By Marc Graser

HOLLYWOOD (Variety) - Consumers may soon have to decide whether they want to rent or download the latest James Bond film.

MGM broadened its relationship with Blockbuster Inc. on Tuesday, making it the first major studio to allow its films to be downloaded from the Internet -- and the first to make its entire library of pictures available under a revenue-sharing agreement with the video rental giant.

The deal is the first content partnership to develop since Blockbuster earlier this month said it is creating a video-on-demand service for digital video recorder TiVo's set-top boxes. TiVo enables users to record and save programming without use of traditional videotape.

Under the nonexclusive agreement, MGM will help Blockbuster test and develop its business model, which will eventually make MGM and other studio pictures available to download or stream on the online service for a fee at the same time that they're released on video or DVD in stores.

Through its pact with MGM, Blockbuster's service on TiVo also would potentially enable users to download videos to their televisions. At the very least, users would be able to reserve titles at their local Blockbuster outlet. MGM officials said selected pictures will also be available to download through Blockbuster's Web site for a fee -- a service that would become more attractive as more high-speed Internet services are deployed into homes.

"This is focused on the Internet," David Bishop, president of MGM Home Entertainment told Daily Variety. "We haven't spoken to TiVo or Blockbuster about TiVo. But certainly as we get deeper into that, TiVo is an option."

Blockbuster plans to make the first downloadable pictures available on either TiVo or the Web, before the end of the year. MGM's first offerings would be trailers and a few select pictures.

Financial terms of the MGM-Blockbuster deal were not disclosed, and a specific business plan is still in the early stages. Yet, with MGM on board, the deal signals that other studios soon could follow.

With video-on-demand looming (Time Warner is also developing its own service), video chains are racing to develop video-on-demand and other e-business ventures they hope will lessen their long-term dependence on video rentals as their primary source of revenue.

Having hammered out the revenue-share deals it wanted with the studios, Blockbuster would now get the business and the major studios the cut regardless whether consumers want to purchase, rent or download a movie.

Not only would such a deal help Blockbuster escape the trap of videocassette and disc dependence, it would protect the studios from the least-attractive aspects of prerecorded video: dubbing cassettes and discs out of pocket and figuring out what to do with them when demand dwindles.

"Access to video-streaming rights for a portion of the world's largest modern film library underscores our goal as a company to provide quality, in-home entertainment in whatever form our consumers want it delivered, whether through our stores or other channels such as electronic delivery," said John Antioco, Blockbuster's CEO.

Through a previous deal, MGM and Blockbuster already split revenues collected from the vid chain's rental of new titles. The new pact extends it to older titles, as well, guaranteeing that more MGM titles will find shelf space in Blockbuster's 6,900 stores worldwide.

Reuters/Variety

SANTA MONICA, Calif (Reuters) - Film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., the home of classic musicals and holder of the rights to 19 James Bond movies, teamed up with video rental giant Blockbuster Inc. Tuesday to find ways to give customers movies via the Internet. The two companies said in a joint statement they had entered a non-exclusive agreement to test and develop a model under which Blockbuster would make available selected MGM films for digital streaming and downloading video via the Internet and other home delivery technologies.

The agreement is part of a new multi-year VHS revenue-sharing arrangement that encompasses both new MGM films and library products.

Blockbuster, a subsidiary of Viacom Inc., is one of the world's leading renters of viedos and video games with some 6,000 stores in the United States and 26 other countries.

Blockbuster chief executive officer John Antioco said the agreement brought the company one step closer to its goal of providing "quality entertainment in whatever form our customers want it delivered."

MGM boasts a 4,100-strong library thought to be one of the world's largest modern collections, although it no longer retains rights to some of the more famous films it made.

But last September MGM regained broadcast rights to more than 800 old MGM and United Artists films from Turner Broadcasting as part of a drive to expand into new areas.

Reuters/Variety

Well done old girl!

But Serena, below, who plays Dr Molly Warmflash opposite 007 Pierce Brosnan in the latest blockbuster The World is Not Enough, has had a life of tragedy having lost both her father and step-father in aeroplane crashes.

Geography teacher Mrs Andrew, who taught the star at the 15,000-a-year college between 1972 and 1977, said Serena's father Lieutenant Commander Simon Scott Thomas died in an air crash in 1966.

Her pilot step-father Royal Navy Commander Simon Idiens was killed in an air crash in 1972.

Serena's sister Kristin, above, who starred in Four Weddings and Funeral with Hugh Grant, also attended the Cheltenham college and Mrs Andrew said: "Those little girls were blighted by this personal tragedy and I'm delighted to hear she has gone on to be successful."

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WHY ARE THEY FAMOUS?: PIERCE BROSNAN

Appearance. James Bond. Gorgeous cad. Mannequin in Debenhams complete with casually undone bowtie. Lara Croft's lover.

Ugly duckling. "Hopefully I play the part in a convincing manner," intones Mr Debonair. Our hero, however, had to undergo a make-over before he was allowed near a Martini glass. Early snaps reveal a chubby-chopped, snaggle-toothed ugly with an urgent need for a barber. Seventies pals described him as "a funny looking chap, rather overweight, with greased back hair".

Home boy. Born in Co Meath, the Bondlet started out as an altar boy. He moved to London at 12. He worked as a mini cab driver, as you do, before plying his trade in the West End and starring in that hilariously titled detective series, Remington Steele.

Premium Bond. After the wet and appalling Timothy Dalton, Brosnan, 46, is 007 incarnate. So the chauvinist dinosaur of a role lumbers into the millennium. The latest features Brosnan in a caviar factory on the Caspian Sea and atop the roof of the Millennium Dome. Well, naturally.

Bond girls. Unfortunately for our purposes, Brosnan is neither a womaniser nor a serial spouse. In 1981, he married Cassandra Harris, aptly a former Bond girl, and stayed madly in love until she died a decade later. "No one could ever replace Cassie," he says. He is father to four, including his latest son, one Dylan Thomas, by long-term girlfriend, journalist Keely Shaye-Smith.

Fame prospects. Pierce needs to wear a sporran or sport a scandalous love life if he is to stay in Hello!. An affair with Ginger Spice or a mayoral run-in would also suffice. Loosen up, Pierce, lovey, and give us all something to laugh about. Shaken, not stirred, etc.

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TOM'S ALL CHORES, GIRLS

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LIVING IT UP: ANOTHER SUAVE AGENT OF FORTUNE

Pierce of beefcake: Far left, the man they came to see - Pierce Brosnan as James Bond. Victoria and Simon Seymour Perry with their tickets for the film. Top right, Lucy Prinsep looks forward to the screening. Right, Lucy Stokes (left) and Suzanne Smith get sorted with popcorn before the film starts.

It can come as no surprise: the new James Bond film - the 19th of its kind - finally opened this Friday.

Already long-awaited by fans and highly praised by critics, no wonder the Odeon cinema in Birmingham went Bond crazy and celebrated the event in style. On Tuesday The World Is Not Enough had its grand opening with city celebrities and Thursday a sneak preview gave the rest of us the chance to enter the entertaining and glamorous world of Pierce Brosnan's Agent 007.

On the recent opening weekend in the USA the film made a record $ 32.7 million. Considering that, its arrival here could not possibly be quiet.

Marketing co-ordinator of the Odeon cinema Michael McLean describes the new film as pure entertainment, and the reaction of the audience who went to see the film has proved his opinion right, he reports.

In The World Is Not Enough a ruthless group of high tech terrorists are fighting to dominate the world and its oil reserves, thus making James Bond the only one capable of keeping the power balance of this planet stable (and, of course, seduce a few women while doing so).

In his efforts he takes the audience around the globe - from Bilbao, Spain, to Istanbul, Turkey, via a high speed boat chase on the River Thames (and a small interlude with the Millennium Dome).

The Tuesday grand opening had some 300 smartly dressed people, among them the Lord Mayor of Birmingham and radio host Ed Doolan, paying dearly to get a first glimpse of the glamourous world of James Bond. All the money from the tickets - pounds 10 for the film alone or pounds 17 including a buffet with wine - went to the charity King George Fund for Sailors.

On Thursday night the Bond craze continued as 600 people had an early peek at the Millennial experiences of the agent when the Odeon once again opened its doors to the dedicated fans. Two practically sold out shows clearly proved that even though James Bond has been going for 35 years, he is still going strong.

GRAPHIC: Bond for glory: Michael McLean prepares for the big night at the odean.

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FILM: REVIEW - WHY PIERCE IS NOT ENOUGH

The World is Not Enough (12) Michael Apted;

The new James Bond film stars Pierce Brosnan as 007, Sophie Marceau as troubled heiress Elektra King, Robert Carlyle as the international terrorist Renard, and Denise Richards as Christmas Jones, a boob-thrusting nuclear physicist. It takes us from London to the Caspian Sea in an oil- supply struggle.

King, kidnapped by Renard as a teenager and completely furious with her father for not bailing her out before she turned into a bitch, is the baddie of the piece. Carlyle looks like an astonished little dolly next to her. Poor chap just needs an early night. You feel he's been up late reading The Last Tycoon, miserable that everything that feels impossible is all he ever wanted. Bond romances the two women, and winds up having Christmas in Turkey. Much is made of this gag.

The film is certainly less definitively feeble than other recent offerings, with an at least two- dimensional female character in the bold and oval Marceau. But my reaction is much the same as to a new Rolling Stones album: I'm just grateful that it's not embarrassing.

But let's not get too excited. As an action film, The World is Not Enough is mundanely choreographed, and as a continuation of the myth it is the usual biannual disappointment. The Bond myth comprised a set of very particular elements. The films were frightening, they were genuinely sexy, they had a very idiosyncratic kind of claustrophobia, and they were exotic in a time when that word still meant something - before we all went on package holidays to Magaluf.

Bond's cruelty was the incarnation of the loneliness of the sophisticated world traveller, and it was secretly terribly sad. Death and despair were the hidden meanings behind the cocktails and first-class air travel. It was all there in one bar of John Barry's theme-tune, all there in Sean Connery's face.

But for a long time now, Bond hasn't been scary, hasn't been sexy, hasn't been cruel. All that remains is action, and pretty much everybody does it better these days. These are the same oil rigs and submarines that Bruce Willis and Harrison Ford now clamber around (films like The Matrix are driving the Aston Martin while Bond is in the Lada). Long gone are the memorable, spidery landscapes. Films like You Only Live Twice and Moonraker moved into space in search of a landscape as frictionless, graceful and frigidly sexual as the hero. Now we open in Bilbao, take a trip down the Thames, and centre on the minarets of Istanbul - all the paranoia about what might be if the computer turned into God that characterised Fleming's books forgotten. They're determined to warm Bond up.

Take a look at Brosnan. Now, I do like him. It's obvious that he is smart, obvious that he understands the character; but he cannot personify him. It's not his fault. Nobody since Connery has been "right for the part" because Connery was the part. All that bitter muscle under the tux, a man isolated by his own charisma, a determined smoker. Bond's interest in civilised things was not a cultivation but a death wish, like the man who's been given a year to live and is just wretchedly bingeing.

Brosnan's Bond looks like a man who actually has a wife and kids back home. He looks like he owns a juicer. But worse, we're now getting into Bond's mind, which is a dreadful cul-de-sac. They even bring MI5 in more, as a kind of family, baby-sitting. And Judi Dench's M is maternal and fretful in her taupe Hobbs jacket. But this man is a contract killer! Let's not get into his head! Else you'll force us to imagine him 20 years down the line, in a Westminster mansion flat, worrying about Stain Devils and the price of cherries.

There is one brilliantly correct moment in this film. Sophie Marceau rounds on Bond: "You'll never kill me, you'd miss me." He shoots her dead and says with burnt-out blankness, "I never miss." It is terrifyingly succinct - coming from a mask-stiff mouth and a mind hanging in emptiness and strife. Warming Bond up desexualises him to such a degree that you feel that Brosnan actually suffers the seductions. When he grapples with a fully-waxed doctor, you suspect he'd really rather not.

I know what you're thinking: for God's sake, Quirke, lighten up. Not on your nelly. Not when it suits the Broccolis for us to honour their tranced repetitiveness as the respecting of "hallowed conventions". When the pleasures of surprise are replaced by the lesser pleasures of recognition, it flatters us - our complicity becomes vital to the actual spectacle. It's called playing to the gallery - also known as camp. Camp's virtue is that it is impervious to criticism. It validates the lowering of expectations (it's only escapist fun) and protects against dissension (only killjoys could carp at escapist fun). The Bond cultists at my screening, with their cheery applause at "classic" moments, unconsciously patronise Bond. Worldwide, the giggles and hoots smack of guilty mass denial about the diminishing returns of an exhausted form.

And for two decades the Broccolis have utilised our camp response to legitimise their incredible slovenliness and timidity and hubris. They are too scared (after 19 films!) to play variations on their franchise's staples - on the Q scene, on the countdown scene, on the closing sexual joke - and too unblushingly lazy to tart up their long-outmoded chases. Under aerial attack, Bond is still flanked on either side by those two neat parallel lines of bullets. And those same gobsmacked passers-by still punctuate the pursuit, spilling their Chablis on their tablecloths. And still we go back for more. I'm afraid my favourite Fleming adaptation will remain Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Now, that was a car with gadgets.

GRAPHIC: Oh no, not the Turkey joke again: Pierce Brosnan and Sophie Marceau in 'The World is Not Enough'

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GRAPHIC: NOT SO FAST, MR BOND . . . BROSNAN GETS FRIENDLY WITH SOPHIE MARCEAU AND, LEFT, ROBERT CARLYLE AS THE EVIL RENARD Back

Times Newspapers Limited/Sunday Times (London)

Crime time

Pierce Brosnan is at his best in the latest Bond, says EDWARD PORTER. But what a pity that the baddies are bores and the traditional grand finale proves a damp squib

Dr Evil, where are you when we need you? The villain of the Austin Powers movies may be inept, but at least he lives up to his name. His desire for world domination is born of a firm belief in evil for evil's sake. He's a comic embodiment of what Coleridge saw in Iago: "motiveless malignity". With this in mind, I think it's high time he was relieved of his duties as Austin Powers's arch-nemesis and fixed up with a new foe: James Bond.

This is exactly the shot in the arm the Bond films require, for in the world of 007, Dr Evil's brand of pure, idealistic wrongdoing is in woefully short supply. Among today's Bond villains, the fashion is for highly motivated malignity. And their favourite motive is the dullest of the lot: the profit motive.

Two years ago, we had Tomorrow Never Dies, where the baddie was a media mogul who tried covertly to engineer an international war to sell more newspapers. But what was the big picture? Had he tainted his tabloids with an undetectable poison that would infect readers through their fingers and thumbs? Nope. He just wanted to sell more papers. Oh well, I suppose a guy's got to earn a living. Gone are the days when any aspiring evil-doer could apply for a grant from Spectre.

Things are much the same in the new Bond movie, The World Is Not Enough, Pierce Brosnan's third film as 007. This time there is more than one villain, and they want control of a long-distance pipeline that is to be a crucial conduit for the West's oil supply in the next century. And what do they plan to do with it, once it's in their nefarious hands? Use it to send a tidal wave of toxic chemicals sloshing into the heart of Europe? Not likely. The film's dastardly ne'er-do-wells have simply worked out that, if you own a vital oil pipeline, you become a key player on the global economic stage.

