The World Is Not Enough

Remember when Bond movies were camp, creaky festivals of explosions, humping and neo-pantomime villainous henchmen? Bond was humping a succession of women half his age, by the way, not the henchmen. We knew no better: Roger Eyebrows had set the template after taking over from Sean Toupee, Timothy Welsh had failed to shift the franchise into the 80s, Pierced Brosnan settled for somewhere between Eyebrows and Toupee with added grunting whenever he got hurt.

The biggest innovation of the Brosnan years was Judi Dench as M. The worst notion was John Cleese as replacement for Desmond Llewelyn's Q. And the invisible car but that's the next film. This one has Sophie Marceau as an Eastern European with a French voice, Robert Carlyle as an Eastern European with a little bit too much of a Scottish voice, Denise Richards with an unnaturally large chest and Robbie Coltrane with the same problem as Carlyle.

Oil, nuclear material, submarines, skiing, shagging, betrayal, caviar, destroyed cars, the Millennium Dome, shagging, grunting, far too many repetitions of the line 'Bond, James Bond', innuendo with Moneypenny, M in danger, gambling, shagging...yup, it's a pre-Craig Bond film.

And it's ok. Just ok. It's not Goldfinger; it's not even Goldeneye. Garbage recorded the theme tune but the real garbage would come with Brosnan's next and final outing as 007, Die Another Day. When the writers resort to invisible cars and the peak of the special effects is a dreadfully obvious CGI sequence of tsunami surfing it's time for things to change. Thankfully they did and Daniel Craig stepped in to drag Bond properly into the new century.