despite opening on the very same day as titanic tomorrow never dies which was pierce brosnan's
second turn as james bond was another box office hit eking out 120 million dollars domestically
something like 19 million more than what goldeneye made although the worldwide take was slightly less
339 million although that was still a great number for 1997. that said it should be noted
that timon ever dies costs something like twice the amount of money goldeneye did a notoriously
fraught shoot pierce brosnan expressed the desire to bring the character back down to
earth so the choice was made to scale this one back into a more serious spy thriller in it james
bond protects elektra king the heiress to an oil empire from an assassin named renard who would be
played by robert carlisle little does he realize elektra is actually in league with the bad guys
with her being a kind of patty her style figure with them planning to use plutonium to cause a
nuclear meltdown in istanbul which will destroy the russian oil pipeline and make elektra's empire
even more powerful basically it's goldfinger but with oil and a female villain not a bad idea
to direct the producers chose michael apted who at the time was primarily known as a documentarian
and a director of small-scale dramas like gorillas in the mist the choice of apted says a lot for how
the franchise was operating in the mid-90s eon pictures wanted directors that were efficient
and at the time they were churning out a bond movie every two years the result was that this
left pierce brosnan absolutely exhausted with him getting little time to act in non-bond films
although he did have a notable hit with his remake of the thomas crown affair in the summer
of 1999. efficiency was valued above all and apted himself told eon that he really had no expertise
at all with action and they famously told him that their second unit crew would take care of all that
he was to focus on the performances and therein lies the problem with the world is not enough
michael apted while a solid drama director just really isn't the guy to put a movie
like this together apparently the producers had actually gone to alphonse quaron before
and one wonders what a james bond movie would have been like with him as a director although
it has to be said at the time quaron hadn't really evolved into the huge director that he was
although his movie great expectations and a little princess were both big critical
hits so i don't know he might have done something very interesting with this
that said they wanted a guy that they could control and with app ted they got exactly that
now this was the first movie that had a screenplay that was written from the start by neil purvis
and robert wade with bruce ferristain also having a credit now apparently purvis and wade
kind of got dropped once apted came on board with his wife at the time dana stevens coming
on to beef up the female parts which was something because you know the james bond movies have often
been criticized for not having strong enough female performances and this was going to be
the first james bond movie where arguably the main villain is a woman now casting electric king
turned out to be something of an ordeal with a lot of people approached including a very young vera
farmiga eventually they decided to go with sophie marceau who was then blowing up after being in
braveheart starring mel gibson she was a huge star in france so they had to pay marceau a lot more
money than they were used to playing bond girls but the result is right up there on the screen
as mixed a bag as the world is not enough is sophie marcelo is absolutely great in the role
she has terrific chemistry with pierce brosnan who really comes to life in his scene's opposite
she's probably one of the best actresses we've ever had as a bond girl and i think her electric
king is extremely memorable but there are a lot of problems with this movie i have to say that
when i saw it in 1999 i thought it was amazing in fact a lot of us did true bond fans were somewhat
upset with tomorrow never dies because we all felt that there was just too much action and not enough
plot the world was not enough was different it had a lot of plot maybe not enough action well that's
not exactly fair there were a lot of good action scenes including that amazing opening boat chase
but the problem was michael apted really had no designs on the action scenes at all it feels like
he just stepped aside and let the second unit crew which was headed by vic armstrong take over the
movie really doesn't congeal at all it plays out like a pretty serious drama and then eventually it
just occasionally breaks into big action sequences which don't really have that much to do with the
rest of the plot it's kind of a mess now world is not enough has also a very mixed bag as a cast
a lot of people like robert carlisle as the villain renard but i always found him to be
a glorified henchman in fact javier bardem was apparently approached to play the part but he
turned it down now robert kyle of course was riding high off of the full monty and ravenous
and indeed is probably one of the best actors to ever play a villain but he just really gets not
much at all to do although they do try to make him somewhat sympathetic the bullet will kill him but