You can't blame today's Bond movies for trying to acknowledge the realities of contemporary commerce. In the era of Bill Gates, it's hard to ignore the fact that there are easier ways of achieving world domination than by living in a hollowed-out volcano, hatching elaborate terrorist plans as you stroke your cat. None of the Brosnan Bond films, however, has managed a persuasive balance between realism and fantasy - the demands of the former always drag down the flights of the latter.

Certainly, the title of The World Is Not Enough, which seems to promise gloriously hubristic megalomania, is left sounding pretty hollow. The world is evidently quite enough for the film's pragmatic crooks. But then this is a movie that specialises in promising more than it delivers. Although the bad guys turn out to be a boring bunch, there was a time, early on, when I had high hopes for one of them: a brutish killer played by Robert Carlyle. Admittedly, he lacks the elegance of a classic Bond villain - with his scarred face, his crew cut and his shell suit, he looks more like a football hooligan - but he does have quite a cool name, Renard, and, in the opening scenes, we hear great things about him. Apparently, he's got a bullet lodged in his brain that will, in the near future, kill him. In the meantime, though, it merely keeps him from feeling physical sensations, including pain. So here's a man who has very little to lose in a fight, because his days are already numbered and his limbs are already numb. Bodes rather well, doesn't it?

But, out of the blue, the film starts feeling sorry for him, pitying his zombieish existence. Having been introduced as someone unafraid of death, he becomes someone who secretly longs for the grave. If this world is not enough for Renard, it's because he yearns for the next. And what use is a Bond villain who wants to play Hamlet?

To make matters worse, none of the villains has a proper headquarters, with banks of computers and henchmen in boiler suits. Since Bond films traditionally set their final scenes in the baddie's lair, this one is forced to find a different location, which brings us to another anticlimax. The big, action-packed denouement takes place in... a submarine. Big deal. Over the years, various Bond films have started in subs, but always as a prelude to more glamorous scenarios. Ending a Bond movie in a submarine represents a serious failure of imagination.

Then again, it does provide an apt finale from a visual-design point of view. What could be more cramped than the interior of a sub? And what, therefore, could be more suitable for the end of a movie in which so many of the interiors have felt cluttered and hemmed-in? Even the obligatory casino scene appears to have been staged in someone's front room. And the story line is just as congested, with too many short, disjointed scenes crammed back-to-back. I know Bond is at his best in a tight spot, but this is ridiculous.

All the same, Bond is indeed at his best. Or, at least, Brosnan is: he has never looked more comfortable in the role - though I do think he should chat to the screenwriters about all the rude things they keep shoving in his mouth. I refer, of course, to Bond's double entendres. I know these are a time-honoured trademark, and Brosnan certainly delivers his saucy one-liners with expert timing, but nothing else in his performance suggests that his 007 - a linen-suited modern man - would actually crack such lecherous gags. Yet the script is so full of them, you could be watching Carry On Spying. Still, this is a small quibble and, like I said, Brosnan looks the part. His hair is shorter than before, as is his temper - two small developments that do a lot to convince us that this Bond means business.

And, sure enough, 007 saves the day. But Brosnan's best efforts cannot rescue this poorly conceived film. It is the worst Bond movie he has starred in. Bring on Dr Evil.

The World Is Not Enough (128 mins, 12)

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The Scotsman

by Jolyon White

The world is not enough Director: Michael Apted

Stars: Pierce Brosnan, Robert Carlyle, Denise Richards (15)

Since his Nineties revival James Bond has been looking around to see how he should fit in. With GoldenEye it was a sort of retro Sixties camp that was the tentative order of the day. Tomorrow Never Dies relied on a compilation of favourite Bond moments, sewn together around the warped intentions of a crazed media mogul's ego.

Third time out and Brosnan's cocksure agent is moving faster than before, in keeping with these chaotic times. Up at the crack of dawn, flying to the middle of the Azerbaijan desert, shootouts before lunch then back to confront seductive Sophie Marceau for afternoon tea. Director Michael Apted said they were going for a Die Hard feel and they've got it.

This travels at such a lick you sometimes wonder what the heck is happening.

Complications deepen with a cunning uprooting of our expectations.

Gone are the days when a fiendishly clever plan for world domination is flippantly explained before a (failed) nasty end for our hero. Scriptwriters Neal Purves and Robert Wade turn the plot this way and that, not always clearly, but cleverly. Despite the pace there's also time for burgeoning relationships and feelings. It's as though Timothy Dalton was on to something. Brosnan grits his teeth and wiggles the muscles around at the back of his jaw - it's uncertainty.

Of course, there are some elements you can always rely on. The trio of Bond girls are as ridiculously gorgeous as Brosnan is smarmy.

Marceau gives the story a spine; Richards, despite her cerebral occupation - nuclear physicist - runs around like Lara Croft, complete with tank top, boots and animated charisma. Her daft name, Christmas Jones, gives licence to appalling puns. Il Postino's Maria Grazia Cucinotta initiates the trademark opening which is more outrageous and sophisticated than ever before.

And, as expected, Robert Carlyle does the business in the East European villain role. Scarred like Blofeld, 'ard like Begbie and as unflinching as Oddjob he gets the accent down a lot better than Robbie Coltrane. But then his Russian mafioso is funnier than the wee fella.

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Times Newspapers Limited/The Times (London)

The World Is Not Enough

(12, Michael Apted, 1999, 128 mins)

THE FINAL outing of the 20th century for 007 opens with a hair-raising sequence at the Millennium Dome, but its essential ingredients remain loyal to Ian Fleming's blueprint. Pierce Brosnan (above) is resolutely suave and quip-happy as MI6's finest, with crazed opposition this time supplied by Robert Carlyle as a pain-shunning super-anarchist. The rest of the casting is spot on, aside from an absurd turn by Denise Richards (above) as pneumatic scientist Christmas Jones. Sophie Marceau is mesmerising as an oil magnate's daughter, Robbie Coltrane reprises his Goldeneye role as Russian mogul Valentin Zukovsky and John Cleese is introduced as R, sardonic successor to Desmond Llewelyn's departing Q. The procession of stunts culminates with a sub-aquatic Istanbul finale: cue the inevitable gags about "having Christmas in Turkey". Slick, fun and daft, just as all self-respecting Bond movies should be.

LICENSED TO BOOB; BOND MISSES TARGET IN NEW MOVIE

SECRET agent James Bond may well have a Licence To Kill.

But the hard-hitting spy, codenamed 007, does not know how to use his gun!

Bond - played by Irish heartthrob Pierce Brosnan - makes a potentially deadly mistake in new blockbuster The World Is Not Enough while holding a Russian bad guy at gunpoint.

For the hero leaves the pistol uncocked - meaning it would not fire even if he pulled the trigger.

Last night, film fan Ian Simpson said: "This guy is supposed to have a licence to kill.

"You would think he would know how to handle a gun."

Bond's amazing gun blunder is just one of many cock-ups spotted by eagle-eyed addicts while watching the latest blockbuster - currently topping the UK's film charts.

During the final scenes, spy-boss 'M' - Dame Judi Dench - tracks her top agent down by satellite to his hotel bed in Turkey after spotting his car parked nearby.

But his BMW supercar had been cut in half earlier by a helicopter carrying a huge saw.

Bond addict Simpson added: "The bloopers don't spoil the film, but fans love to spot them."

The sharp-eyed buffs also spotted a tribute to the first 'M' - actor Bernard Lee whose portrait is hanging in his successor's office.

007'S CLANGERS

OTHER Bond bloopers include:

During a ski-chase, where Bond and Elektra King - played by Sophie Marceau - try to escape airborne assassins, it snows, then it's sunny and cloudless and then it snows again.

Bond's tie is skewed to his right during a confrontation with boss 'M'. When the camera shows him just seconds later, it's skewed to the left.

Elektra King takes off her earring to show 007 her mutilated ear - it magically reappears in the next scene.

Russian troops use American-made M16 machine-guns during action sequences.

A railing near the Millennium Dome is bent out of shape before a boat, piloted by gorgeous villainess The Cigar Girl, hits it.

Bond and Dr Christmas Jones manage to unscrew a nuclear bomb casing with no tools - after saying that the screwheads are stripped.

And oil billionairess Elektra picks a hat off a table - in the next shot, it's back on the table and she picks it up again.

GRAPHIC: FIERCE PIERCE: But his weapon won't do any damage

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THE NAME IS BOND ... MORTGAGE BOND

MOVIE OF THE WEEK:
THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, directed by Michael Apted

WITH its over-complicated plot, weak puns and forgettable title song, The World is not Enough needed something extra special in the stunt department if it was not to disappoint James Bond fans.

Spectacular chases have always been a staple in the series and, on this score at least, the latest 007 film lives up to expectations. It must be difficult to find novel ways for the screens favourite secret agent to chase or be chased and the obvious solution is to use new locations and vehicles, both of which are in evidence here.

The opening sequence is placed in Bilboa with the Guggenheim Museum in the background as Bond (Pierce Brosnan) experiences for himself the care Swiss bankers take to protect their clients interests. The film then shifts to London where the Millennium Dome gazes down on a powerboat race and up at a balloon as Bond tries to capture an anonymous nemesis. It could be said that the rot sets in at this point because the song sung by Garbage comes in over the credits and all the familiar trademarks get yet another airing.

However, The World is not Enough differs from its predecessors in that its villains are more complex and less clear-cut. For instance, it is almost possible to sympathise with Renard (Robert Carlyle) because an assassination attempt by one of Bonds colleagues has left him with a bullet lodged in his head, the result of which is a truncated life-expectancy characterised by a gradual loss of his senses, including the capacity to feel pain.

Brosnan brings some well-dressed detachment to his portrayal of a spy who is not quite as reckless, impulsive or hedonistic as he has been in the past. There is an air of weariness about Brosnans interpretation: still the picture of debonair elegance, he nonetheless appears to be going through the motions, as if too preoccupied with his own problems to have to worry about saving the world for the 19th time.

The story has to be seen to be disbelieved: the principal interest lies, instead, in the gadgets, explosions, gunfights and ingenuity, all of which are present in impressive quantities. Those looking for deeper meanings will have to search elsewhere and might find the changes to the tested formula cosmetic yet significant, if only in terms of the path future productions may take.

For example, M, played again by Judi Dench, is allowed to escape both her office and her disapproving stance when she displays her own resourcefulness in the field. Q (Desmond Llewelyn) has prepared for his overdue retirement by acquiring a successor in John Cleese whose performance does not bode well for the next few movies. The fleshpots of the West have been replaced by such fun spots as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and, as if it did not have enough on its shifting plates, Turkey.

Glamour and intrigue are provided by Sophie Marceau as Elektra King, Serena Scott Thomas as Dr Molly Warmflash and Denise Richards as an unlikely nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones. All have some bearing on the plot or serve the important purpose of providing the scriptwriters with contrived opportunities for poor and sexist jokes.

David Arnolds music makes intelligent use of Monty Normans Bond theme while adding some class of his own. And, for a director noted for earnest, non-action movies, Michael Apted does a commendable, if not particularly inspired, job.

The placing of commercial products is not as blatant as it has been of late the last two adventures owed so much to sponsors that their hero could have been called James Mortgage.

Despite its faults, The World is not Enough manages to keep the entertainment flowing and tension high. Certainly not the best of the Bonds yet hardly a disgrace to the long-running franchise, it keeps the series alive and indicates where 007 may go in the next century.

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by PETER SMITH

BY GOD, he's good. Very good. But he's not Sean Connery -- Pierce Brosnan, I mean.

So, you've guessed it. I've been to see the latest Bond movie, The World Is Not Enough, which is explosive, sensational, and will lift the hearts of all Bond fanatics.

It's only the sixth movie I've been to in 13 years in Canada, as I'm a very selective movie-goer, but this time I was inspired by a stamp.

As you can see here, someone in the post office on the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean must be a greater fan of Bond than even I am, as they persuaded their stamp committee to issue this great souvenir sheet.

Madagascar? I doubt the film's actually showed there yet, and for all my researches into the background I can't find any record of them filming any of the scenes in Madagascar High Street, but I'm glad they did it.

I know the star of this souvenir sheet, the one featured in the stamp itself, is Sophie Marceau, who plays a sensuous woman character called Elektra in the film, and who spends most of the time in or out of very flimsy clothing displaying a marvellous suntan.

But for those of us who have close affinities to Bond, it's the men on the sheet who are important.

"What do you mean," I hear you ask, "those of us who have close affinities to Bond."

Well, I have.

It actually wasn't me who first noticed it. It was others who brought it to my attention.

It started one day in a rather un-Bond-like setting, actually the take-out section of my local Swiss Chalet, when a total stranger took one look at me and said: "You know, you look just like Sean Connery." "That's funny, I'm ordering Double-O-Chicken legs, as it happens," I replied, dropping in a throw-away one-liner, in the ilk of my hero.

And it happened several more times. People kept taking me for Sean Connery.

The best was in Salt Lake City.

As I went to book into my hotel there on a mission to cover a murder story, two young blond starlets were manning the reception desk, and started staring at me. Actually, one saw me first, flushed as if she'd seen a film-star and nudged her friend, who looked. They looked at each other, and both immediately asked: "Can I help you, sir?"

I mean, when do you ever have two hotel receptionists drop everything and rush to be the first to accommodate you?

When they heard my impeccable British accent, that did it. Convinced, they were. James Bond, no, let's get this right, Sean Connery was at their front desk.

I'm not exactly sure what it was that gave the game away that I wasn't Sean Connery, after all, I asked them to have a drink sent up to my room -- bring it up yourself, I offered, already lapsing into Bond-like daydreams -- and I told them I wanted it shaken not stirred, I got that bit right. But asking for a pint of English beer could have been the give-away.

Even after I came clean and told them, "the name's Smith, Peter Smith, licensed to write stamp columns" they still shook their heads in disbelief.

"You should do Sean Connery lookalike spots on television," said one of them -- she was my favourite -- but I've never pursued it.

So that's why this souvenir sheet is so perfectly right.

I know Sophie's the main star, and Pierce Brosnan's there, and Roger Moore's there, and the car, and the motorcycle and the helicopter, but who's at the top, in his rightful place.

Sean Connery, no less, and what do you notice?

He's got the biggest gun. Of course.

GRAPHIC: 1. stamps courtesy Amanda's Topicals 2. 2 photos LOOKALIKES? ... Peter Smith, right, often gets told he looks like his favourite Bond -- Sean Connery.

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World Is Not Enough poster is too much

''To my regret, it is forbidden in our country to depict on billboards a girl dressed in a sleeveless top or in any way touching a man,'' said Ben Kalifi of Globus Group, the film's promoters. ''It is unbelievable that in a free country, we are forced to live as if in Iran.''

The latest Bond film opened in Israel Thursday at a record 33 cinemas. Ultra-Orthodox Jews have an understanding with advertisers banning billboards featuring " inappropriately dressed" women, or depicting physical contact between men and women.

