The latest Bond has all the right ingredients - beautiful heiress, complicated gadgets, Eastern European pipelines, devilish holograms - you name it, it's got it. Unfortunately the resulting film does not quite have it.
After British oil tycoon Sir Robert King is killed in a bombing at MI6 headquarters, his daughter Electra King (Sophie Marceau) inherits his millions and acquires James as a bodyguard (not in all senses of the word. .). However, diabolical Renard (Robert Carlyle), a malicious sociopath who is unable to feel pain after a bullet lodged in his brain, has a master plan. The race is on to prevent him from destroying the world.
Pierce Brosnan is a successful James, managing the right cocktail of suave, charm, and downright sleaze. Marceau is suitably glamourous and suitably evil, although her accent does begin to verge on the monotone. Denise Richards (ridiculously named Christmas Jones to provide a joke at the end) is unconvincing as the nuclear scientist that she is supposed to be. It seems unlikely that this girl who looks like she has barely emerged from adolescence would a) have managed to get a Phd in nuclear physics, and b) be attracted to a man old enough to be her father/grandfather. Furthermore, she can't act and can only pout in the most innapropriate way as havoc reigns around her.
Judi Dench as M steals the show of course, although her rather unlikely decision to fly to the scene of the action is a dubious attempt at giving crowd-pleasing Dench a bigger part. John Cleese gives a hilarious cameo as R, the hapless new assistant to Q (Desmond Llewelyn) the inventor while Robbie Coltrane is another slapstick and endearingly silly villain. The real arch villain is played rather half-heartedly by Robert Carlyle, who somehow never grabs that darstadly spirit of other Bond enemies.
The plot is a rehash of the old Bond themes, as it must be to maintain the tradition. As such it could be highly successful, but unfortunately in this film the story is weak and the action descends into the boring. It drifts towards the conclusion with no real direction, only endless boring chase/blowing-up sequences with that James Bond theme tune harping on incessantly in the background. The film only offers us all those things that have been done innumerable times before, and they are wearing thin, while it crucially fails to offer anything new of its own. The catchphrases no longer fit with the plot and are merely clichés thrown in out of context. When James announces his name or orders a martini, we only snigger knowingly, as if James is satirising himself. The result is something that could be an unoriginal spoof version of a real James Bond movie.
After British oil tycoon Sir Robert King is killed in a bombing at MI6 headquarters, his daughter Electra King (Sophie Marceau) inherits his millions and acquires James as a bodyguard (not in all senses of the word. .). However, diabolical Renard (Robert Carlyle), a malicious sociopath who is unable to feel pain after a bullet lodged in his brain, has a master plan. The race is on to prevent him from destroying the world.
Pierce Brosnan is a successful James, managing the right cocktail of suave, charm, and downright sleaze. Marceau is suitably glamourous and suitably evil, although her accent does begin to verge on the monotone. Denise Richards (ridiculously named Christmas Jones to provide a joke at the end) is unconvincing as the nuclear scientist that she is supposed to be. It seems unlikely that this girl who looks like she has barely emerged from adolescence would a) have managed to get a Phd in nuclear physics, and b) be attracted to a man old enough to be her father/grandfather. Furthermore, she can't act and can only pout in the most innapropriate way as havoc reigns around her.
Judi Dench as M steals the show of course, although her rather unlikely decision to fly to the scene of the action is a dubious attempt at giving crowd-pleasing Dench a bigger part. John Cleese gives a hilarious cameo as R, the hapless new assistant to Q (Desmond Llewelyn) the inventor while Robbie Coltrane is another slapstick and endearingly silly villain. The real arch villain is played rather half-heartedly by Robert Carlyle, who somehow never grabs that darstadly spirit of other Bond enemies.
The plot is a rehash of the old Bond themes, as it must be to maintain the tradition. As such it could be highly successful, but unfortunately in this film the story is weak and the action descends into the boring. It drifts towards the conclusion with no real direction, only endless boring chase/blowing-up sequences with that James Bond theme tune harping on incessantly in the background. The film only offers us all those things that have been done innumerable times before, and they are wearing thin, while it crucially fails to offer anything new of its own. The catchphrases no longer fit with the plot and are merely clichés thrown in out of context. When James announces his name or orders a martini, we only snigger knowingly, as if James is satirising himself. The result is something that could be an unoriginal spoof version of a real James Bond movie.