In Bilbao, Spain, British agent James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) meets with a Swiss banker named Lachaise (Patrick Malahyde) to access the funds of Sir Robert King (David Calder), a British oil tycoon and friend of Bond’s boss M (Judi Dench). Bond is trying to learn the name of an assassin who killed an MI-6 agent, but Lachaise is killed and Bond escapes with the money. At MI-6 in London, King dies in an explosion and it is discovered that the money was laced with explosives. Bond pursues an assassin, called Cigar Girl or Giuletta da Vinci (Maria Grazia Cucinotta) by boat on the Thames River to the Millennium Dome, where she attempts to escape in a hot air balloon. Bond offers her protection, but she blows up the balloon, killing herself.
Bond traces the money to a KGB agent turned terrorist named Renard (Robert Carlyle) whose real name is Victor Zokas. He has a bullet in his brain which makes him impervious to pain but is slowly killing him. M assigns Bond to protect King’s daughter Elektra (Sophie Marceau). Bond flies to Azerbaijan, where Elektra is constructing an oil pipeline. During a tour, Bond and Elektra are attacked by a hit squad in snowmobiles equipped with guns and paragliders.
Bond visits Valentin Zukovsky (Robbie Coltrane), a former KGB agent now running a casino, to ask him about Electra’s attackers. He finds it suspicious that Elektra loses a million dollars in a card-game, and he discovers that her bodyguard Sasha Davidov (Ulrich Thomsen) is in league with Renard. Bond kills him and takes off in a plane toward a Russian base in Kazakhstan. Posing as a Russian scientist, Bond meets an American nuclear physicist named Doctor Christmas Jones (Denise Richards in her nuclear physicist short-shorts and tank-top). Renard takes the GPS locator card and weapons-grade plutonium from a nuclear bomb, but Jones blows Bond’s cover and Renard steals the bomb, leaving everyone to die. Bond and Jones escape with the locator card.
In Azerbaijan, Bond warns M that Elektra may not be as innocent as they think, because of Stockholm Syndrome. She may be in league with Renard. An alarm indicates that the stolen bomb is attached to a pipeline inspection pig headed toward the oil terminal. Bond and Jones enter the pipeline to deactivate the bomb, and Jones discovers that half the plutonium is missing. They escape before the pipe is destroyed by the bomb, but they are presumed killed. Elektra admits, back at the command centre, that she killed her father as revenge for him using her as bait, and she abducts M because M had advised her father not to pay the ransom.
Bond confronts Zukovsky at his cigar factory and they are attacked by Elektra’s helicopters. Zukovsky admits that his shady financial dealings were to get his hands on a Russian submarine. The group goes to Istanbul, where Jones realises that Renard could use the stolen nuclear material to destroy Istanbul, sabotaging the Russian pipeline and making Elektra’s pipeline more valuable. Zukovsky’s henchman Bull (Goldie) blows up the command centre. Zukovsky is knocked unconscious and Bond and Jones are captured by Elektra’s men.
Jones is taken aboard the submarine, but Bond is taken to a tower where Elektra tortures him with a garrote and admits that she cut off part of her ear to make her kidnapping more believable. Zukovsky and his men assault the tower. Zukovsky is shot by Elektra, but before dying, he frees Bond, who kills Elektra and frees M. Bond boards the submarine and frees Jones. The submarine is ruptured and sinks into the Bosphorus. Bond impales Renard with a plutonium rod and then Bond and Jones escape from the submarine as the flooded reactor detonates. Then they spend a romantic evening in Istanbul.
The film was directed by Michael Apted from a screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and Bruce Feirstein, and produced by Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. The World is Not Enough is a translation of the motto on the Bond family coat of arms, thought to be a quote from the Roman poet Lucan. It was later referred to Alexander the Great by Juvenal and became the motto of Spain’s King Philip. The film received mixed reviews, and Denise Richards’ casting as a nuclear physicist was particularly criticized, but Brosnan and Sophie Marceau were praised, as was the film itself for its characters of some emotional weight. It was the first Bond film released by MGM instead of United Artists. Barbara Broccoli was the one who had realized that the oil companies’ competition for the untapped reserves in the Caspian Sea following the Soviet Union’s collapse would be worthy of a Bond villain’s attention.
The film was nominated for an Oscar, an Empire Award, and a Saturn, but Denise Richards won the Golden Raspberry for worst supporting actress. She was called the least probable nuclear physicist in movie history. She admitted that her costume was not realistic but if she had been dressed like a real scientist her fans would have been disappointed. It seems to me she would have looked just fine as a nuclear physicist in a black skirt, white blouse, and glasses. This was the uniform of every female scientist in an SF movie in the Fifties, particularly when the skirt was split to the waist so she could climb an elevator shaft or run from a monster. But then, the basic purpose of casting the popular Denise Richards was to draw Gen-X eyes to the film. That’s why she was dressed like Lara Croft.
The explanation was that she was an idiosyncratic non-generic scientist whose beauty meant she was not taken seriously, making her defiant and resentful. This sounds like the producers wanting to make her a feminist hero, so they could have the feminism and jiggle it too. I seriously doubt if Richards was capable of playing a part that complex. As one reviewer said, “She can’t even run convincingly.” They already had a brilliant actress in Sophie Marceau, who played half the movie as a needful Bond Girl and the other half as an insane Bond villain. She was brilliant. The film was criticized for trying to turn Pierce Brosnan into Roger Moore, but Sophie Marceau saved it, in my opinion.
The movie was filmed in front of the actual MI-6 headquarters in London, at Eilean Donan Castle in Scotland, and in France, Spain, Baku, Azerbaijan, and Istanbul. In Zukovsky’s warehouse, the girlie pictures on the wall are all former Bond girls. This is the third Bond film to feature a pipeline inspection pig, after Diamonds are Forever and The Living Daylights. Desmond Llewelyn (Q) died in a car accident after the movie’s release and it features a tribute to him in the DVD release. He appeared in seventeen Bond movies over thirty-six years and was consistently one of the best things in the films, loved by every audience. His successor in this film, John Cleese, was called R. His farewell scene was modelled after Merlin’s farewell to King Arthur.