GRAPHIC: CP Color Photo: Reuters / You had to be quick to see the original posters used in Israel for the new James Bond movie The World is Not Enough. The original posters brought protests from ultra-orthodox Jews who said they were too sexy with co-star Sophie Marceau in a sleeveless evening gown leaning against star Pierce Brosnan. So the posters were altered to add long sleeves to Marceau's dress and partially obscure her behind Brosnan's gun.

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The Korea Herald

Pierce Brosnan gives new James Bond human touch

The new James Bond movie, "The World Is Not Enough," has everything one expects from the series: the gadgets, the gunfights, the girls.

But Pierce Brosnan, who plays the lead in the film, told reporters on Tuesday at the Shilla Hotel that it also features a more human Bond than its predecessors did.

"For me it's making him real," said Brosnan, who also played the British spy in the series' last two installments. "To make him human without taking away the mystery of the man or the myth of the character. It's a balancing act."

While Brosnan may have added a human touch to his Bond, he said that the character's fundamental rakishness is still intact. Bond still knows how to have a good time while he's fighting international terrorism and taking down megalomaniacal villains.

"I think the boozing is still there and the womanizing is still there," he said. "I don't smoke. That's the only difference."

And while The World's story, set before the topical backdrop of a Caspian oil pipeline, may be a bit more sophisticated than the previous film's, Brosnan said this installment also respects another key to the series' success - the Bond girls. "Women. Just get women in there. Get as many as you possibly can," he said. He said there's a woman in The World for every male appetite:
a spunky Denise Richards, a sophisticated Sophie Marceau, and a seasoned Dame Judi Dench. "You have the ultimate Bond babe in Dame Judi Dench," Brosnan said.

But it's character development that he said he wants to stay focussed on the next time he appears as Bond. "I would like to build on what we just made in this movie. The characters in this movie and the story in this movie," he said.

Right now, however, Brosnan said he's still exhausted from making The World and wouldn't want to start a new Bond film for another three years. In the meantime, he said he plans to work on films through his own production company, Irish Dream Time, which most recently released The Thomas Crown Affair. He said he also wants to try out some other dramatic roles during his break from being Bond. Although he said he likes the broad creative control he has as a producer, he said he still sees himself primarily as an actor, a career that he began on the stage in Britain. "First and foremost I'm an actor," he said. "That's what I am."

But he said one thing he's not is similar to his character Bond.

"I do not want to live like James Bond, nor do I live like James Bond. I hate gadgets. I like to live as simply as possible," he said. "It's me pretending to be James Bond."

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International Herald Tribune

The World Is Not Enough Movie Guide

He shows signs of emotion, cuts back on the lame puns and makes lifelike conversation with fellow characters. Should he ever stop posing mannequin-like with left hand in trouser pocket, or engage in a clinch without appearing to be promoting his wristwatch, Brosnan's Bond will have entered the land of the living. This latest film, which evokes its jolliest laugh when Bond tries to work the title phrase into a conversation, seems to be populated by more noticeable people all around. Back at initial-filled headquarters, M (Judi Dench) takes a more active role in this story, while the delightful Q (Desmond Llewelyn) is now made even more so by John Cleese's R. Both men are suitably aghast whenever Bond runs off with their newly designed equipment and treats it as if he were a teenager who shouldn't have borrowed the car. The film is off to the races with its obligatory high-octane opening. This year's model features the Frank Gehry-designed museum in Bilbao, Spain, an amphibious chase through London and a hot-air balloon. And it pits Bond against a woman in tight red leather who drives a speedboat while shooting a machine gun.

(Question: Isn't it difficult to do both?) The chase ends tragically, with a cryptic line of dialogue.

(Question: Will anyone know what her problem was when the movie is over?) Still trawling for plausible villains, ''The World Is Not Enough'' pits Bond against Renard (Robert Carlyle), a rabid anticapitalist terrorist who has a bullet in his head.

(Question: Is the large, mobile, computer-generated hologram of Renard's skull and brain more interesting than the actual character?) Renard was once the kidnapper of beautiful Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), whose beloved father (note her first name) is blown up before this film's opening credits. The plot, which often sends the audience into a pleasant fog while big machines and deadly weapons are thrown around, involves the struggle over an oil pipeline (with Robbie Coltrane as an amusing Russian gangster) and sends postcards from places as diverse as Scotland and central Asia.

(Question: Is it easy to rent a shiny new BMW if you're in Azerbaijan? It is if you're James Bond.)

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The Mirror

WHICH STAR'S THE BIGGEST DRAW? CELEBS PEN CARDS FOR CHARITY SALE

Stars ranging from pop diva Geri Halliwell to actress Felicity Kendal drew these colourful postcards for a charity auction.

Proceeds from the "sale" to be held at Harrods on December 14 will go to cancer support groups the Lavender Trust and Gilda's Club, whose patron is Bond star Pierce Brosnan. Brosnan's wife Cassie, 41, died from ovarian cancer in 1991.

Gilda's Club chairman Paula Reed says: "Some of the messages on thecards seem inspired by personal experience - they are so touching."

Other famous contributors to the auction - which is expected to raise pounds 30,000 - include Jane Horrocks, Liza Tarbuck and girl band Thunderbugs.

Hearts and lipstick from Emma Forbes host of BBC1 daytime show The Club. Jane Vaughan of girl band Thunderbugs went for a colourful, modern art design. TV presenter Lorraine Kelly signed hers "peace and love" and included a poppy. Encouraging words from soap star Nicola Charles. TV girl Philippa Forrester drew on a photo of herself. Thoughtful Big Breakfast presenter Liza Tarbuck even left space for greetings. Actress Liza Goddard showed off her artistic side with a pen and ink drawing. A kiss from The Good Life star Felicity Kendal, who lost her sister to cancer.

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The Mirror

DEAR JO READERS'S LETTERS: I SPY THE NEW OO7

He is the closest the producers have come to how Ian Fleming intended his hero.

And when Pierce calls it a day, I think Ewan McGregor would be a good choice as his replacement.

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The Times (London)

Pierce Brosnan

PIERCE BROSNAN is leading a campaign to clean up the Thames. Brosnan, who will have helped to soil the waters when he filmed a giddy speedboat race on the river for The World is Not Enough, his latest outing as Bond, has agreed to wear a concerned expression on behalf of Thames 21. The environmental group, which deploys volunteers to remove bobbing jetsam from the murk, has enrolled Brosnan to lobby on its behalf. Naturally, he drew the line when it was suggested he might don his waders and join the troops.

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The Evening Standard (London)/December 1, 1999

The world's superstars seem to enjoy hanging out in each other's houses. Brad Pitt, who is currently filming Diamonds, the follow up to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and his girlfriend Jennifer Aniston, (pictured together, left), are renting Sting's house in The Grove, Highgate's most beautiful terrace of Georgian houses.

Sting's previous tenant was Pierce Brosnan, who used it during the filming of the new James Bond. The rent for such a house would be at least £5,000 a week.

Actor Iain Glen (Nicole Kidman's costar in last year's sellout play, The Blue Room), and his wife, actress Susannah Harker, have bought a house close to Dulwich Village, in a road where similar houses sell for around £450,000.

When local estate agent Chris Husson-Martin, at Wates, asked if it was true that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman had also bought in south London's favourite village, Glen responded that the story was "rubbish". The wild child of Irish pop, Sinead O'Connor (right), is moving to the United States and is rumoured to be selling her 1930s home of two years on the Holly Lodge Estate in Highgate for about £1.4 million. She spent a fortune on the house but after fighting a bitter custody battle with former partner, pop journalist John Waters, over their child, Roisin, the house may have lost its charm for her.

It was a bittersweet symphony for Winkworth's Hammersmith office as The Verve's lead singer Richard Ashcroft, with a budget said to be £2 million, has called off his search for a house in W6 or W14. The gardens were all too small.

The extremely design-conscious Bob Geldof (right), who got his friend Roger Saul, of Mulberry, to design his £600,000 apartment overlooking Battersea Park, may be on the move. He has been four times to see a spectacular penthouse in the classy all-glass development, Parliament View, with sweeping views of the river and Big Ben, just south of Lambeth Bridge.

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VARIETY

The Pierce Brosnan starrer nabbed $ 2.4 million in four days on 320 in Australia (including previews), the fifth-best non-holiday opening, and $ 492,000 in three days on 82 in South Africa, an all-time industry best beating "Star Wars: Episode I --- The Phantom Menace."

Israel's $ 257,000 on 34 was UIP's second-highest entry ever there behind "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," while Hungar ponied up $ 151,000 on 28. The seven-territory cume raced to $ 15.3 million after a $ 13.1 million weekend.

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Och, make way

Getting nasty. Face it- good guys are boring, especially for actors wanting to get their teeth into a role. That's why the trend of casting Scots as baddies is only to be encouraged, says Brian Pendreigh. The role of James Bond has been passed round the home nations in turn like a sports trophy. Bond has been played on film by a Scot, an Englishman, a Welshman, and an Irishman, with an Australian attempt to muscle in on the action proving short-lived.

It began with a Scotsman of course, which was appropriate as Ian Fleming made it clear in the novel On Her Majesty's Secret Service that Bond's father was Scottish. But it has taken another 37 years for a Scot to land the role of principal villain. "I would have done it for nothing," says Robert Carlyle, who goes head to head with Pierce Brosnan, as the ice-cold killer Renard, in The World is Not Enough. "I used to go to see the James Bond films with my father in the sixties and early seventies, and Connery was the only Scottish actor who sounded like me. So that link between Connery, Bond, and Scots is fundamental."

Renard feels neither pain nor fear, because of a bullet which is lodged in his brain and is slowly killing him. Already test audiences have acclaimed him the best Bond villain ever, praise indeed considering the competition from the likes of Goldfinger, Oddjob, and Dr No.

Although Carlyle is the first Scot to play lead baddie, Alan Cumming and Robbie Coltrane did appear as minor Russian villains in Goldeneye. While Cumming's computer geek came to a sticky end, Coltrane's gangster Valentin Zukovsky continues his uneasy relationship with the world's greatest secret agent in the new film.

"Scotland is very fashionable at the moment and people want fashionable actors in their movies," says Graham Rye, president of the James Bond 007 International Fan Club and Archive. Carlyle is already familiar to international audiences through The Full Monty and Trainspotting, in which he played the psychopathic Francis Begbie.

However Carlyle, like Cumming and Coltrane before him, is playing a foreigner. Although we may see a Scottish actor as a Bond villain, Rye doubts we will ever see a Scottish character in that role. "There's still this idea that the villain has to be Johnny Foreigner," he says. You need only look at the roll of dishonour - Ernst Stravro Blofeld and Rosa Klebb, Kananga, and Scaramanga - to realise these guys would not score well on the old cricket test.

There was a Scottish villain in the novel Licence Renewed, the first in the series written by John Gardner after Fleming's death. The main villain is the maverick nuclear physicist Anton Murik, Laird of Mulcady, and his right-hand man is an overdeveloped thug who rejoices in the name of Caber.

But Rye thinks that on film, Bond fans will forever associate Scottish accents with Sean Connery.

Elsewhere, Scottish villains are being allowed to show their true colours. In the ill-fated Avengers movie, Connery played a baddie who might well have escaped from one of the wackier Bond movies. Sir August De Wynter, complete with kilt and feathered bonnet, attempts to hold the world to ransom by controlling the weather. James Bond may not have faced a Scottish villain, but his groovy alter ego, Austin Powers, encountered the species earlier this year in the smash hit The Spy Who Shagged Me. As well as playing the hero, Mike Myers plays the villain Dr Evil and his ungroovy, kilted Scottish sidekick Fat Bastard. Myers is Canadian, but has Scottish relatives and grew up on a diet of British TV shows. Back in 1993, he played a mad old Scotsman in So I Married an Axe Murderer, zooming in on the distinctive mix of humour and incipient violence with lines like: "Kiss your mother or I'll tear your lungs out."

He took his celebration of Scotland to new levels with the creation of the 30 -stone monstrosity Fat Bastard. The character contributed significantly to a new standard in cinema grossness, refusing to flush the toilet and sharing a bedroom scene with Heather Graham.

But one of the biggest surprises of the summer was the appearance of a foul -mouthed Scottish bully in the exclusive American private school which provides the principal setting for the comedy Rushmore, with Bill Murray and Olivia Williams.

Stephen McCole plays Magnus Buchan with only a slight variation on the accent - and language - he used as the character who is turned into a fly in the film of Irvine Welsh's The Acid House. It is as if Francis Begbie has been stuck in short trousers and introduced to a meeting of the Dead Poets Society, a measure that could only have improved that film.

There seems no reason why the bully should be Scottish. But, on the other hand, there is no reason why not. Apparently, the writers just thought it would be cool to have a Scottish character in the film.

Scottish villainy is set to reach new levels next year with the release of Mission Impossible 2, in which Dougray Scott, who has been widely hailed as the new Ewan McGregor, co-stars with Tom Cruise.

Scott made his mark on Hollywood last year in the Cinderella film Ever After, but it was his turn as the bent cop in Twin Town that landed him the role of Cruise's adversary in the sequel to one of 1996's biggest hits. The production has been shrouded in secrecy and it remains to be seen whether Scott will be playing a Scot, or adopting some other accent for his nefarious deeds. It is a sign of Scotland's rising cinematic profile that both Scottish actors and Scottish characters are in such demand as villains these days.

GRAPHIC: Evil intent: Robert Carlyle, who plays the enemy Renard, in The World Is Not Enough has already emerged in test screenings as the best Bond villain ever;Mad, bad and fat: Dougray Scott, left, who is to play Tom Cruise's adversary in the sequel to Mission Impossible; Mike Myers as the hideous Fat Bastard in The Spy Who Shagged Me, centre, and as the crazy old Scotsman in So I Married an Axe Murderer, right. ;Fancy footwork: Sean Connery, as Sir August De Wynter, dances with Uma Thurman in The Avengers

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Around the world is not enough

Simon Askey, aged 26, of St Andrews, found himself tugging on the trouser leg of an Italian actress in a spectacular stunt sequence for the 5 million movie.

Simon, who works for aerial film company Flying Pictures, was called in to help with a sequence being filmed on the River Thames in April.

He was put in charge of a balloon built by world-renowned Bristol firm Cameron Balloons, which was part of a classic Bond chase scene.

Cameron Balloons hit the headlines earlier this year after its Breitling Orbiter 3 became the first balloon to complete a record-breaking round- the -world trip.

And to top off a thrilling brush with the high life, Simon and partner Hannah Cameron, daughter of balloon company founder Don Cameron, were invited to the glitzy London premiere of the film which featured Simon's name on the credits.

Simon said: "It was a brilliant experience. The actress escaping in the balloon, whose character was called Cigar Girl, didn't speak English, so she didn't know when to turn the burner on and off.

"To signal her, I had to crouch down in the bottom of the basket and tug her trouser leg when the order was given."

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The New York Times

Tall Ideas, Small Rooms (12 by 12 by 24 Inches)

CUTE can be sophisticated. At "Small Wonders X," an auction at Christie's on Monday, 15 miniature rooms by interior designers will be sold to benefit the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club in the Bronx.

