Another near-miss Bond (with spoilers): The World is Not Enough (#SFWApro)

(Image rights with current holder).
Like Octopussy, The World Is Not Enough (1999) has enough good ideas it could have been terrific. But it isn’t.
The Story: We open with Bond recovering some stolen millions from a Swiss banker, helped out by a mystery marksman who takes out a couple of bad guys but doesn’t try for Bond. We learn why after he returns the money to M’s friend Robert King: It’s been treated to transform it into a firebomb when King gets close.
In the aftermath, Bond realizes this has ties to a kidnapping case several years earlier: Terrorist Renard (Robert Carylyle) kidnapped King’s daughter Elektra (Sophie Marceau). King went to M, who followed policy and refused to pay the ransom. Fortunately, Elektra killed her guards and escaped on her own. M’s people subsequently put a bullet in Renard’s brain, but he survived; although he’s dying slowly, the neural damage makes him immune to pain, and thereby also able to push himself to the point anyone else would collapse.
Bond contacts Elektra, who as new head of Dad’s company is building an Eurasian oil pipeline. As this will compete with existing pipelines, lots of people, particularly Russians, would like to see it fail (as with Living Daylights, Octopussy and others, this invokes Russia as a threat, but only in the background). In between becoming Elektra’s lover, Bond saves her from assassins and discovers Renard’s plotting some sort of nuclear strike.
As Bond gets in deeper, however, he discovers Sophie and Renard are working together—not because she’s gone Stockholm Syndrome but because she seduced him and struck an alliance when she realized M and her dad weren’t going to pay the ransom. Having killed her father, she plans to use the nuke to destroy Constantinople, where all the other East-West pipelines pass, making her the only conduit for Russian oil (it will also kill M, who’s been locked away there). Can Bond and nuclear physicist Christmas Jones (Denise Richards) stop the plot in time?
Why It’s a Near Miss: First the Near Part: This gives Judi Dench lots more to do, which is never a bad thing (I can’t help wondering if they’d ever have done a plot like this with original M Bernard Lee—I rather think not). Desmond Llewellyn, in his last turn as Q, actually gets a goodbye scene with Bond.
And the villains in concept are great. A man who’s superhuman because he’s dying, and a female mastermind and manipulator. In a sense, Elektra takes the Spy Who Loved Me approach where the female lead is more important than the villain to a logical extreme, making the Bond Girl and the villain one.
And Now, the Miss: Marceau simply isn’t seductive or strong enough to work as the manipulative fake good girl she’s supposed to be. She’s better when she shows her evil side, but not good enough. Famke Jannson could have done it, and Jane Seymour would have been a lot more fun than she was as Solitaire. And like Zorin in A View to a Kill, Elektra’s goals are mundane, just advancing the bottom line for her oil business.
And Renard, despite the build-up, isn’t anything special (much like View‘s Zorin). Other than one point where he picks up a red-hot rock, he shows no special strength or endurance; his big fight with Bond at the finish is less impressive than Robert Shaw back in From Russia With Love. Plus, of course, picking up a red-hot rock is going to burn him even if it doesn’t hurt—that’s a bad move for someone in a violent profession (reading the Thomas Covenant books has made me aware of the dangers of not having a sense of touch).
Denise Richards is talentless, though she’s still better than View‘s Tanya Roberts (interesting how much I cite that film as the rock bottom).
Fortunately, Brosnan’s swan song next film was much better. See you then.