he'll grow stronger every day until the day he dies notably the movie also has a beefed-up role
for m which kind of foreshadows what judy dench would get to do in the daniel craig movies as she
gets kidnapped by elektra and elektra of course held a grudge for having been kidnapped by renard
m apparently told her father robert king who's assassinated at the beginning of the film not to
pay the ransom leaving her with the disfigurement with the bad guys cutting off part of her ear and
sending it to her father to induce him to pay this actually comes right from what happened
to the gettys which of course was dramatized in all the money in the world now where the film
gets really controversial is in the choice of the second bond girl dr christmas jones who would be
played by denise richards now denise richards performance in the movie is quite cartoonish
she's not extremely believable as a nuclear physicist i mean not at all but you also have
to remember that denise richards at the time was probably the number one pin-up in the world i mean
she had really broken out big time in starship troopers and then especially wild things i mean
god when i was a kid i thought denise richards was just an absolute goddess so when i heard
she was starring in a james bond movie oh i was excited all my friends were excited too
it's another day at the office but an actress uh she was really good in movies
like drop dead gorgeous undercover brother and wild things but she just really doesn't suit
playing a nuclear physicist and her performance is unfortunately something that craters the film
and makes it hard to re-watch in fact i'll say this as i said earlier i kind of liked the world
it's not enough when it came out i thought it was one of the greatest james bond movies ever but
something funny happened the second time i watched it i didn't like it as much years later i ended up
actually working on the blu-ray of this movie doing quality control on the subtitles so i had
to watch the movie over and over again in fact i had to watch a lot of the james blonde movies like
this and even the worst installments ones like moonriker which i had to watch over and over again
i still love i can still watch moonraker anytime even though it's not really considered one of the
best bond movies but world is not enough i watched so many times that after a certain point i just
couldn't stand watching it anymore it just fell apart on repeat viewings and i don't know why it
just doesn't really hold up it's episodic and it's also quite dull between the action scenes
which themselves are totally unexceptional except for the boat chase at the beginning
of the movie which really stands as one of the only moments in the film to really come to life
it's not pierce brosnan's fault breaking the movie down a bit i will say this pierce brosnan is
very engaged in his performance here he's really good as james bond especially in his scenes with
elektra but the problem with his role as bond in this is that he seems to have some kind of duality
when he's with electra you feel that bond is really getting emotionally involved with her
and he seems devastated when he has to kill her at the end but then he kind of slips back
into like the james bond happy-go-lucky vibe at the end of the movie with his horrible horrible
double entendre to christmas jones being i thought christmas only comes once a year
this one went over my head when i was younger but boy oh boy is it silly and you know if james bond
has been through this kind of emotional ordeal the end of the movie shouldn't end with him making
cheeky double entendres i think the daniel craig movies got this right you know where at the end of
the movie sometimes he was shaken up and not you know ready to throw off a one-liner in some ways
this is a preview of what was to come or a dry run but it just doesn't really work in this film
i give pierce brosnan something like a 7 on 10. i think he really gives it his best but i think some
of the things i don't like about pierce bros and also show up in this movie he has some ticks that
have always kind of bothered me particularly his weird hurt acting you know where he goes
when he's being tortured he does a lot of that in the world is not enough which i always find
kind of funny that said you know he gives it his all and i think that if brosnan had been given
some really top-flight material he would have probably been one of the best james bonds ever but
unfortunately outside of gold knight his movies just were never really that good
in terms of the bond girls again very mixed bag i'm not gonna count electric king actually as a
bond girl because i think she's really the villain in the movie so that leaves us with
denise richards as christmas jones who as i said looks beautiful i mean she looks like
laura croft but her performance is really bad and i'd say she's probably one of the worst james bond
girls ever i give her a 4 on 10. i'm sorry denise i still love you the villains sophie marceau is
great as electric king probably one of my favorite james bond villains ever but they kind of chicken
out at the end she's built up as the main villain but then they kind of kill her off and were left
to deal with renard as the main baddie at the end of the film so it's divided between james bond