Tim Button's room, "Seduction," is a homage to "The Thomas Crown Affair" -- but without people. When Mr. Button, of Stedila Design in Manhattan, saw the film, he liked the romantic moment with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo on a staircase. In his design, which like all of them is 12 by 12 by 24 inches, each object adds to the narrative. On the stairs, a tiny cat plays with a woman's evening slippers; on the floor, a box of roses lies open. "It's the remnants of an encounter," he said.

Mary Meehan, an interior designer, and Michael Tyson Murphy, a decorative painter, both of Manhattan, looked to Egypt for inspiration.

Mr. Murphy's "Folly on the Nile" is a recreation of a second century B.C. garden pavilion, a three-sided room with the fourth side left open to the river. A mural depicts lotus marshes with birds and fish. The furniture has gilt animal legs, like those of an ostrich, an ox and a lion. "A lot of the furniture was perfectly straight-legged," he said, "but for special pieces, they had animal feet as spiritual protectors."

Ms. Meehan plans to spend New Year's Eve in Egypt. So, her room, "On the Nile," celebrates her trip. "But it could be anywhere," she said. "It's Moorish in feeling." The room is painted with fake tile mosaics. Roses climb on the arches, and the furniture is covered in Indian silk.

The miniatures are on view at Christie's, 20 Rockefeller Plaza (49th Street), from Friday through Monday. Viewing hours: Friday, Saturday and Monday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m. Monday evening will begin at 6 with cocktails and "Big Wonders I," a silent auction of large things, like a black Shetland pony, a golden retriever puppy and two Lufthansa business-class tickets to any of 300 destinations. The main auction will begin at 8. Tickets to the evening are $100 or $150. Information: (718) 893-8600, ext. 245.

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The Scotsman Publications Ltd/The Scotsman

by Ken Houston

THE big hit with film fans at Scotland's latest multiplex cinema, Virgin in Edinburgh, is the new Bond movie, The World Is Not Enough, starring Pierce Brosnan as 007.

For some of us, however, Bond films will forever be associated with the first actor to play the part - Scotland's Sean Connery, who was born and brought up in the same mean streets where the new multiplex is located.

It is, therefore, perhaps fitting that this somewhat unlikely location should have been chosen, not just for Scotland's latest cinema but for a huge multifunctional entertainment complex as yet untried in this country. While not exactly Disney World, the scheme, called Fountainpark, is like nothing seen before north of the Border.

Fountainpark is the first of three such schemes planned for central Scotland - another in Edinburgh and one in Glasgow - and the only one to be completed so far. The developer, Scottish & Newcastle, has managed to race ahead, completing while the other two are still in the embryonic stages of construction.

The market has certainly given the scheme, constructed at a cost of GBP 28 million, the thumbs up because ownership has now passed to the leisure funding specialist, Marylebone Warwick Balfour, at a cost of GBP 42 million.

Scottish & Newcastle was particularly fortunate in its choice of site - a former brewery warehouse at Fountainbridge on the edge of the city centre. The rival Edinburgh scheme, Bondway's multiplex and leisure complex, is more centrally-situated but, this being Edinburgh, perhaps too central for its own good, as the location, at the top of Leith Walk, is part of a World Heritage Site. This has meant the familiar Edinburgh scenario of objections from the heritage lobby, leading not only to delays but, in this case, a complete rethink of the whole scheme.

In spite of the happenings two miles away in Dundee Street, where Fountainpark is situated, the Bondway team still insist that their scheme - multiplex anchored by Warner Village cinemas plus associated leisure plus hotel - is still going ahead.

"We are on course for opening in 2001 and the Fountainbridge scheme makes no difference to our plans," said Ali Lamb of the letting agent, Ryden. The likely operators of the hotel, he said, had been narrowed down to just two companies, while the hotel building itself is being reconfigured to form the top floor of the leisure building, partially to take advantage of the roof garden there.

Mr Lamb also insisted that the complex would be completed as one scheme - not in disjointed phases.

So that gives Fountainpark more than 18 months to establish itself before the Leith Walk scheme opens for business, although some observers believe that the two will happily co-exist and that those who suffer as a result will be existing cinema and other leisure operators in the city.

Fountainpark provides 228,000 sq ft of leisure space, 94 per cent of which is pre-let.

The facilities consist of a 3,000-seat, 13-screen Virgin cinema multiplex; two iWERKS 2D screens - one in the cinema and one providing the basis of a living history feature, "Shaping A Nation"; a nightclub (claimed to be Scotland's largest), health club with swimming pool, 18-lane megabowl and various restaurants. Two units remain, one of 20,000 sq ft and the other of 5,000 sq ft.

Perhaps one of the aspects of the scheme which so caught the eye of the investment market is the way in which the property is being made to work for more than 20 hours a day. "When we are fully up and running, Fountainpark will be operational from 6: 30 in the morning until 3 the next morning," said Mary Turner, centre manager. "Over 24 hours, Fountainpark changes as the profile of the visitors changes. The complex has been designed to encourage this - it is very much a family destination on a Saturday afternoon but a nightspot for Edinburgh's most fashionable on a Friday, for example."

"Fashionable" is not, however, an epithet one could give to the location, in spite of the dramatic sweep and clean lines of the architecture of the building. The site shares the immediate vicinity with a brewery, car spares business and various workshops, rather than department stores and offices.

However, pointing to the relative proximity of The Exchange office district, Claire Leven, of the letting agent, CB Hillier Parker, said: "As the office district expands it will eventually reach out to where Fountainpark is now." Fair enough, but this will be for future generations; describing the site as "city centre", as is currently the case, requires a wide stretch of the imagination. This means that what is otherwise an impressive, and, indeed, welcome addition to Edinburgh's entertainment scene does have an Achilles' heel: poor links by public transport. But the site's weakness on this score cannot be said of its position vis a vis the private car; its location adjacent to the West Approach Road will spread the natural catchment beyond the city to towns such as Livingston and Dunfermline, perhaps even as far away as Lanarkshire; this is a central Scotland complex rather than one for just Edinburgh alone.

The car park holds 870 cars and although there is a payment element, the developers insist that this is to discourage non-patrons of the complex using it for park-and-ride facilities.

Customers using the cinema, bowling alley or restaurants will receive a refund on their parking charges.

Meanwhile, another scene of leisure development is Aberdeen, where a cinema -anchored leisure scheme is to emerge on the site of the former ABC picture house in Union Street/Ship Row in the centre of the city.

The ABC will make way for The Lighthouse, a multiplex comprising seven theatres to be built in the "stadium" style, plus two restaurants or bars. The scheme is scheduled for completion in December next year.

Stewart Blair, chairman of the cinema development company, Spean Bridge, said: "We have planned 1,900 seats in total, including luxury reclining premium seats and the ever-popular loveseats. Each Spean Bridge cinema has a name and interior theme specific to the local surroundings and as Aberdeen is a key Scottish port, we decided to a maritime design would be highly appropriate.

Funding has been secured from the German investor, BHF Bank AG.

The developer will no doubt be encouraged by recent comment from the RICS that "there are still relatively few visits made to the cinema in Scotland so there is a potential for greater market penetration".

Although 1998 saw a fall in cinema attendences, the RICS notes that this was only the second decrease since 1984.

Admissions are expected to increase slowly throughout the UK, with the expectation that average attendances will increase from its 1997 level of 2.4

admissions per person per year to around 3.2 by 2007. However, cinema development itself is expected to slow after next year.

Odeon, which has a mixture of city centre and edge-of-town sites, is the market leader by box office and screens. Odeon had 19.5 per cent market share of audiences last year, followed by UCI (18.5 per cent), Warner (13 per cent) and Virgin (11.7 per cent).

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WENN/P

He says, "Gadgets hold no seduction for me. I write all my letters longhand and someone else deals with the computer.

"After GOLDENEYE they gave me a beautiful IBM computer which just sat there. After TOMORROW NEVER DIES they wanted to upgrade me. I had to dust off the first one before they gave me the second."

Brosnan then gave the new computer to one of his assistants. The hearthrob Irish actor also confesses to not being able to work a video recorder or fix his car.

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Behind James Bond's box office comeback. Ty Burr ponders the reasons 007 has shaken AND stirred audiences from Maine to California

Maybe it's an example of the Buddhist principle of karma as applied to American pop culture. Maybe it's a sign of premillennial exhaustion. And maybe, just maybe, it IS James Bond's world -- and we just live in it.

I'm trying really hard to figure out why a movie franchise that is 37 years old and that has been through five leading actors (no, not counting ''Casino Royale,'' but, yes, counting George Lazenby) still has enough muscle to break box office records. ''The World Is Not Enough,'' the latest bit of Bond-age, opened last weekend to a startling $35.5 million, the largest three-day take ever for its studio, MGM/UA, and the fastest opener for the series yet. This in a weekend that saw Tim Burton's ''Sleepy Hollow'' also gross more than $30 million.

My question is simple: Why? The Bond films have seemed pretty damned arthritic in the past decade, in terms of entertainment, relevance, and box office clout. The two Timothy Dalton vehicles, 1987's ''The Living Daylights'' and 1989's ''Licence To Kill'' were weak enough performers for many in the industry to predict the series' imminent demise, and while Pierce Brosnan's donning of the legendary tuxedo helped 1995's ''GoldenEye'' to a solid $26 million opening and 1997's ''Tomorrow Never Dies'' to $25 million, there was never the sense that Bond once more mattered to the pop-culture landscape -- that the movies were anything more than two hours of kitsch nostalgia.

Well, maybe that IS all they are. And maybe that's all we need as the 20th century draws to a close. Or, putting on the analyst's hat for a moment, maybe there are other factors at work here. Did adding Denise Richards to the cast -- who cares if she can't act her way out of a sack? -- bring in a teenage crowd that had spurned the previous two installments? Was ''Tomorrow Never Dies'' hurt at the box office two years ago only because it had the misfortune to open against ''Titanic''? Did ''The Thomas Crown Affair'' -- a huge and deserved hit that oozed 007 swank and placed Brosnan's weightless charisma in a new-but-not-so-new setting -- set the stage for a Bond revival?

It could be, of course, that the movie's really good. But that's beside the point -- and for the next few weekends to prove. Opening weekends, by contrast, are notable for what they say about what we WANT to like (or, when the marketing is strong enough, what we've been TOLD to like). Right now, it seems, we want to like James Bond. And it may not matter who's playing him.

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Century Newspapers Limited/Belfast News Letter

BIG SCREEN: THIS TIME BROSNAN WILL SAVE THE WORLD

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Midland Independent Newspapers/ Birmingham Post

ARTS: SLICK, FIT AND LICENSED TO THRILL;

by Mike Davies

When her oil tycoon father, a family friend of M, is ingeniously murdered, almost certainly involving someone in his organisation, Bond is assigned to protect his daughter, Elektra.

Her life, it appears, is in danger from Renard, the psycho chaos terrorist who once kidnapped her and who, thanks to a bullet burrowing its way through his brain, feels no pain.

And so an increasingly convoluted plot spins out to take in a stolen nuclear warhead, rival oil pipelines, a threat to destroy Istanbul and a narrative that conveniently requires visits to Turkey, Switzerland, the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, as the chess game of revenge, betrayal and power play unfolds.

The 19th official 007 movie, Pierce Brosnan's third, most confident outing in the role and it's all you'd expect. Sometimes more, occasionally less.

The set piece stunts - paragliders with guns, a boat chase, snowmobiles, skiing, submarine encounter - have all seen service in previous Bond movies, but they've rarely been quite as slick.

And, as promised with Michael Apted behind the camera, the plot to special effects ratio is rather more evenly balanced. It even actually feels like it was written as a story not as a series of set-pieces to be sewn together later.

There's a deepening of character too. For once you almost get an insight into Bond's insatiable sexual appetite and a psychological fall-out from his line of work.

And I promise you the ruthless killer persona Brosnan's brought back to the role has never been seen to more unexpected effect than here.

Judi Dench too has been allowed to flex her acting muscles, her role as M expanded, juicily woven into the guts of the storyline and given an emotional edge. In fact it's true to say that the ability to feel emotion, and to either act upon or deny it, is a key motif of the whole film.

There are disappointments. While one of the nastiest bad guys to grace a Bond movie in a while, Robert Carlyle isn't really given enough to do as Renard, which may explain why his accent occasionally lets slip the odd Celtic twinge. Still, better his than Robbie Coltrane's Russian as the returning Valentin, now out of the spy game and running his own casino and caviar factory.

Elsewhere, things sag somewhat in the mid-section. John Cleese's much-touted R is just another of his Basil Fawlty rehashes and even the most charitable would find it hard to describe Denise Richards' portrayal of nuclear scientist in hotpants Dr Christmas Jones as anything but perky, but poor. Still, the script does contrive to get her T-shirt wet. And there's always a final obvious pun on her name to look forward to.

The plus side is far more encouraging. The pre-credits sequence is easily the best and certainly the longest in any Bond movie yet. And - as if often not the case - is actually integral to the storyline. A run-in with a Swiss banker, an impromptu bungee escape, the tycoon's murder, a spectacular speedboat chase up the Thames (and through the streets), a hot air balloon and the Millennium Dome - some entire movies don't have this much action.

Sophie Marceau makes for a refreshingly three dimensional and suitably smouldering Elektra. Q bids a genuinely touching farewell, but not before providing plenty of the obligatory gadgets (there's also a very effective hologram briefing session bringing MI6 into the 21st century).

And of course you get the usual flirting with Miss Moneypenny and the obligatory one-liner innuendoes, delivered by Brosnan - it must be said with an increasing mastery of straight-faced tongue in cheek.

The credits sequence and the Garbage theme tune are pretty fine too. Pity most people will have left the cinema before Scott Walker's contribution starts to play. Oh, and best touch of all - the para-gliders Bond destroyed, they were on hire and had to be returned!

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Scottish Daily Record & Sunday Mail Ltd./Daily Record

ONE STAR IS NOT ENOUGH;

IT'S one of the year's most anticipated movies with a cast to die for. The new Bond film, The World Is Not Enough, which opens today, is a sure-fire box office smash.

The cast is led by Pierce Brosnan in his third outing as the super-cool secret agent.

Brosnan's Bond is rivalling that of even Sean Connery's 007 but these days the action-packed thriller doesn't have to rely on the charisma of its main character.

There are so many stars in the latest blockbuster, it can't fail to shine. We profile the main players. THE Irish star reckons he's finally made Bond his own.

"In this one, 007 is more relaxed," Pierce said. "It's more my own piece. If I don't know what the heck I'm doing by the third one, then I'll never know." Ironically, now that Pierce has finally bonded with Bond, he's not sure just how much longer he will play the ice-cool British agent.

Rumours are flying that the 46-year-old actor will walk away after he hits the big 5-0.

"I love playing James Bond and it's certainly turned my life around," he said.

But he warns that he may not be as everlasting as the legend of 007.

"One day I went to work, and my day's acting was swimming after a nuclear submarine," Pierce said.

He's keen to do more dramatic scenes but while Bond may be a world hero, no actor has ever been given an Oscar for bad puns and bedding leggy lovelies.

