The World is Not Enough

WHAT DOES THE BAD GUY WANT? Renard has a bullet in his head. This is not all good news for Renard. It means he can feel neither pain nor pleasure. Renard is one of those terrorists that exist nowhere in real life but exist everywhere in movies: the terrorist with no political agenda. He’s the terrorist that’s too crazy for other terrorists to work with. How crazy is he? Well for starters, he likes to kill people with a squadron of flying snowmobiles, which strikes me as pretty freaking crazy.

The big tangle in TWINE, of course, is that the Lead Villain turns out to actually be the Second Villain, which, if I was a terrorist with a bullet in my head, would be just the thing to put me over the edge.

But essentially, what Renard wants is what everyone wants: to sacrifice his life and blow up Istanbul so that his weird girlfriend can take over the oil industry.

WHAT DOES JAMES BOND ACTUALLY DO TO SAVE THE WORLD? I believe TWINE is the most plot-heavy of Bond films, but let’s lay this out to find out for sure.

Bond is sent to Bilbao to recover a suitcase full of money for a wealthy friend of M’s. Right there my brain comes to a screeching halt — M sent Bond to Bilbao to recover a suitcase full of money for a wealthy friend? Is that what MI6 is there for, to run errands for plutocrats? And yet, it turns out this is not a plotting error; one of the key innovations of TWINE is to actually examine the role of MI6, its power in the world and the way well-intentioned, interest-conflicted politicians screw everything up for working men like James Bond and the people of Istanbul.

He brings the money back, the money blows up and kills the wealthy friend. Okay. So Bond is sent to protect the wealthy friend’s daughter, Elektra. Elektra does not seem to be afraid of any terrorists; she’s got other fish to fry, she’s got a massive oil-pipeline to maintain in Azerbaijan. Bond follows her to Azerbaijan and even though Elektra does not seem to appreciate having Bond around (he did hand her father a suitcase full of exploding money, after all) they go skiing together. That’s when they get attacked by the flying snowmobiles.

Bond wants to know who sent those flying snowmobiles, and golly, I do too. He pulls a little Moonraker-style detective work where he wanders into someone’s office looking for nothing in particular and stumbles upon a murder! He instantly makes the decision to abandon his bodyguard role to pose as a member of Renard’s gang, hitch a ride on a helicopter to a nuclear-bomb-dismantling facility somewhere in some dusty place where they speak Russian.

There he meets Dr. Christmas Jones, a beautiful American nuclear physicist whose job is dismantling nuclear bombs in some dusty place where they speak Russian. He’s checking out Dr. Jones’s nuclear-bomb-dismantling operation when he runs into Renard who, as luck would have it, is just then in the middle of stealing a nuclear bomb (even though we just saw him killing a guy in Azerbaijan twelve hours earlier). Bond tries to stop Renard, but Renard gets away with his bomb.

Bond and Jones team up (for some reason) and go after the stolen bomb. MEANWHILE (because this isn’t complicated enough), M gets kidnapped because, in the big twist, it is revealed that Renard is not the Lead Villain after all. No, it turns out that Elektra is the Lead Villain, and has been plotting with Renard all along, ever since Renard kidnapped her years earlier and apparently turned her against her father, his riches and all of his friends, including M and Bond’s Russian informant Zukovsky. So M is tossed in a cell and given X hours to live (Why don’t Bond Villains just shoot people? Why?)

Bond and Jones recover half the plutonium from the stolen nuclear bomb but need to get the other half. As it turns out, Renard is on his way to hijack a Russian nuclear submarine and inject the stolen plutonium into its reactor, which apparently will cause a Chernoble-style meltdown in a port in Istanbul. He wants to do this because Istanbul is a major oil port and contaminating Istanbul will give Elektra power over the oil industry.

What Renard doesn’t know is that Elektra has been playing him all along (I think even since the kidnapping, but I’d have to check). Renard wants only to sow anarchy in world oil markets, but Elektra has been reading the Bond Villain Playbook and knows that by wiping out her competition she can gain a virtual monopoly in an important market (like all Bond Villains, she didn’t get to the part where Goldfinger ended up sucked out of an airplane and Zorin got thrown out of a blimp).

Anyhow, Bond gets kidnapped by Elektra who reveals her evil scheme to him while slowly torturing him to death. Bond gets out of the trap, regretfully kills Elektra, sneaks aboard Renard’s stolen Russian nuclear submarine, tells him the bad news, kills Renard and swims to the surface.

Whew! And I left out the part with the helicopter with the giant buzzsaw attacking the caviar factory.

WOMEN? Another key feature of TWINE is having a surprise female Lead Villain. I applaud this twist and I wish it worked better. Elektra is a complex character with dark motivations and many layers to her personality. Unfortunately, she’s played by Sophie Marceau, an actress incapable of expressing any of that. Luckily, the movie is saved by Denise Richards, who is totally believable in her subtly nuanced, brilliantly accomplished performance of the role of Dr. Christmas Jones, beautiful young American nuclear physicist trying to escape her dark past by dismantling nuclear bombs in some dusty place where they speak Russian.

Okay, so TWINE kinds of blows it on the women. And yet, there are three love scenes in this movie and I believe every one of them. This is how good Pierce Brosnan is. In fact, I will go so far to say that, as far as Bond Love Scenes go, Brosnan scores a higher believability rating than any other Bond, Connery and Craig included. There, I said it.