fans with who's actually the main villain in this movie i've always thought it was electric king but
a lot of people and the canon suggests that it's actually renard who really doesn't fit the bill
i mean he's a glorified henchman at best so i give the villains a 7 on ten i think sophie marco was
amazing but i also think she should have been given more to do in the movie what the movie
does have however is another really good score by david arnold who was really coming into his own at
the time he had famously been hired to compose the soundtrack for tomorrow never dies and that
was a highlight of the movie and he's back in the world it's not enough doing kind of a more mellow
john berry-esque score you don't really have any propeller heads in this one but it does have a
great theme song by garbage which i think stands as one of the better james bond theme songs of the
time it also ends with a scott walker song well at least the soundtrack ends with a scott walker song
it doesn't actually turn up in a movie because it was a little too moody i think one of the things
this movie also did was that it introduced john cleese's r you see at the time desmond lewellen
was getting older and there was some concern that he wasn't going to be able to play q for
much longer so klies was brought in as r to serve as kind of his successor not replacement because
the intention was never to replace desmond luellen with r the problem is with this r is really just
kind of a goofier version of q desmond luellen was special in the role nobody was quite like him
and he had this wonderful chemistry with every actor that played james bond they all really liked
him and you could tell especially with roger moore and timothy dalton also just there was something
about him he had kind of a fatherly relationship with bond and you know you always knew that no
matter what happened q was there to help bond out which i think was most touchingly portrayed
in license to kill where bond goes rogue and of course reliable q shows up to give him gadgets
and even do a little bit of undercover work so the world is not enough has a really bittersweet
moment where q basically tells james bond that he's thinking about hanging up at a certain point
and advises him first never let them see you bleed and the second always have an escape plan
it's a beautiful little scene but what would be really sad was that desmond luellen died in a
freak car accident a few months later nobody ever intended this to be his last james bond movie but
that's just how it turned out and while his exit scene is really good it's a heartbreaker because i
i grew up absolutely loving him in the role and it's too bad that he died in such a weird way
because i think the intention was always to bring him back and we were left with john cleese as
r who i never really liked and i just thought he was too over the top in the part john cleese is
good he's funny but doesn't belong in a james bond movie it's just too it's just too goofy
in terms of action there's nearly not a lot of it you know it's got some big action set pieces
but it's all done by you know the second unit crew it's efficiently done but there's nothing
really memorable outside of that opening boat chase although one of the things that's kind of
interesting about this film is that it has the longest pre-credited sequence ever because the
boat chase apparently was supposed to come after the theme song which would have just left them
with that little part in balboa spain where bond kind of escapes from an office which would have
been a really dull opening although he wears these really cool sunglasses at one point that
i really wanted i wanted i wanted a pair of those badass sunglasses and i could never find them the
bow chase is great but the rest of the movie just can't live up to it all this i have to say adds
up to one of the most disappointing james bond entries ever again it was a movie that i liked
as a kid and i thought was pretty good originally when it came out but just hasn't really held up
too well i give this one a 5 on 10. it really is one of my least favorite james bond movies and
you know it's slightly better than what was to come unfortunately for pierce brosnan with die
another day of course being something we're really gonna have to unpack in the next episode but world
is not enough a very bland entry yet the movie was actually a box office hit with it grossing 126
million dollars which was one million dollars more than what tomorrow never dies made it also made
362 million dollars worldwide smashing franchise records so clearly audiences still love pierce
brosnan as double07 even though i think we can all look back and say that this was kind of
a harbinger of things to come they needed some new blood unfortunately goldeneye was a great
pierce bros movie but he never really got his due and we would see just how disastrous
a james bond movie could be with the next installment which of course we're gonna go into
in our next james bond revisited which will be one of the most explosive episodes ever
if you like this video and you like the james bond revisited series
make sure to click on the bell to receive notifications every time we post the new video
we're an independent company and you know what we appreciate all of your support
you