly no Gert Frobe; but then neither was Gert Frobe. At least Renard gets one great line: "A man tires of being executed."
To compensate for a lack of villainous flair, we are offered an exploding MI6, a fat Russian drowning in caviar, a 70 mph no-helmet bailout from an exploding pipeline luge, a rapacious Swiss banker complete with Holocaust remittance jokes, flying BMW-splitting hedge trimmers, a VMF-surplus nuclear submarine, a Bond beauty who acts as well as she fills an evening gown, a Bond ten times more likely to shoot you than to tell a joke, and glory of hoked-up glories, Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist in hot pants. It just doesn't get any more Bond than that.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bond back on good form, 3 Nov 2008
After the disappointment of Tomorrow Never Days, it perhaps shouldn't have been too surprising that, as per the usual EON pattern of alternating good and bad Bond films, The World is Not Enough turned out rather well. It helps that it has a stronger plot this time round as well as some attempt at an element of mystery - along with For Your Eyes Only this is the only Bond where the identity of the real villain is withheld for the first half of the movie. It's also more character-based than usual, with some interesting dialogue that takes on a different dimension once you know who's on the side of the angels and who isn't. The Maguffin is an oil-based variation on Goldfinger's big scheme, but the execution is very different and rather more grounded. Brosnan has the best character writing of his tenure but isn't always up to it: the moments of ruthlessness convince but he's one of those actors who can't stand still and just be and always has to do something, making him seem somewhat ADDS in some scenes and leads to a couple of strange bits of gurning. Yet it can still lay claim to being his best performance in the role, and the presence of Sophie Marceau and Robert Carlyle helps raise the acting bar enough so that even Denise Richards' hot pant wearing nuclear scientist - in-joke casting at its finest - isn't quite as bad as she's been painted.
There's a slightly schizoid feel to Michael Apted's direction at times seeming a tad uncertain and stylistically very different from Vic Armstrong's action scenes. It's certainly not difficult to tell who shot what, and not just because Armstrong seems better at hiding the significant height difference between Brosnan and Carlyle. While still variable (the opening boat chase has a few too many sight gags and the helicopter/chainsaw sequence doesn't work as well as it should), the action scenes are much better handled this time round and much better integrated into the story. Despite some awful wisecracks, this feels less like an attempt to hang plenty of setpieces on a flimsy plot and more like the action is being dictated by the story. Definitely one of the better modern Bond outings.
There's not much new in the two-disc Ultimate Edition to justify an upgrade though. While the extras from the previous release have been carried over, there's only a Hong Kong press conference and a few deleted and alternate scenes. Of these - including Renard's very unimpressive original entrance, more tomfoolery in Q's lab and a line about madmen in hollowed out volcanoes filled with large breasted women threatening the world with nuclear war ("It only takes one") among them - only a visually striking scene in the abandoned oilfields seems good enough to have kept.
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