Other actors shy away from declaring an interest in an Oscar but Pierce makes no bones about his desire to be the Man with the Golden Gong. "Oh, I'd love to have one," he said. "I've grown up watching the damn Oscars, and whether you think it's a cattle market or whatever, it's great." Whether he wins the big prize or not, Pierce is already a winner when it comes to love. He's set to wed long-term girlfriend Keely Shaye-Smith next year. The couple have been together for six years and live in Malibu with their son, Dylan Thomas, two, and Brosnan's teenage son Sean.

A beaming Pierce said: "It's wonderful. It's like, 'Why didn't I do this sooner?

Dr CHRISTMAS JONES: DENISE RICHARDS EVEN Denise Richards admits that casting her as a nuclear physicist is stretching credibility just a wee bit.

But did she meet any real experts to prepare her for her role as rocket scientist? She rolls her eyes.

"It's Bond. As for the technical jargon that I have to say and the different things I have to do, welI, I just found out what everything meant. So when I was defusing the bomb, I knew which wire to cut. I didn't want to look like a complete idiot."

Denise, who starred in Starship Troopers, likes the banter between her character and Pierce's. "My character is sassy and there's great chemistry between her and Bond. I think there's a good relationship between the two," she said.

RENARD: ROBERT CARLYLE SCOTS actor Bobby Carlyle is the latest baddie trying to kill Bond.

And his Mr Nasty is the kind who doesn't feel pain. But taking the part had nothing to do with dosh, Bobby insists.

He has always wanted to "do a think I'm getting paid millions. That's just Fantasy Island," he said.

"It's an easy choice to do Bond. I've grown up with these films."

As Renard, Bobby sported a buzzcut, which raised royal eyebrows when he collected his OBE.

The Queen asked what he was doing at the moment. "I've spent the week trying to kill James Bond, ma'am," he said. Bond" and has been a fan since he saw Sean Connery in the films.

ELEKTRA KING: SOPHIE MARCEAU FRENCH star Sophie Marceau beat off stiff competition from Sharon Stone to play one of Brosnan's Bond babes.

Sophie, 32, was a hit at just 14 when she starred in the 1980 international hit La Boum.

Outside of France, she's just starting to taste the fame that she's enjoyed in her native land.

Her biggest picture to date is Braveheart when she played the French princess who falls in love with Mel Gibson's William Wallace.

And now she's delighted to have become a Bond babe at last because, even as a teenager, she was bitten by the Bond bug.

"I went with my mother twice to see Roger Moore as Bond. He was very popular when I was 15," she explained. "I just loved the Bond movies.

Q: DESMOND LLEWELYN SADLY, The World Is Not Enough seems to be bidding farewell to actor Desmond Llewelyn, who has played Bond's long-suffering boss Q in 17 of the 19 films.

If he decides to hand over the reins to John Cleese as his successor R, he has a bittersweet exit scene in The World Is Not Enough.

John, 60, has already signed on for three more pictures, but says Desmond, 85, is welcome to hang on as Q for as long as he wants.

When asked at the film's premiere if he would be back, Desmond said: "It's up to the Almighty."

But Desmond is already looking forward to working with John on Bond number 20.

"I think we're going to have great fun together in the next one," he beams.

VALENTIN ZUKOVSKY: ROBBIE COLTRANE FORMER Cracker star Robbie Coltrane first appeared in Pierce's debut Bond outing GoldenEye as the superscoundrel Valentin Zukovsky, head of the Russian Mafia.

And he says he was "flattered" to be invited back.

"It's a first, I think," he beamed.

This time, he and Bond form an uneasy alliance. But the main reason he signed up for a second outing was caviar. "I love the stuff. And Valentin is in charge of a caviar factory," he said.

Robbie should have been in seventh heaven for a scene where he is buried up to his neck in the stuff. But, of course, it's fake - a combination of sago pudding and ink.

He said: "It wasn't just disgusting to eat. It was also very cold to sit in." And the dye didn't just turn the goo black - when Robbie emerged, he was black from the neck down, too.

He had to be hosed down and to cap it all, it was his birthday. BULLION: GOLDIE WITH his tough-looking gold teeth, jungle star Goldie is just perfect to play a Bond bad guy.

Goldie plays Valentin Zurkovsky's driver Bul - short for Bullion.

But he had to be patient before he got his big break.

Rugby star Jonah Lomu was offered the part first, but turned it down.

Like Bond, Goldie has been linked with a number of beautiful and famous women

007: PIERCE BROSNAN including Bjork and Natalie Imbruglia.

Girlfriend Tracy has threatened that if rumours are true, she's licensed to kill him. But Goldie says he's happy and settled since the birth of their daughter, Chance.

Offscreen, the youngest Bond baddie is a real softie.

"I am a family man and I enjoy that side of life. People think I am some kind of philanderer," he said.

"I have been with Tracy for a long time, seven years, and she is the only woman for me."

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Evening Herald/Evening Herald (Plymouth)

Cool non-smoking action hero has come full circle

But don't worry, he's still the lean, mean and magnificent secret agent who likes his Martinis shaken, not stirred.

Pierce Brosnan's Bond is on another mission to save the world from evil megalomaniacs in The World Is Not Enough.

But this time Bond is a non-smoking modern thinker torn between duty and personal happiness.

In his latest outing Bond is assigned to protect the daughter of a murdered oil tycoon, Elektra King (Sophie Marceau).

He is drawn ever deeper into a relationship with her, even though she is a double-crossing villain out to destroy the world.

In a break with tradition, Bond is shown to be in love with her, even though she is the main villain.

He has also been given a modern makeover. Unlike previous incarnations, he no longer smokes and has a slightly more enlightened view of women than his 1960s character.

But despite the differences Bond remains, as ever, the sophisticated secret agent.

Graham Rye, president of the James Bond Fan Club, says: "In the World Is Not Enough, Bond has come full circle in many ways.

"In the 1960s he was a cool, sophisticated killer, in the 70s and 80s a gadget-happy stuntman. Now he has returned to being the super cool action hero he was always meant to be.

"The great thing about Bond is that little is known about his character, so, to a certain extent, it is easy to keep reinventing him without being disloyal to the original."

With the World Is Not Enough, Brosnan now has three Bond films under his belt. But will we still be watching 007 antics into the next millennium?

Director Michael Apted says: "James Bond keeps getting bigger and bigger. It's a fine balancing act. I believe we have achieved that balance."

Evening Herald/ Evening Herald (Plymouth)

New theory of evolution

128 minutes Cert 12

Director: Michael Apted

Stars: Pierce Brosnan; Sophie Marceau; Robert Carlyle.

WHAT'S happening in the world of that super smooth agent James Bond?

Slick special effects, take -your-breath-away action, state-of-the-art gadgetry and all the usual stuff is there just as we have come to expect. But increasingly there's something else too. Everything is going touchy-feely. Goodies and baddies all come complete with psychological motives and even the usually infallible M is shown to have human failings.

What's more, this Bond isn't a go-it-alone solo operator, dragging the conventional pretty girl in his wake. He's still undoubtedly the hero, but we see him in 'team briefings' and working with colleagues.

In fact in Darwinian terms, over the past few films, Bond has definitely been in a state of evolution, ready for the 21st Century, and it's not just the way the female roles have been beefed up. They are also going for just a little more depth.

It doesn't always work. Although she's the best actor on the screen, Judi Dench (Bond's boss M) doesn't convince with her new mother hen character. She's in a world of two dimensional figures and this particular rounding out doesn't convince.

Sophie Marceau as the leading lady doesn't do the business either. We are given a psycho-babble check-list for her, but it doesn't really check out.

And the villain, usually so rich a part for an actor, is underwritten. Robert Carlyle is nothing like as memorable here as he was playing bad boy Begbie in Trainspotting. That sounds like a load of gripes, but Bond can take it.

And there's plenty on the plus side, with an emphasis on character and plot. Welcome returns see Samantha Bond as Moneypenny and Robbie Coltrane as the dodgy Russian businessman while it looks like former Python John Cleese is being lined up to replace the obviously ageing but always-good -to-see Q.

This is the 19th outing for the world's most successful agent. The story-telling might not be straight forward and some of the action scenes might be overplayed (the caviar factory) but it's very good entertainment and on this showing there is still plenty of life in the 007 formula.

GRAPHIC: GIZMOS: Q (Desmond Llewellyn) still supplies the gadgetry

Evening Herald/ Evening Herald (Plymouth)

The agent with the soft centre

IT'S Bond as we have never seen him before - but don't make the fatal mistake of thinking the world's favourite agent has gone soft.

He's still licensed to thrill, it's just that Pierce Brosnan decided it's time we got to know the man behind the legend.

The new, vulnerable 'Bond for the Millennium' has evolved partly at the request of the man who is playing him for the third time, actor Pierce Brosnan.

The Irish -born star who appears alongside a host of familiar faces in The World Is Not Enough, including Dame Judi Dench, Robert Carlyle and Robbie Coltraine, felt Bond should be more human.

Brosnan, 42, said: "There's a nice progression with the character now. What interests me is what can go wrong with the man? What are his fears? He's fallible - if you read the books there is a man in there.

"If you go into the grey area of the character it gets more interesting as opposed to being a black and white cartoon character, as has been alluded to."

Fans needn't worry that our contract killer has gone completely soft. He may only be fighting a girl but the action scenes in this movie count for some of the most exciting and explosive ever.

The opening sequence alone features a spectacular chase along the River Thames, culminating in a dramatic shoot-out at the Millennium Dome.

The five minute scene cost 5 million dollars - the most expensive in Bond history - and an exhilarated Brosnan carried out most of the stunts himself.

He said: "The boat goes like the clappers. Sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night thinking, 'Oh my God! what on earth am I doing', but it was so exciting."

After three successful films, Brosnan has made the role of 007 his own now.

And he has a message for the likes of singer Robbie Williams and actor Jonny Lee Miller, who have been on record as possible successors to the Bond crown. He said: "They'll have to have patience. I did. I'm just getting the hang of it for heaven's sake, and I would like to do a fourth."

GRAPHIC: HEAT'S ON: Bond and trusty companion WHAT'S THIS EAR? Bond with Elektra King

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Guardian Newspapers Limited/The Guardian (London)

Looking for Richards;

Is this any way to run a career? For Denise Richards, the answer, clearly, is yes. In 1997, Richards was just another face in the teen-movie brat pack, jostling for column inches and screen time with the then-equally-unknown likes of Heather Graham, Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Love Hewitt. Today, two years and four movies later, Richards has distanced herself from the chasing pack, and is well on the road to becoming an honest-to-goodness movie star. Of the recent crop of Hollywood new-wavers, only Neve Campbell, her Wild Things co-star, is a serious rival to Richards' newly-found movie-world clout. As a case-study of making it in Hollywood, the Denise Richards experience is frightening to behold.

If nothing else, the new Bond movie and every cent of its $35,519,007 opening weekend take at the American box office is testament to that. As the relentless, all-pervasive marketing materials make blindingly clear, Richards is to be found perched on Pierce Brosnan's arm as the latest in the long line of semi-cheesecake Bond Girls. Her character is a nuclear physicist (yeah, right) named Christmas Jones. Racing around a weapons facility in a halter -neck cut-off; getting fetchingly drenched as a hijacked submarine scrapes along the sea floor; trading a few lines and trading a climactic clinch with the impeccably- suited super-spy Richards would seem a natural in the role.

Doing Bond, however, is a two-way street. It's actually something of a tribute to the resurgent power of the 007 franchise that it can attract a figure of such up-and-coming calibre. With one big-budget movie (Starship Troopers) and two snappy independents (Wild Things and Drop Dead Gorgeous) behind her, Richards is the kind of jealously guarded, machine tooled Hollywood starlet whose slightest twitch is the result of endless strategy sessions and career planning seminars. Bond Girls may occupy a fond place in the annals of coffee -table-book publishing, but there's no denying that, for most of the pack, a Bond movie was their place in the sun. Barbara Bach? Maryam d'Abo? Izabella Scorupco? Lois Chiles? Richards, surely, isn't headed for the bargain bin any time soon.

After the US premiere, The World is Not Enough roadshow hit London earlier this week; Richards was duly wheeled out for inspection. She took questions politely, and on the chin.

How did she feel about the curse of the Bond Girl? 'I never had any reservations about the role. I'm very flattered they wanted me to be part of their history. Obviously they're doing something right to be so successful this is their 19th film, and it's my job what I do afterwards.'

Didn't she wish she'd had more dialogue? Wouldn't it have been a little more rewarding than running around in a form-fitting T-shirt? 'It was fun. I knew what it was when I got into it. Everything I shot was there. I read the script and that's exactly what it was. I think it's the perfect thing: I come in at the right time, and I love how the relationship evolves, and the banter back and forth and I get him in the end.'

What was the strategic thinking behind her taking the role? 'Oh, it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up. I didn't over-think doing this. There was no question in my mind. It has allowed me so many opportunities, even to be part of the history of Bond. There's no movie like this. And if some people don't take me seriously because of this part, I'll prove them wrong with the next role I do. Michael Apted is such a phenomenal director, with the cast and everything, there was not a second thought in my mind whether to do this film.'

Was it a question of Hollywood politics, to get another $ 100m movie under her belt? 'I didn't think about the budget. I just thought what a great opportunity for me as an actress to have this director direct me and work with these actors. And be part of the history of Bond, and to allow opportunities to happen.'

It doesn't take a rocket scientist, or, indeed a nuclear physicist, to work out that Richards has graduated, magna cum laude, from the Hollywood charm school. More than anything, though, it becomes clear that the already-renowned cheekbones conceal a ferociously focused mind that's taken on board every lesson in actor-world diplomacy.

With Wild Things, for example, it 'was great that everything fell into place with John McNaughton directing it and working with Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon, Bill Murray, Neve Campbell'. She had 'a great experience with John'. She would 'definitely work with him again'. As far as Starship Troopers is concerned, she is 'glad that Paul hired me he's the one that really got my foot in the door'. As for her appearance on Seinfeld, back in 1993, when she had a bit part as the daughter of an NBC executive whose cleavage fatally distracts George's attention during a meeting: 'doing guest spots is a great way to meet producers and meet new people. It's a great learning experience. I've done a lot of guest spots, and it's a great way to build a resume'.

But don't take her word for it; let's turn to the professionals. John Papsidera, casting director for Richards's last movie, Drop Dead Gorgeous, is frankly slavering in his admiration for her commercial nous. 'She's in a really prime position. Bond is already a huge commercial success, and that's an incredible leg-up on the competition. There's a lot of girls in her age range who have done great independent movies, and stuff with smaller success but very few girls break through into big studio movies. That translates as being in the driver's seat in terms of going out and choosing projects.'

Papsidera has actually cast Richards in two movies he snagged her for the as -yet-unreleased Canadian indie Tail Lights Fade. 'The smart decision was to not go to something that was incredibly sexy, or had nudity, or dealt with sex in an overt manner. Because she did that on Wild Things. They made a concerted effort to find material that was based on interesting characters. Not just her look.'

