The World Is Not Enough

Skippable, and it contains the best idea of the Brosnan era inside a film that cannot hold it. Sophie Marceau's Elektra King is an oil heiress who was kidnapped as a young woman while M, personally, advised her father not to pay, and she has spent the years since planning what to do about it. A Bond villain with a direct grievance against the service, and a genuine claim on M's conscience, is a real story.

The film keeps interrupting it. There is a pipeline, a nuclear device, a caviar factory with circular saws on helicopters, and Robert Carlyle as a terrorist with a bullet in his brain that has removed his ability to feel pain, which sounds interesting and amounts to him being shot and not reacting.

Michael Apted was an unusual choice and brings real attention to the Elektra scenes, several of which are better written than anything else in the era. The boat chase down the Thames in the pre-titles is a genuinely good eight minutes.

Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist in hot pants became the standing joke of the series and is not her fault; the part is written as a prop. Judi Dench gets more to do here than in any other Brosnan film, which is the main argument for watching it.