HOW COOL IS THE BAD GUY? Renard is a great idea for a character and Robert Carlyle is great in the part. He’s spooky, creepy and seems to think he’s in a real movie. The bullet-in-the-head idea is swell, but the filmmakers do absolutely nothing with it, except have Renard pick up a flaming rock and ponder the limitations of faith.

ON DRIVING A BOAT THROUGH BUSY CITY STREETS: When Roger Moore drove his gondola through the streets of Venice, he arched his brows and tried to look dignified (and failed). When Pierce Brosnan drives his speedboat through the streets of London, he sets his jaw, grits his teeth, and drives with a flinty air of grim determination. I have not yet decided which approach is the best way for an actor to approach this unique acting challenge.

NOTES: TWINE, conceptually, is full of complex, interesting ideas, moral ambiguities and multi-dimensional characters. It also has ludicrous action set-pieces that are a perfect illustration of “pointless spectacle.” The complex espionage thriller making room for the ludicrous set-pieces results in a script that is a tangled mess.

The first scene is set in Bilbao, that hotbed of international intrigue located in rural southern Spain. Bond goes to Bilbao, I’m guessing, so that he can run past the Guggenheim Bilbao, which looks cool. In front of the Guggenheim Bilbao, it happens, is Jeff Koons’s “Puppy”. Putting James Bond in the same frame as Jeff Koons is a pop-culture masterstroke that will make my head explode if I think about it too much.

I would now like to address the problem of flying snowmobiles. If I am a Bond Villain and I want Bond dead, I have to ask myself: is a squadron of flying snowmobiles the most efficient way to accomplish this task? But attack the squadron of flying snowmobiles do, and miraculously survive Bond does. And then what? Bond frets about who might be trying to kill him.

Well now wait a minute, Mr. World’s Greatest Detective. You just got attacked by a squadron of flying snowmobiles in Azerbaijan. How many different people do you suppose are capable of operating flying snowmobiles? Why don’t you go to the local flying-snowmobile school and make some inquiries? How many places in Azerbaijan do you suppose sell flying snowmobiles? Why not head over to the local flying-snowmobile emporium and ask if, perhaps, recently a bald man with a bullet in his head came in asking about hiring a squadron of flying snowmobiles to be piloted by a team of daring flying-snowmobile-piloting assassins? Or did the team of assassins come with their own flying snowmobiles? Are they a team of flying-snowmobile pilots like Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus, perhaps out of work and looking for a little side employment as a team of crack flying-snowmobile assassins?

(The flying-snowmobile assassins turn out, of course, to be hired not by Renard but by Elektra, which makes even less sense. Hey Bond Villain, when you hire someone to kill Bond, don’t hire them to kill you as well. THAT’S JUST STUPID.)

And while we’re at it, later in the movie Elektra sends a helicopter with a giant buzzsaw to go destroy the caviar factory of an enemy. Okay, let’s think this out, Ms. I-Want-To-Take-Over-The-Oil-Industry. You’re in the middle of a gigantic, once-in-a-lifetime scheme to destroy Istanbul, take over the oil industry and kill all your enemies. It would be a good idea if you were not caught doing these things. You know what’s a good way to kill a guy? Shoot him. Poison him. Cut his throat. You know what’s a bad way to kill a guy? Send a helicopter with a giant buzzsaw to destroy his factory. Especially when the helicopter with the giant buzzsaw has your oil company’s logo painted on the side in bright red letters. The local police show up to investigate the big caviar-factory destruction in the morning and find all the buildings sawn in half; I’m guessing the list of locals who own helicopters with giant buzzsaws is a pretty short list indeed.

And while we’re discussing the helicopter with the giant buzzsaw, who is flying that helicopter anyway? Does Elektra know a helicopter pilot who can operate a helicopter with a giant buzzsaw and is also a ruthless assassin? Because we see the helicopter earlier in its daily routine cutting tree-branches away from a roadway. I buy that there are helicopters with giant buzzsaws fulfilling useful functions for oil plutocrats, but where are you going to find a ruthless assassin who can also operate such a machine?

I give credit to TWINE for having a genuine mystery in it and genuine twists worthy of an actual suspense thriller. I take away credit because I spend far too much of the movie thinking things like “We’re going skiing now because why?” “Renard lives in a cave surrounded by flaming rocks why?” “We’re going where now to do what because why?” “Bond’s booby-trapped car just happens to be parked on the dock of the caviar factory because why?”

In the scene with Moneypenny, Bond offers her a cigar. I’m guessing this is a Clinton reference.

This movie has the final appearance of Q. Good riddance. I hate him. He’s an idiot.

It is announced that Q is being replaced by John Cleese. This is a brilliant idea. Cleese is a natural fussy headmaster and one of the most accomplished comic actors in history. Unfortunately, for TWINE he’s forced to play buffoon to Desmond Llewellen, which makes for one of the least funny Cleese moments in history.

Another wonderful innovation in TWINE is the total lack of gigantic Villain HQ. The villains in TWINE live in perfectly ordinary locations furnished with perfectly ordinary medieval torture devices. When Renard steals a nuclear submarine, the set startles because it looks exactly like a nuclear submarine. It’s not huge, it has no vaulted ceiling or armies of bad guys. Then, to make the innovation even more startling, the nuclear submarine upends in the spectacular action climax and does exactly what you would expect an upended nuclear submarine to do. This would be a great sequence in any thriller but having it show up in a Bond movie gives it that much more of a kick.