Papsidera says Richards first popped up on his Hollywood radar 'maybe four years ago'. She'd have been 23 years old at the time, with a ragbag of TV appearances and movie bit parts to her name. Richards actually graduated from high school in San Diego in 1989, having done some modelling. ('It wasn't like I established myself as a model,' she says now, 'I just did it because I earned more money at it than at other high school jobs.') She started working the audition circuit shortly afterwards. Early jobs were spots as eye candy on shows like Saved by the Bell, Married with Children, and, of course, Seinfeld ('Get a good look, Costanza!').

The turning point, in hindsight, came when she auditioned for Showgirls for director Paul Verhoeven, who was already a legend for films such as Robocop and Total Recall. She didn't get a part 'To be honest, I don't know whether I'd have done it; as an actress at that level, you audition for everything' but Verhoeven saw something he liked, and called her in next time around when Starship Troopers came together. As a fresh face for the meat-grinder, Richards hardly distinguished herself but at least Verhoeven's movie did well by her, in sharp contrast to the luckless Elizabeth Berkley, whose then -burgeoning career was comprehensively derailed by Showgirls.

As if to underline her newly acquired status, Richards also accepted a one -line cameo ('Insert it in your clammy crevice, will you, Shannon?') in Gregg Araki's plasticky LA-scene angst drama Nowhere. A foretaste of the future, clearly, for Richards enlarged on the dirty-mouth/squeaky-clean combination for her as-yet-definitive role in Wild Things. Here, she played an ultra -devious rich kid whose first words are, naturally, 'Fuck off.' A pivotal courtroom scene, where she cuts loose and screams 'You skanky bitch!' at co -star Neve Campbell, is as fine a demonstration of Richards's comic abilities as she's yet offered. Drop Dead Gorgeous, in which she plays a murderous gun freak-cum-beauty pageant contestant, completes the set.

But as far as the man who cast her in that role is concerned, Richards's ascent to stardom is a triumph of meticulous planning. 'I believe it's a real team effort,' says Papsidera. 'Her agent, Chuck James at Gersh, has been an integral part of planning and designing the kind of projects that they want to target. What appealed to them for Drop Dead was the fact that it wasn't a studio thing, that it was a cool independent, that the role itself appealed to her.'

So far, so fine; Richards's career is generating its own momentum now, and could take her all the way. It can't hurt that her next movie, the already -completed The Third Wheel, will see her partnered with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon box-office dynamite if Hollywood ever knew it.

Does the responsibility of carrying such burdens keep her awake at night? She replies phlegmatically: 'I've been hired to be put in films that people expect to make money, so they obviously see something in me to put me in the film.'

Come again? 'I can't worry about the movie making money. I'm concerned with what I have to do.' Truth is so simple sometimes, it hurts.

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Guardian Newspapers Limited/ The Guardian (London)

You're stuck in the 50s, Mr Bond;

The World is Not Enough

Here he is, back again. Suavely manipulating preposterous gadgets and the dress zips of a million desirable women, James Bond is back in The World is Not Enough, starring Pierce Brosnan. And even now, at the very end of the millennium, for all the desperately flashy updating, Bond is still abjectly recognisable as Ian Fleming's creation of the 50s: a bizarre conflation of Sir Fitzroy Maclean and Hugh Hefner, and bearing about as much relation to the tatty, banal reality of espionage as Superman does to PC Plod. In the real world, the playground of British intelligence is not so much the Monte Carlo casino as the Kincora boys home. But you don't come to James Bond movies looking for the real world.

I am sorry to note, however, that the very last overt connection with Fleming appears to have been jettisoned: the picturesque convention whereby the villain addresses 007 by his rank as a Naval officer, as in: 'So Commander Bond, this is Sodium Pentothal, ze truth drug, so much more efficient zan zose archaic mezods of torture'

The 46-year-old Brosnan now looks pretty well dug into the role with his third outing as Bond, and I guess it is his face, gently ageing and cragging up, that we shall be looking at on billboards annually for the next few years. This is good news. Brosnan brings an intelligence and wit, together with a lightness, to the role his softly Celtic vowels pleasingly reminiscent of Sean along with a plausible virility Roger Moore never quite managed. And Pierce wears some beautifully tailored suits as to the manor born.

Here Bond is foiling an international terrorist plan by the sinister Renard (Robert Carlyle) to control the world's oil supplies by bombing all hell out of the pipeline in central Asia, if you please. But the 'plot' is by the by: there is no 'plot' in the normal sense. There is simply the visceral excitement of Monty Norman's fantastic James Bond theme tune at the beginning and in various funky remixes thereafter, the big stunt before the opening credits and then, well, a flat, undifferentiated sequence of crashes, explosions, quips, eyebrow-raisings and shags. In vulgar 'narrative' terms, the interest factor of each and every Bond movie plummets after the first 15 minutes. What counts is the quality of the villain, the set pieces, and the sex.

It's a mixed bag. For the villain, director Michael Apted has opted to split the role into two, or almost three. Robert Carlyle is an ice-cold, strangely charmless bad guy; the point being that he is supposed to have a bullet lodged in his brain that prevents him 'feeling'. He's obviously put in a smidgeon of time in make-up because one of his eyes is a bit lower than the other, but only a bit, and not the full Donald Pleasence gross-out effect. Rather tiresomely, this is because he's obviously supposed to be a bit sexy and cool, and gets to perform consenting sexual acts though presumably, erm, non -feeling ones with one of the Bond girls.

Robbie Coltrane is a persuasive sub- villain as a Russian club-owning rogue, Valentin Zukovsky, with the only witty lines. And, incredibly, Goldie gets to play a glowering heavy a performance of purest tropical hardwood, and everybody dissing poor Goldie like mad by taking the mick out of his gold Jaws -style teeth. Did Goldie realise quite what a prat he was going to look? I sense he will not welcome any more of these gags at his expense in the clubs.

And what of the actresses who have taken the one-way ticket to career palookaville as the Bond girls? Well, here is the real gem: Sophie Marceau, as glamorous oil heiress Elektra King, is terrific: sexy, stylish, with a really beautiful face entirely innocent of the cosmetic surgeon's art a claim I cannot confidently make for the (equally winsome) Denise Richards as nuclear scientist Dr Christmas Jones. Bond, naturally, has sex with them that weirdly dated, coy, Bollinger-by-the-bedside James Bond sex in which sheets are strategically draped over both participants, the function of which, I suspect, is to prevent us getting too clear a look at Mr Brosnan's substantial tits.

It is the settings and the stunts that disappoint. There are lots of gloomy, cloudy locations in boring places such as Azerbaijan and a 'high-speed' power -boat chase on the Thames that looks slow and damp, leaving Pierce drenched, like a grumpy step-dad persuaded against his will to get on a ride an Alton Towers. It just still looks so weirdly dated they're still clanging around in submarines, with bombs with diode timers, while Keanu Reeves and his younger generation are getting groovy and hi-tech in The Matrix.

Perhaps there will be a back-to-basics movement in Bond movies soon: Barbara Broccoli will abandon the spurious updating and just make them period pieces, set in the 50s, with BOAC flights and people playing tense games of contract bridge in Mayfair clubs before driving off in antique, open-top motors. Pending this revolution, though, there will be more of the same in the flashy, unreal production line: enjoyable Yuletide romps. And that's enough for me.

Newspaper Publishing PLC/The Independent (London)

THE BIG PICTURE: HANGING BY A THREAD

byAnthony Quinn

Garbage. That's the band performing the title song of the new James Bond movie, The World Is Not Enough, and as much a sign of the times as 007's recent switch from an Aston Martin to a flash Beamer. Such efforts to smarten up and get with it play rather uneasily in this regard, because so much of the Bond style, and its hero, remains an anachronism. It's like putting a Kangol beret on the Queen Mother, or Jeffrey Archer, come to that - the accents and accoutrements of today just look out of joint on people who belong definitively to The Past.

Bond is now an institution, and those charged with its upkeep seem torn between looking forward and harking back. Ever since Sean Connery donned that immaculate tux back in 1962 the series has been shaken, occasionally stirred but more often in danger of fossilising altogether. Yet it staggered on, and survived even the mid -Eighties wretchedness of Octopussy and A View To A Kill. Its fans know how close it has come to collapse; indeed, that might be part of the reason they're still fans. No matter how poor the last Bond movie, they can't wait for the next one. "James Bond Will Return" reads the familiar end title, but it's a promise that reflects more accurately on his publicity than his vitality.

The World Is Not Enough, the 19th in the series, begins in familiar fashion, its pre-credit sequence getting the picture off to a flyer. Gasp as Bond exits a bank, Halliburton suitcase in hand, from a 25th-floor balcony. Thrill as he leaps on a dinky black speedboat and gives chase to a fleeing assassin along the Thames. Cheer as he almost singlehandedly destroys the Millennium Dome in his efforts to find the boat a parking space. The breakneck pace of these first 15 minutes is pretty exciting, actually, and you can feel the audience willing it along.

Yet, once the sequence is over there's a strange feeling that the movie itself is over too. From this point you could write the producers' brief on the back of an envelope: one, dream up a villain whose evil and genius are in suitable proportion; two, stage a whole load of stunts that are more sensational than the ones in the previous Bond movie. That's it.

This time round 007 has to save the West's oil supply from an international terrorist named Renard (Robert Carlyle, who will never play anyone scarier than his Begbie in Trainspotting). Renard's distinguishing feature is a bullet lodged in his cerebral cortex, which makes it impossible for him to feel pain - just as well given the lines the scriptwriters have put in his mouth. How's this for starters: "Behold the wonder of the miracle of the fires that never die." That's worthy of a Spinal Tap lyric.

In order to snare his man James requires the help of oil heiress Elektra (Sophie Marceau) and, later, the technical expertise of nuclear weapons whizz Dr Christmas Jones (Denise Richards), who's dressed, like any serious scientist, in sports vest and hot pants. "Don't bother making any jokes about the name, I've heard them all," she tells Bond, who looks slightly chastened - but of course he can't resist, and eventually gets in a couple of swift Christmas gags before the credits roll. The audience whoops at them, dutifully.

This pull between the predictable - the girls, the gizmos, the wait-for- it punchlines - and the need to modernise, has induced a kind of schizophrenia in the film-makers, nowhere more apparent than in Bond himself.

Pierce Brosnan is athletic, decisive and preposterously debonair, and enjoys one great moment here when, having plunged under water, he briefly but unmistakably straightens his tie. Yet why does he seem to inhabit a different era from the rest of the movie?

In GoldenEye, Brosnan's first outing as 007, M (Judi Dench) accused Bond of being "a sexist, misogynist dinosaur", a museum piece from the Cold War. She's more or less right. The film-makers are terrified of Bond seeming dated, but they allow him to do the usual gentleman-spy things like bed beautiful women, visit a casino, trash a lot of scenery and - a real hangover from the Sixties, this - save the planet from a nuclear catastrophe. Is there anything more wearisome in a Bond movie than the endgame spectacle of men in hard hats and orange boiler suits dashing in panic from the megalomaniac's underground HQ, prior to a humongous explosion?

The World Is Not Enough lulled me into a half-trance, as most Bond movies do, from which I emerged with eyes dazzled, ears ringing and heart untroubled. Doubtless I'll watch it all over again some Boxing Day in the not-too- distant. Is there anywhere for Bond to go but deeper into self-parody?

A friend of mine suggested that the best course now would be to set him in period, the Cold War, when Ian Fleming was writing the original novels. One might then recover their forgotten thrill of danger and sexiness, of skinny ties and properly blocked hats, when one could believe that a man with a Walther PPK and a taste for dry Martinis might actually save the world.

Walking With Dinosaurs must have been a lot of fun.

GRAPHIC: This time round Pierce Brosnan's Bond has to save the world from the villainous Renard

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The Irish Times/The Irish Times

Bond finally comes unstuck

The World Is Not Enough (PG) - General release

The current issue of Variety notes tantalisingly that Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino are among the film-makers who have expressed an interest in directing a James Bond movie. However, it goes on to quote an un-named industry insider as saying that "the very things that A-list directors would bring to Bond are the very things that just wouldn't be allowed by the guardians of the series".

That article is prompted by the view that the latest instalment in the 007 series, The World Is Not Enough - directed by Michael Apted - offers "numbing proof that the series has never truly been shaken, let alone stirred". However, with the series revitalised by the casting of Pierce Brosnan as Bond, and his appeal to women significantly broadening the audience for the series in recent years, it would appear that those guardians are content to stick with a cautious "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" philosophy.

Nevertheless, the prospect of the new Bond movie appeared more attractive than usual earlier this year when some British papers gushed with hype promising that it would be invested with a hipper, hard-edged, late-1990s sensibility by screenwriters Neil Purvis and Robert Wade, who wrote Let Him Have It and had been hired for The World Is Not Enough. Certainly, the movie gets off to a spectacular start, a brilliantly staged and sustained sequence involving abseiling, a boat chase, a hot air balloon and widespread explosions and destruction as it catapults 007 from one new cultural landmark, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, to another, the Millennium Dome at Greenwich.

Brosnan is as suave and graceful as ever in the role of James Bond, this time saving the world from Renard (Robert Carlyle), a ruthless Bosnian terrorist who has a bullet embedded in his brain which blocks out all sensations, including pain. Sophie Marceau plays Elektra King, a murdered oil tycoon's daughter whom 007 is assigned to protect and Denise Richards is implausibly cast as a nuclear physicist even more improbably named Dr Christmas Jones.

Renard has the potential for the ultimate in villainy, being an amoral character who has nothing to lose any more, but he is left undeveloped beyond Carlyle's intense, haunted expression - and crucially, left off screen for far too much of the movie. And while the movie offers some dynamic set-pieces handsomely filmed by Adrian Biddle, even these are undermined by a seriously over-plotted screenplay, and the later stages of the film sag helplessly under the weight of its slackness.

As ever, there's plenty of amusing gadgetry - including a set of bagpipes which fires bullets and doubles as a flame-thrower, and X-ray glasses which allow Bond to check out concealed weapons (and women's underwear) - and knowingly delivered double entendres. A welcome newcomer to the series is R, the grey-haired "young man" whom Q is training as his replacement and who is played with gleeful pomposity by John Cleese.

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Newcastle Chronicle & Journal Ltd/THE JOURNAL (Newcastle, UK)

Brosnan IS Bond

King has just gone up with a booby-trapped briefcase full of stolen cash, and after a breakneck pursuit along the Thames, MI6 becomes convinced it's the work of top terrorist Renard [Robert Carlyle].

Despatched earlier by M [Judi Dench], 009 succeeded only in lodging a bullet in Renard's brain, short-circuiting his nervous system and rendering him impervious to pain but allowing him to continue a dastardly scheme to destabilise the global economy.

Sounds like a job for Bond - except that the British super-spy is nursing an injured shoulder, and is already developing some rather unprofessional feelings towards Elektra.

>From the ridiculously enjoyable opening sequence featuring 007's white-water thrills past the Millennium Dome, it's clear this movie has it all - fabulous locations, overblown stunts, snappy pay-offs, thumping soundtrack.

Brosnan is a suave and assured centrepiece bolstered by returning favourites like Samantha Bond's Moneypenny and Robbie Coltrane's Valentin Zukovsky.

