When you watch the James Bond franchise, especially as intensively as I have in the last couple of weeks, you will note a few things that are common to all of them.  Some are easily recognizable.  In every movie, at least once, whoever is playing the famous military intelligence, section six (MI6) operative introduces himself as “Bond.  James Bond.”  There is also his preferred cocktail, vodka martini, shaken, not stirred.  You can hear this in every single entry in the series, along with the spy sleeping with almost every woman he meets.  That last part has caused an endless amount of sighing from me.  Another often used set piece at which I often roll me eyes are chases.  These usually occur in cars, but they can take place in the air and on the water.  When they happen by boat, it is a sign of how silly is whoever directing the current production.  This takes place in The World Is Not Enough (1999), and is partly why it is not quite as good as its predecessor.

In addition to the fact that The World Is Not Enough, so too are the efforts of the villains with which James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) contends in Bilbao, Spain.  He is there to retrieve the money of Sir Robert King (David Calder), a British oil tycoon.  James is successful, but not in finding out the person responsible for originally taking the sum.  Once he gets the cash back to MI6 headquarters, it is promptly handed over to Sir Robert by M (Judi Dench), the head of the spy organization.  However, as she and James are sitting down for a celebratory drink to a job well done, he notices that there is something wrong.  He rushes to the MI6 vault only to see a bomb planted in the cash explode, killing Sir Robert.  A long pursuit on the Thames, as alluded to above, proves fruitless in revealing any more information, and James hurts his shoulder in the process.  After Sir Robert’s funeral, James finds that he is locked out of the system in terms of beginning an investigation into Sir Robert’s death.  This is M’s doing.  In addition to not believing James fit for service, she is ashamed of the connection she has to Sir Robert’s daughter, Elektra King (Sophie Marceau).  The money James had been sent after was intended for Elektra’s ransom from being kidnapped by the notorious terrorist Viktor “Renard” Zokas (Robert Carlyle).  In the process, M had used Elektra as bait to learn about Renard.  While James receives a clean bill of health as only Bond can, M orders him to Azerbaijan, which is where Elektra is carrying on her father’s work of building an oil pipeline across central Asia.  He is told not to inform her that MI6 suspects someone is trying to kill her, but he finds he is falling for her and informs her anyway.  Instead, he makes it his mission to discover Renard’s location, though this last bit he keeps from her.  To get things started, he travels to the casino owned by Valentin Zukovsky (Robbie Coltrane), former member of the KGB of the Soviet Union, and current Russian mafioso.  James does not find out much, but does learn that Elektra’s head of security, Sasha Davidov (Ulrich Thomsen), is in Renard’s employ.  Thus, James follows Sasha later that night, taking Sasha’s place on board a plane headed to Kazakhstan.  They land near what appears to by a plutonium mine, and it is there that James meets nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones (Denise Richards).  I am unclear as to who she is supposed to be working for here, but she seems to be on the right side of things.  I say this because she helps James resist Renard, who is attempting to steal nuclear weapons from what turns out to be an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silo complex.  In the process, James is starting to believe that Elektra is in league with Renard when the terrorist uses a euphemism that she had uttered.  Though Dr. Jones and James are able to return to Azerbaijan, Elektra denies any involvement with the man who had been responsible for her torture.  Nonetheless, he suggests to M that Elektra cannot be trusted when the MI6 boss arrives to personally manage the situation.  It is at this moment that Elektra’s technicians detect a bomb traveling down their pipeline, one carrying plutonium.  Dr. Jones and James are sent to diffuse the explosive.  They manage to remove the nuclear material, but James allows the rest to go off.  Thinking that James is dead, Elektra turns on M, taking the MI6 chief hostage and traveling to Istanbul.  Meanwhile, Dr. Jones and James decide to confront Valentin, who knows more about Elektra’s illicit activities than he had previously admitted.  Indeed, he lets on that his nephew, the captain of a Russian nuclear submarine, is due to rendezvous with Elektra and Renard in the Turkish capital.  Dr. Jones and James go there, too, but are quickly captured.  Like many a Bond villain before her, Elektra reveals that she plans to use the submarine as a bomb, overloading its reactor with plutonium. This would then somehow sever the oil pipelines of her competitors, giving her control over the trade.  This, of course, allows Valentin enough time to make amends by attacking Elektra’s guards, and for James to slip free from his, er, bonds, and kill Elektra.  James and Dr. Jones make it onto the submarine where Renard is attempting to implant the nuclear material into the vessels core.  James is able to save the day, and make it back to the surface with Dr. Jones.  Yet again, the movie ends in a similar fashion to its predecessors with James in bed with Dr. Jones.

The general reason for why The World Is Not Enough is not as good as the one that comes immediately before it is because there are some plot holes.  Not understanding who is employing Dr. Jones as discussed in the previous paragraph is one.  Another is the unclear nature of Elektra’s overall plot.  I know, in real life, a lot of oil goes through the Black Sea past Istanbul, but I am not sure how destroying the city cuts off most of this supply.  I guess it just sounds evil.  No matter its clarity, it is the brainchild of an interesting villain from a Catholic perspective.  I was initially piqued by her when she is pictured saving a Coptic Christian church in the path of her pipeline from destruction.  This briefly warmed my heart because the Coptic church is in communion with Catholicism.  Ironically enough, I sat in line for Confession today with a person of an Orthodox profession, which should underscore the nature of that communion.  Still, this is a limited aspect of her character.  A bigger one is the fact that she suffers from Stockholm Syndrome.  The Church does not have any specific teaching on this condition whereby a victim of kidnapping falls in love with her or his captors.  What Scripture does say is to love your enemy, and the Bible does have examples of New Testament figures, especially St. Paul, being gracious towards those who imprison him.  Stockholm Syndrome is different, and it usually involves those taken hostage joining in the criminal activities of those who had initially spirited them away.  A real-life instance of this is Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of printing tycoon William Randolph Hearst.  In 1974, she was taken by the Symbionese Liberation Army, which sounds more revolutionary than it actually was, and eventually took part in bank robberies with them.  This is not too dissimilar than what you see in the movie.  In any case, neither situation is Godly.

In case you are wondering, The World Is Not Enough is the only real mainstream movie in which Denise Richards appears, unless you count Starship Troopers (1997).  I would not call that one “mainstream.”  I bring her up because she has had an interesting, and checkered, career.  I am sure she thought this would lead to more, but it does not appear to have worked out that way.  Anyway, in researching her more, I learned that she was born near my hometown and raised Catholic.  These are not reasons to watch this movie, but here you go nonetheless.