Will The Real James Bond Stand Up Part IV-Pierce Brosnan’s “The World Is Not Enough” (1999)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By former Associate Film Critic Alden Riley

The World Is Not Enough, starring Pierce Brosnan, Sophie, Marceau, Robert Carlyle, Denise Richards, 1999

A curtain is beginning to descend on the American Left History blog that I have been associated with (had been an associate film critic before such titles were eliminated without discussion by the head of the new regime Greg Green and his hand-picked minions). No, not the famous, or infamous as the case may be, one signaled by old-time British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Fulton, Missouri in 1947 for the start of my parents’ generation’s Cold War which ultimately defrosted with the demise of the Soviet Union about quarter century ago but sinister enough. (By the way this whole latter day Bond series starting with he-man in a tight spot Pierce Brosnan, John Le Carre, and Tom Clancy must be eternally weeping real tears since they don’t have that behemoth to beat up on anymore as much they try like in the film under review here The World Is Not Enough with one of the villains being an ex-KGB agent.)

Sinister enough for comment here before my review of yet another James Bond film in the seemingly never-ending “mock heroic” battle with former Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon over who the fuck is the real James Bond. (Apparently in audience land nobody cares since the revenue stream is measured in the hundreds of millions.) And before I can no longer make such comment under the agreement that Sam Lowell made with Greg Green and rubber-stamped by the Editorial Board that will soon prohibit mention of the just concluded internal struggle over direction and personnel changes. More importantly the ban on mentioning by name the previous site manager Allan Jackson, his accomplishments, or his short-comings.

So while the amnesty lasts which only extended to the ten or fifteen pieces that were in the pipeline before the agreement was reached I will express my displeasure. First at the elimination of titles which I have mentioned before and which still rankles since I put in some great effort to get to that status and have now been thrown on the Everyman, Every-person now that we have good women writers coming along , scrapheap like everybody else. Secondly at that ominous trend of making non-persons out of people who were critical to the success and development of this blog (and in its previous hard copy iterations which Sam Lowell, a key figure in all of this, is writing a history of to close the curtain down tight) and who taught me a lot about social media survival. This worry by the way from a person, from THE person, if one person can be said to have started the furor over the demise of Allan Jackson one of the founding members. Me. Rumor has it that Allan is out in exile, exile after purge as Sam Lowell put the matter inelegantly but correctly, hustling the Mormons for newspaper subscriptions.

The truth I don’t know but that sounds weird about a guy who has skewered well-known Mormon honcho and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney about his white underwear and about his unjust abandonment of his great-grandfather and his polygamous five wives. Another truth, a known truth is that I am standing by my remarks about the descending curtain despite the fact that I hated Allan Jackson, hated the way the blog was heading and fought tooth and nail with the “Young Turks” to purge the bastard. The immediate reason which is all I will detail now and let Sam do his business is the time in 2017 that he went crazy over commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the Summer of Love, 1967 and was assigning everybody who could walk, who could write, some silly assignment about that year.

My “mistake” is that he heard about my ignorance of Janis Joplin, a key rising blues singing star during that time, who made a big splash at the first Monterey Pops Festival that year which Sandy had written about and I had told him that I had never heard of her. Allan went wild and assigned me like some naughty schoolboy a biopic about her life. Yes, so no love lost here. But Allan was a larger than life personality and he should not be resigned to the dustbin of history like his buddy Leon Trotsky said about the old regime in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Trotsky, a guy, a larger than life personality, they, the Stalin supporters in the Soviet Union when there was a Soviet Union, tried might and main to make a non-person. It will not wash with me, it just will not.      

But now onto the real battle of today. The mismatch between one senile old goat Sandy Salmon, like Allan locked in a time capsule about 1965, hanging on to his lame excuse for a James Bond old fogy Sean Connery against me, against the king of the hill, and my favorite sporty handsome he-man full of prowess that Sean would buckle under, one Pierce Brosnan. For those following this life and death struggle the basic difference is that Pierce’s Bond, James Bond could run circles around the asthmatic Connery who should have been put in an old age home about that same 1965 that Sandy-and Allan- seems locked into.

Enough of that though. Let’s run the tale, let’s tell how many “kills” and “collateral damage” Pierce put on his scorecard while Sean was still walking down the garden path with some good-looking eye candy woman who last read a book about 1949. James is onto some craziness around the fate of that former KGB agent I mentioned earlier who has turned rogue, has made himself a big spot in the international terrorist hall of fame. The target a rich British oil man who is assassinated by that dastardly former KGB agent. A separate thread has this oil king’s daughter taking over the business after having been kidnapped and NOT released via ransom paid by but by stealth and sexual allure. That no ransom the very public stance of MI6 and of its leader M. It turned out that the terrorist and kidnap victim were murkily working together on a big caper. Drive the price of oil through the roof by “killing” the market. Killing the oil by blowing away oil sites and driving production low via some stolen high tech gizmos which wind up like the British Empite not working. Nice move.

Naturally James, an erstwhile agent of the British interests in cheap oil is the one the case. He has his suspicious about that oil man’s daughter although, as is always the case, when she does here come hither act on him he goes under the silky sheets just like any other guy. Along the way sweet baby James is helped by yet another secret agent perk, a shapely drop dead beautiful young women posing as a brainy oil doctor. Posing at the end after a zillion escapades which would have drained the life right out of pokey Sean Connery. Yeah sent those old guys out to pasture just like we did with Allan Jackson except maybe not Utah, maybe Siberia.