Okay, so Denise Richards as nuclear physicist Dr Christmas Jones does little more than squeeze into tiny tops and, as Q's young assistant, John Cleese seems slightly surplus comic relief.

But full marks to old Desmond Llewellyn for hobbling out once again, and plaudits too for Judi Dench for making M an eye-catching turn.

And Sophie Marceau is sheer, breath-taking quality - sexy, sophisticated, classy and much more than a bauble for Pierce to bounce innuendoes off.

Brosnan, I reckon, is the ultimate Bond - and that includes Sean Connery. He is smooth, sexy, witty where necessary and hard.

Welcome back, James.

The World Is Not Enough [12]

Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Sophie Marceau, Robert Carlyle, Denise Richards.

GRAPHIC: Match made in heaven: Pierce Brosnan and Sophie Marceau in the new James Bond film, The World Is Not Enough

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Leicester Mercury/ Leicester Mercury

A SUBTLE Bond--that's what Pierce Brosnan says he's after in the new blockbuster The World Is Not Enough.

"We have a good balance of character and story in this film,'' he explains.

"We had a director in Michael Apted who knew how to bring out the character of Bond, and satisfy my desires to make this a Bond who has grey areas and is not just a black or white character.

"What I wanted to see in this is the man, not just the killing machine. I knew Michael from before and I discussed with him these possibilities, and he was the right director to get that from the script.''

Brosnan was speaking at a press junket at Claridges hotel, and looked surprisingly fresh and fit for a man in the middle of a worldwide series of promotions.

The film sees the series return to the directness of sixties Bonds, with Brosnan doing a lot of his own stunts. "Dare I mention the wetness? '' he jokes.

It is hard to believe that this is only his third Bond, as he is now so well established in the part.

Not so in his awkward debut GoldenEye in 1995, or the empty Tomorrow Never Dies released two years later.

"I suppose I'm still the same Bond as before, but with a few twists and turns,'' is how he explains it.

"It's like stepping into an old pair of shoes, I suppose, but I am more comfortable this time around. There's not the stress and strain of the first one.''

Nevertheless, Brosnan is in the middle of a frantic work period.

"The World Is Not Enough came on the tail end of two other movies, The Thomas Crown Affair and Grey Owl, and I only had three weeks to reflect before I started work on Bond again.''

The Thomas Crown Affair was released to lukewarm reviews, although it performed moderately well at the box office. But the Richard Attenborough-directed film Grey Owl seems to have been lost in the schedules.

He could offer no clues on when Grey Owl would be released.

"I have absolutely no idea, hopefully next year. I am very proud of what I did on that movie, very proud indeed.'' As well as his films, the actor has participated significantly in ECO, Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd-sponsored campaigns.

And he recently announced his engagement to Keely Shaye Smith.

"I try and stay fit by working out and daily exercise and it is important to stay active when working on such an arduous committment like Bond. I always like tennis, but sometimes it is hard to keep up all the effort.''

So is he up for Bond film number four?

He seemed very upbeat about it. "I'm really settled into the whole Bond thing, and my lifestyle has evolved around it. I'm getting better with it, and I feel that I will be around for some time. I'm the keeper of the flame!''

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MGN Ltd./ The Mirror

THE NEW BOND FILM: IT'S LUDICROUSLY SIMPLE.

by Jonathan Ross

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH (12, 128mins)

After surviving the unwanted attentions of Jaws, Blofeld, Goldfinger, Scaramanga and Dr No, not to mention the dastardly attempt by Austin Powers to discredit the whole secret agent thang, the original and best is back - Bond, Jimmy Bond. This is Pierce Brosnan's third outing in the bespoke suit and handmade shoes of everyone's favourite spy, and if you weren't already convinced that he was the best Bond ever then this all-action extravaganza should do the trick.

The World Is Not Enough starts with Bond, tightly wound and ready to rumble, collecting some cash from a Swiss banker. It's British money, the ransom for a wealthy oil magnate's kidnapped daughter who escaped her captors before the transfer. But the real reason for Bond's visit is to learn who killed the British agent who was carrying the money?

When the banker refuses to name names, Bond kicks off one of the most exciting action sequences in any 007 film. Bungee jumping, explosions, a high-speed boat chase, a perilous balloon encounter and an unexpected visit to the millennium dome are all thrown in as James proves, yet again, why he's the best in the business.

Although M (Judi Dench) suspects Bond might be taking things a bit too personally, she lets him stay on the case. He is assigned to protect the kidnap victim Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), who is now the vastly wealthy head of her dead father's oil empire, from any more acts of extortion or terrorism. She is soon targetted by her father's killer Renard (Robert Carlyle), an international anarchist with a grudge against M16. Thanks to a freak accident, Renard is unable to feel any pain. He is also working with limited time - a bullet lodged in his brain is working its way down and will kill him in the near future.

Will James foil Renard's plans, save Elektra, protect the oil supply for the West and still have time for a several martinis and a few passionate nights in? You betcha.

Brosnan brings more to Bond than ever before. He conveys the sense of Bond as a human being rather than just the two-dimensional cipher for spying, shagging and shooting of the earlier movies.

Of the rest of the cast, Robert Carlyle is tasty, though sadly under-used, as the bad guy. Sophie Marceau is easy on the eye as Elektra, and Denise Richards as Dr Christmas Jones is pretty enough to catch Bond's eye but fails spectacularly to convince anyone as a nuclear physicist.

Robbie Coltrane is terrific as Valentin Zukovsky, and gets to deliver one of the movie's few genuinely funny lines. He lets himself into his office and finds the sultry Dr Jones waiting. "I must call security," he exclaims, "to congratulate them."

While we're on the subject, why does Bond get such lousy jokes? Surely with the amount of dough they spend on these epics they could hire a couple of gag -writers for an afternoon to punch things up a bit? Even the unflappable Pierce struggles with some of the lamer attempts at wit that pepper his dialogue. But I suppose lame jokes are all part of the Bond experience.

The weird thing about Bond movies is their strength is also their weakness. They are all based on the same ludicrously simple yet successful formula: big action scene followed by great title sequence, then M explains the plot, then Bond meets a sexy bit of fluff, followed by big action scene in which Bond is almost killed, followed by travel to a foreign location. Then - crash, bang, wallop - something blows up. Bond fights with a bad guy. Bond kills the bad guy. Bond delivers a bad joke. Bond gets his leg over. And we all go home satisfied.

It works brilliantly and The World Is Not Enough is a first-rate example. It's an adrenaline rush, packed with thrills and fun, great-looking men and women going through their paces at luscious locations. Although I enjoyed it tremendously, part of me wants more. I want to be surprised, I want something which isn't totally predictable. But, sadly, the straitjacket of Bond's successful formula means I'll probably never get it.

Extinguish all smoking materials and buckle up for the ride of your life. Taxi will give you a buzz like you're really there, in the thick of the action. Produced by Luc (La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element) Besson, Taxi features some of the best stunt driving I've ever seen, including an opening sequence in which a pizza delivery boy almost does the impossible - making it hip and cool to be a pizza delivery boy!

Daniel (Samy Naceri) switches job from the pizza run to taxi driver. But he is caught speeding and forced to help Emilien (Frederic Diefenthal), an inspector on the trail of bank robbers, in return for keeping his licence. This comedy thriller is pretty standard stuff - two-dimensional bad guys come up against outsider youths united by their passion for driving fast and furiously through Marseilles. But the convincing performances and the sheer energy of the driving sequences soon won me over.

If you need speed, don't miss Taxi. It's fast, furious - if a little forgettable - fun.

GRAPHIC: RIDING HIGH: Taxi is fast, furious and fun; PREMIUM BOND: The good; (Brosnan), the bad (Carlyle, left) and the beautiful (Richards, above)

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007 + Q + M = mayhem

By NIGEL ANDREWS The new James Bond film feels properly epochal. Not only does 007 crown an exciting power-boat chase down the Thames by causing grievous harm to the Millennium Dome - a few gasps of dismay could be heard when the structure managed to survive - but two major figures in MI6's alphabet soup personnel go through changes.

Desmond Llewellyn's Q shimmers like an evanescent Jeeves, disappearing through an unseen trapdoor after introducing John Cleese, no less, as his heir apparent. Vale to a great techno-valet. And Dame Judi Dench shows a human face as M, kidnapped in Azerbaijan, put behind bars and forced to look flustered in fetching beige.

The world is not enough? Nothing is enough in this long-running saga of tailored testosterone. The Bond series must find new fashions in hokum at least thrice a decade, during which an eager-to-serve globe passes before it laying out the latest fabrics. Cold War? Been there. Islamic terrorism? Done that. Energy crisis? Old hat. Nuclear showdown? Sorry.

Here, to solve the problem, we have a conflation of absolutely everything. Sophie Marceau's tinkly-accented French oil tycoon tries to finish off her trans-Asian pipeline while the primary and secondary villains - facially scarred Euro-psycho Robert Carlyle, whose fashion accessory is a bullet lodged in the brain, and Russian tub of lard Robbie Coltrane - help or hinder.

When not dazzled by the up-to-speed action set pieces, I kept trying to think whom Pierce Brosnan, with his en brosse haircut and appealing chipmunk features, reminded me of. Then I remembered. Gizmo the gremlin! Brosnan inhabits this Savile Row spy with a growing appreciation of his cuddly absurdity and animatronic agility. For much of the film he must also direct mating noises at Denise Richards's twentysomething nuclear scientist, his helpmeet in adversity, who sports - what thermophysicist doesn't? - hot pants, midriff-revealing shirt and lips that need no collagen.

This teaming works well. When it comes to channeling a partner's sexist machismo into world-saving action, Richards proves the Einsteinian theory that energy equals MCP squared. In their finest hour - or five minutes - she and Bond spin along an oil pipeline's interior curled inside a moving rig, having to defuse an H-bomb while travelling at 60 mph. The scene is quintessential Bondery - action cinema as geo-apocalyptyic It's A Knockout - and also demonstrates that the series' very British charm lies in its sang froid in the face of mayhem.

The main disappointment is Robert Carlyle's baddie. Did ever a good actor so resemble a rabbit caught in the headlamps?: a rabbit who realises, furthermore, that he is supposed to do a kitsch-villain routine in front of those lights and has no good lines and hasn't invented a funny voice.

Much of the comedy is sub-standard in this Bond. Just when Brosnan has learned how to taxi for epigrammatic take-off - the curled lip, crinkled eyebrow, glinting pupil - no one writes him a good joke. The sweetest comic moment is the wordless scene in which a helicopter dangling a tree-cutting device with interlocking saw-wheels slices straight through 007's priceless BMW. Our hero nips out just in time to see his cream-coloured sportif turn into something resembling two cliffs of shiny vanilla ice melting into a reluctant embrace.

Techno-disaster as balletic tour de force: no wonder we love these films. If they had their way, world crises would end with a quip not a whimper, postscripted of course by the slyest and most biblical of "bangs".

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CINEMA REVIEW

US, 128 mins

Stars: Pierce Brosnan, Sophie Marceau, Robert Carlyle, Denise Roberts, Robbie Coltrane, Judi Dench, Desmond Llewelyn, John Cleese

WATCHING the new James Bond film is like meeting up again with an old friend after an absence of a few years. You know exactly what to expect. There is something familiar and comfortable about the relationship. Initial worries are soon forgotten as you get back in the old routine. Great play has been made of the fact that the director Michael Apted isn't known as an action director but was brought in to beef up the characterisation. His presence must certainly have helped attract actors of the calibre of Marceau and Carlyle. The role of M (Dench) has been expanded to make her an intregal part of the story while the shady Russian Zukovsky (Coltrane), who appeared in GoldenEye, returns to take a key role in the proceedings. The cast is one of the strongest fielded in the entire series so the acting is bound to be pretty good. But, when all is said and done, this is still a typical Bond movie from the pre-credit sequence (which at 20 minutes is a short film in its own right) through the half-dozen set action pieces to the inevitable let's-blow-up-the-set finale. The usual formula remains intact although, as you'd expect from a production team that's been making Bonds for so long, the whole thing is shot through with a confidence and gloss that imitators can only pray for. It is supremely well done and 007 fans will be in ooh, ooh, heaven at the breathtaking stunts, natty gadgets and jokey one-liners.

Those of you who demand a plot to fill the bits between the action sequences should know that Bond (Brosnan, wearing the character like an old, much-loved pair of slippers) has to discover who killed an oil tycoon and is now trying to sabotage a vast pipeline in Turkey. International terorist Renard (The Full Monty's Carlyle, suitably deranged and menacing) is his prime suspect - a man who, because of a bullet lodged in his brain, can feel no pain but rather likes inflicting it on others. But wait, what should we make of beautiful (of course) oil heiress Elektra King (Marceau, the best Bond girl for ages). Of course, she snuggles up with James under the duvet but can she be trusted? Back at base, M seems to be in danger herself over something from her past and long-time gadget wizard Q's (Llewelyn) job seems to be threatened by his new assistant R (Cleese). Also hanging on to Bond's arm is an unlikely T-shirted nuclear weapons expert named Dr Christmas Jones who's there so Bond can make a joke about her name.

As for the action, the pre-credit sequence which whisks the audience from Spain to London and a choppy Thames speedboat chase is so good that anything else looks pale by comparison although the sequence in which a caviar factory is cut into pieces by a helicopter with a 17ft chainsaw slung beneath it comes close.

The film opens across the North-East from tomorrow

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FOR THOSE WHO STILL EXPECT TO BE SHAKEN AND STIRRED, THE NEW BOND IS NOT ENOUGH

SO WHO is this James Bond guy anyway? As we reach the 19th film in the series, there's a danger the 007 formula has become so established that the producers hardly feel the need to ask themselves that question anymore. The World Is Not Enough is certainly flush with inventive action sequences, but it sometimes leaves you wondering whether the hero who biffs the bad guys, kisses the girls and skips through one life-threatening scrape after another has become just a James Bond type, rather than the unique protagonist shaped by Sean Connery in the franchise's first decade. Yes, he wears a dinner jacket and dodges the bullets with the usual elan, but there are worrying signs here that 007 has become just another identikit action figure, like the indestructible superspy Arnold Schwarzenegger played (with rather too much of a smirk) in True Lies. To be fair, there's much to enjoy in the latest Bond, but you would hardly be surprised if Pierce Brosnan plonked down a box of Milk Tray at the end of it all.

It starts, though, with a stand-alone set-piece which is a real smasher among Bond pre-credits spectaculars. There's some dodgy business in a Bilbao office block, which allows the new Guggenheim Museum to flaunt its silvery Frank Gehry curves in the background, before the scene shifts back to London and an explosion in the Thames-side MI6 HQ starts Bond off on a boat-chase past the Houses of Parliament, under Tower Bridge, zig-zagging through the waterways of Docklands, and culminating in a contretemps with a hot-air balloon over the Millennium Dome. As an exercise in integrating hair-raising stuntwork and real locations, this little number will be hard to beat. So much so indeed, that once we've got past Garbage and the insidious theme tune, the rest of the movie rather struggles to live up to it.

In a surprise move, the presence of Michael Apted in the director's chair - his solid documentary background includes the fascinating Seven Up series and Coal Miner's Daughter on the big screen - would seem to indicate a renewed sense of seriousness towards character and plot. In the finished product, however, that's true only up to a point.

