There. Now that I have my newspaper ad quote out of the way, let me tell you what I really think.

[NOTE: I won't be warning you when I reveal plot points because, hey, I couldn't give a damn.]

This James Bond is dull. It's boring. It's a snoozer. My God, shake it or stir it, I don't care, but give this creation some LIFE! All the elements are there: the locations, the explosions, the chases, the bad guys, the stolen bomb, the gadgets, the women. But there's no soul. There's a scene, for instance, when James, his girl sidekick Christmas Jones (a Bond girl name to be sure, played by Denise Richards), and Valentin Zukovsky, the Russian "business man" from GoldenEye, are being chased around a network of piers by two helicopters equipped with a dangling set of rotary saw blades. (Don't ask.) Buildings, pipes, cars, and the pier itself get chopped to pieces. Bond runs around, avoiding the baddies while trying to kill them all. Christmas runs around looking for a place to hide so she can pull her short shorts out of her ass crack. Valentin ducks and shoots a couple bullets. There are explosions and stunts and noise. Perfect Bond set-up, right? Forget it. There's no life. None! And the whole movie is this way! I'd rather be watching a two-hour showing of that X-ray film loop from second grade of a man chewing and swallowing a lump of food. Did you ever see that? It was great.

Why is there no life to this Bond? Good question. It's a combination of bad directing, slow editing, and a boring script. Michael Apted, who normally directs things like Gorillas in the Mist and Coal Miner's Daughter and Nell, is way out of his league here. He tries to give Bond an angsty side. I didn't mind that play in The Living Daylights, when Timothy Dalton was asked to bring some broodiness to "the franchise" (I am one of only six people who liked Timothy as Bond), but it was overdone, and badly, in License to Kill. And here, too, it's just not right. You can give Bond a darker side, but you have to damn well make sure his smug, dapper side remains visible for the rest of the movie. Pierce Brosnan looks like he's about to fall asleep here, even when he's swimming beside a submarine or sliding down a cable with a crow bar or skiing to the edge of a precipice. As Brosnan snoozes, so shall we.

The editing sucks. There are some really bad cuts where shots linger on people long after they've stopped talking or even performing, and you expect to hear Apted's "CUT!" from off-screen. The action, likewise, is not well put-together. This is not the same problem Michal Bay has (gee, can't wait to see his epic Pearl Harbor movie—Wait, was that a bomb falling or a swish pan of a ham and cheese sandwich?). Michael Bay's movies are well edited technically but are disastrously incoherent, while this Bond yawner is just badly edited. My guess is it was rushed. It could have used some cleaning up.

The script is not at all interesting or creative, which is too bad because I kind of liked the story idea. In fact, the story was a little more complex than normal, despite the presence of the stolen nuclear bomb element, a thing Austin Powers should have lampooned out of existence. But, oh, the dialogue. It was just as dull as the rest of the movie, without any thought of color or spark put into it. Pierce himself can barely spit out the bad puns this time because they are so bad and misplaced. ARGH! What a nuisance.

There were two things in particular I was looking forward to in this one. The first was Judi Dench having an expanded role as M, and the second was Robert Carlyle as Renard, the bad guy. M gets kidnapped? Wow! By Robert? Wow! Oh, but they are victims of Bond boredom, too. Judi just sits around most of the time gaping and behaving like a guilty puppy. Then she gets kidnapped and has to sit in a makeshift cell forever. Her one moment to shine is when she figures out that she can be located if she activates the nuclear bomb GPS card she has. (Don't ask.) She bungles the first attempt, damn her cliché-ridden bones, and then when she does manage, the solution is so ludicrous, even for a Bond movie, that I just sank. (If you're wondering, the Russian GPS card can be activated using a common 9-volt battery.) And Robert? Well, he gets to be mean, but that's about it. Just mean. He doesn't even have Sean Bean's magnetic glower (as 006 in GoldenEye). He's just a bullet-brained freak who feels no pain and wants to martyr himself for his beloved traitor lady, Elektra (Sophie Marceau, exciting as hominy). OOPS! Did I just give away that Elektra's the real bad guy? I'm sorry. Yell at me if you wish.

Denise Richards? Well, she got all kinds of cat calls from the young guys in the audience, but man does that girl need to be hit with an acting stick! There's only so much you can get across by sloshing your lips around in various pouty ways. The rest needs to come from a well of talent. Poor girl. She'd do best to work for Hot Dog On a Stick. She'd look great in one of those uniforms, pumping up and down while she makes lemonade. She'd still get the cat calls from the teenyboppers, and she wouldn't have to have any acting skills to say, "Be careful! These are hot!"

The rest of the cast is too boring to mention.

Even the theme song is dull, almost as dull as the one for Tomorrow Never Dies. And that Daniel Kleinman guy knocked my socks off for the opening title sequence for GoldenEye but has since put my socks back on, one at a time for each of his follow-up Bond titles. Sigh.

Oh, I did like the parasnowmobiles. Those were cool. I mean, as a concept. Their execution was—you guessed it—boring.

You may notice that I haven't mentioned any of the earlier, pre-Timothy Bond movies. I figure, why bother? They are such different creatures now that it hardly does any good to compare them. At least not right now when all I want to do is finish this review and get on with my web browsing.

In case you're wondering, The World Is Not Enough set a record for biggest Bond movie opening ever. Figures. Maybe they should have cast Adam Sandler as Q's replacement instead of John Cleese. Then they would have made $50 million instead of $37 million.

Has anyone else found this season of The X-Files to be rather disappointing? I know I have! Talk about dull. I used to look forward to this show with geeky anticipation, but now I almost don't care. Maybe this week's combo of Millennium and The X-Files will be good. I miss Frank Black. He's creepy.

At least The West Wing is fun.

—Steve

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