Certainly, there's a degree of topicality in a storyline which sees a proposed oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to a Western supply point in Turkey menaced by a renegade international terrorist and rival Russian business interests.

But you don't come to a Bond flick expecting World In Action, so the background set-up only matters in as much as it meshes with the film's larger -than-life characters, and in this instance the script makes rather a hash of it. It's a neat idea to have Renard, the volatile terrorist played with shaven -headed glumness by Robert Carlyle, suffering from a bullet lodged in his brain and thus remain impervious to pain, but the movie fails to follow through on it by giving him anything really, really bad to do. Equally half -baked is the characterisation of the Sophie Marceau role as the daughter of the errant British business magnate building the aforementioned pipeline, since her motives become decidedly amorphous as the film goes on. To say more would be spoiling a few secrets, but the effect is to dissipate our involvement in the latter stages, even if Marceau plays everything with the same little-miss-hoity-toity approach this terminally over-rated performer seems to bring to all her films.

That said, there are plenty of amusing diversions to disguise the movie's evident flaws. Post-Oscar, Judi Dench's contribution as M has been bumped up to winning effect, while a cheery departing wave from the long-serving Q of Desmond Llewellyn ushers in R, his replacement, and a fun bit of casting when John Cleese pops up to explain the latest gizmos in his best mad-boffin manner. Stealing every scene he's in is Robbie Coltrane as a dubious Russian entrepreneur with a sharp line in formal wear and urbane dialogue to match, but he and all the other actors do sometimes have to take a back seat to the striking hardware and big-bucks production design filling the screen.

The massive oil refinery built over the studio water tank at Pinewood is quite a sight, especially when it comes under attack from a helicopter brandishing a flying chainsaw designed to lop the tops off trees. We haven't seen one of those before, and for the film-makers to come up with new gizmos like that after all these years is part of the reason why there's still evident life left in the Bond business.

Still, if the Bond movies are now even more technically dazzling than they ever were, it may be at the expense of their personality. There's a scene here in an Azerbaijan casino where 007 gulps down his vodka-martini in such a cursory fashion the iconic significance of the drink is barely allowed to register. Are we being allowed to forget that this dashing secret agent is also a man who enjoys the finer things in life, knows how to wear a suit, takes to the business of seduction with a sense of self-deprecating humour? Needless to say, the old boy beds another succession of beautiful women, but it all seems a bit by-numbers, and the spark that you might expect when Denise Richards, who brought such a sense of fun to killer-babe roles in Starship Troopers and Drop Dead Gorgeous, turns up as a nuclear scientist named Dr Christmas Jones never really materialises.

There's little zing to the sexiness here and little sense of Bond as a man of the world when he's not on active duty, which is a pity since Brosnan is surely the best-equipped since Connery to supply the latter. In The Thomas Crown Affair, the Irishman looked absolutely at home as someone able to glide through an environment of deep-pile luxury, appreciating the value of everything and far removed from such petty questions as price. The Bond series should still have some of that too, since 007 is not just about foiling one megalomaniac after another, he's also an aspirational lifestyle figure, as anyone who has ever drooled at the very idea of a silver Aston Martin will tell you.

Perhaps the notion of Bond-as-connoisseur is simply going to be lost on the adolescent American audiences who provide a lot of the series's resurgent box -office. A shame really, since a little more truthfulness to that essence of the character might bring the next 007 closer to the ideal than it has been since the days of Connery.

The production expertise is clearly there, better thought-out villains would help, but the sense that we may not yet have seen the best of Brosnan's Bond nullifies the mild sense of disappointment we feel at the end of The World Is Not Enough.

Great stunts and exciting chases have their place, but allowing Bond a little more time to be himself would leave us truly shaken ... and stirred.

General release from tomorrow.

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22 November 1999

Off to Claridges, the smart London hotel, to meet Pierce Brosnan, the current James Bond. My heart is going "Dun-de-dun-dun-de-dundundun...daa-naa, daa-naa" in that powerfully rhythmic, 007 way. Up in the lift, which is marvellously old-style posh. All gilt and dark red velvet, with a little old man working a clanking lever. I don't think he is Q.

The publicity suite for The World Is Not Enough is on the fourth floor. It may even be the fourth floor. It is frighteningly huge, with what seems like 438 marble bathrooms and 587 lounge suites. The first lounge is filled with swish PR women in black ("Catherine, Pierce must have time for make-up before Clive Anderson, OK?" "Sure, CYNTHIA. I'll see to it.") and Barbara Broccoli. Barbara Broccoli! Daughter of that legend, Cubby Broccoli, who produced all the Bond films until he died. Now she does! Here's my moment. I will seize it. I sidle over.

"Hey, Babs!" I say. "Hi," she says. I tell her I was thinking of coming along in a bikini today. As a kind of Bond girl audition. I can be very Ursula Andress, you know. Indeed, last summer, during an Awayday to Clacton, I came out of the sea and actually heard someone whisper: "Goodness me. It's Ursula Andress." OK, I might have been mistaken. OK, they might have whispered: "Ughh, look at her undressed." But that's not very likely, is it? So, how about it, Babs?

This all goes down so well I am led to a side-room. Here, I am told, I can wait for Pierce on my own. I would have minded, I think, but there's a lovely big bowl of fruit in here. These Bond people certainly know how to do things! And the grapes are good. Not seedless, admittedly, but still good. I don't touch the bananas. Bananas are fattening, you know, and I have my new career to think of. I spit the pips into the bin ­ bing, bing, bing! My aim is shockingly accurate. I might make a better assassin than Bond girl, actually.

Sod it, I think I will have that banana after all.

Finally ­ and four bunches of grapes, seven bananas, six kiwis and a plum later ­ I'm told Pierce is ready for me. My heart is racing wildly. My heart is going: "Baba-baba-bababa". I think I might have gone out of 007 mode and into Pearl & Dean mode, but these things can happen at times of great excitement.

Into yet another room, and there is Pierce. He is gorgeous. He is beautiful. He has very blue eyes. He has thick, tufty hair, that's spiked-up just right.

Apparently, though, Mr Brosnan is considerably more beautiful from the left than the right. "Take from the left, OK?" he tells the photographer. I tell him he looks perfectly symmetrical to me. He says: "This is the sort of thing you learn when you are in films."

"Excuse me!" I say, "but I finished a film just last week as it happens."

"Oh?" he queries, raising a single eyebrow which, yes, he can do masterfully.

"Yes," I continue, "and I'm expecting to get it back from Boots any day now."

That put him in his place rather, I think.

He is divinely dressed: thick charcoal jumper; soft charcoal trousers; black leather, trendily moulded shoes. Where are your clothes from, Pierce?

"They're just clothes. Just grey slacks and a sweater."

"Where are they from?"

"I'm not telling."

"You might get a discount."

"I already get a discount."

"You might get a bigger one."

"I get them for nothing, OK?"

He is not especially easy-going. It is rather like meeting an expensively elegant yet tightly furled umbrella. I'm not sure he enjoys giving interviews. Do you enjoy giving interviews, Pierce? "I endure,' he sighs wearily. "I have to do so many..." Obviously, he suffers horribly for his art. "Can we talk about the film now?' he asks.

The film. You know, I don't think I've ever seen a Bond film from start to finish until now. This is unusual, I know. Apparently, half the human race has seen at least one. (The World Is Not Enough is the 19th). Mostly, I've just glimpsed bits of them on Christmas Day ­ snatches of huge explosions, and gold toothed baddies, and whooshing speed boat chases, and casino scenes, because there always seems to be a casino scene, and the gadgets like the watch that can turn itself into a missile launcher or a high-tensile grappling hook, but never anything useful like a new pair of tights for when you've just laddered the ones you've got on.

Plus, of course, the ravishing nuclear scientist whom Bond will get to have sex with in the very last scene. Usually, this is a woman. Usually, she has a highly punnable name, so giving Bond his witty, rather risqué payoff line. In The World Is Not Enough this is Dr Christmas Jones, as played by top Hollywood babe Denise Richards. "So," Bond remarks, as they finally emerge from the sheets, "It isn't true what they say... Christmas doesn't come just once a year."

This joke, I feel, is almost up there with one of mine. I say, if he ever gets to star in the Jewish version ­ The World Is Not Enough (At Least, Not At That Price) ­ would he consider me as, say, Passover Jones? He raises an eyebrow. And smiles. Almost. An eyebrow and a smile might be quite hard to co-ordinate. It always flummoxed Roger Moore.

"Whatever you wish, darling. Whatever you wish." He is warming to me, I think. He may be unfurling a bit. I might be well in here. Consequently, I decide not to tell him that Passover lasts for seven days and is spectacularly boring. That the highlight is a boiled egg dipped in salt. I don't want to push my luck. He says: "Lets get back to talking about Bond, OK?"

No. I want to talk to him about his childhood, actually . I am quite interested in his childhood, which sounds as if it was one of those ghastly, Angela's Ashes Irish ones. Have you read Angela's Ashes? "Yes. Why?" Because I imagine it would interest you. "It resonated with me, yes. Why are you interested?" Well, I reply, as Tolstoy said on the opening pages of Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." He is impressed. "My," he says,"aren't you well-read." I dare not tell him I also have a regular order for Hello!.

He grew up in the small town of Navan, 30 miles outside Dublin. His earliest memory is, he says, "of the River Boyne, the convent at the end of the road, watching the nuns make butter." He attended a very Catholic school "full of dark men in cassocks, carrying leather straps... a nasty bunch of men."

Could they be deliberately cruel? I ask. "Yes." In what way? "They were deliberately cruel in their beatings, which they did while pontificating about religion and the Lord." What did that do to your relationship with the Lord? "That is a very personal relationship. That is a very personal question, which I am not going to answer. Back to Bond, please."

Um... what sort of relationship does Bond have with the Lord? "I think he might have his beliefs."

His father, Tom, a carpenter, walked out when Pierce was two. His mother, May, left for London to train as a nurse, and Pierce was left in Ireland to be bought up by his grandparents and various aunts and uncles. His mother kept in regular contact until he joined her in London when he was 11. She returned in her holidays, sent him his weekly pocket money taped to the back of a letter, and good presents, too. "I was the first boy on my street to have Go-Jo rubber-wheeled roller-skates."

His father never really reappeared. "I only saw him once. He came to visit me when I was a boy. He knocked at the door. I was sent upstairs. I could hear mumbling below. I looked out the window. I must have been seven or eight. I saw him walking away. Then, when I was 33, and had a career, had Remmington Steele [the American detective mini-series that made his name], I was filming in Ireland and Tom Brosnan just turned up one day."

And? "We went for afternoon tea. Then he left again." Did you connect with him? "Only in the most abstract sense. I looked at his face, trying to see mine. I listened to his voice, trying to hear mine. There was some echo, but it had been buried in time and absence." Was Tom's problem the drink? "He liked a drink, yes."

I wonder, naturally, how all this has affected him: "The lack of fathering has, I think, enabled me to be a better father."

His wife of 11 years, the Australian actress and one-time Bond girl Cassandra Harris, died of ovarian cancer in 1991, leaving him with three children to care for ­ two from her previous marriage, now in their twenties, one from theirs, Sean, now 15. Did she know she was dying when she was dying? "I believe she knew long before I did. She had enormous courage. The cup was always half-full for her, never half-empty. Now, I've said enough. Bond. Let's go to Bond. Do you have a fella?"

I have. And a son, too. But they mean nothing to me, Pierce. Nothing! I am entirely yours, if you'll have me. Look, I'll prove it to you. I pick up the hotel phone, affect to call home, and bellow into the receiver. "Sorry, won't be back tonight. In fact, I'm never coming back. It's over. Finished. And take the child with you. I could never stand him. I'm Pierce's from now on."

Yes! Pierce laughs! I got the umbrella to go up ­ so to speak ­ if only momentarily.

"My, you're a bold girl."

"I don't want to be a bold girl. I want to be a Bond girl!"

"You don't!"

"I do."

"You don't."

"Why not?"

"Because, darling, they never come back."

He now lives in Malibu with the environmental journalist Keely Shaye Smith, whom he plans to marry next year. They have a three-old son, Dylan Thomas.

You like Dylan Thomas? "Yes." My, aren't you well read? "Yes." And, as it happens, he is. He is currently reading Mental Fight, Ben Okri's long poem for the millennium, and "enjoying it very much."

Do you write yourself? "I keep a journal. I write bits of stuff. Poetry. Stories. Can we talk about Bond?"

The World Is Not Enough is his third outing as Bond and, yes, he thinks there will be a fourth. I tell him I enjoyed the film, which I did. You'd have to be pretty churlish not to enjoy, and admire, a Bond film. Still, I tell him, it's a good job he's always one step ahead of the explosions, otherwise the films might be rather short.

"Yes, they would, wouldn't they?" he says, adding "I think we've got to wrap up now." And: "You're a one, aren't you?"

One what? Bond girl, probably. I knew he'd see it in the end.

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MATTHEW WRIGHT'S COLUMN: PIERCE IN SPY CLUB

JAMES Bond star Pierce Brosnan will receive the ultimate 007 accolade tonight when he's admitted to a club for real-life secret agents.

I can reveal that the dashing screen hero will be made an honorary member of the Naval And Military Club, a discreet establishment frequented by the military and Bond-style government spooks.

A banquet will celebrate Pierce's admission to the club - remember Bond is a former Naval commander - and other guests include screen baddie Robbie Coltrane and his spy boss M, alias Judi Dench.

I'm told Bond's membership number will, of course, be 007. What's more, the ceremony will be hosted by Brian Tovey, a real-life Q who used to serve as a principal at spy centre GCHQ.

"The presentation will be a little tongue-in-cheek but it is nevertheless an honour to be made a member of this club," one stalwart explains. Tonight is the premiere of Pierce's third Bond movie, The World Is Not Enough.

It's fantastic stuff. The opening sequence - a boat race down the Thames - is worth the admission price alone. Robert Carlyle plays the mad villain who threatens to blow up the planet with an ageing Russian nuclear bomb.

The premiere in London's Leicester Square this evening will be followed by a champagne bash to be held nearby under a giant marquee.

M (that's me) and P (that's my Polly) will, of course, be conducting a thorough investigation and expect to leave feeling both shaken and stirred..

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The Financial Times Limited/ Financial Times (London)

Bond is the name, food is the game:

By JOHN MARIANI

"I take a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink. It comes partly from being a bachelor, but mostly from a habit of taking a lot of trouble over details . . . It's very pernickety and old-maidish."

Thus spoke Bond, James Bond, the ageless, unflap-pable, unkillable British secret agent created by Ian Fleming in a series of 12 novels beginning with Casino Royale in 1953 and about to appear in the latest - although surely not the last - of 19 films, The World Is Not Enough, starring, for the third time, Pierce Brosnan.

Bond was the first fictional male hero to revel in unbridled gourmandism, his connoisseurship as much a part of his persona as his Aston-Martin DB-5, Walther PPK handgun, and the parade of women with names such as Pussy Galore and Tiffany Case.

What once seemed like effeminacy in other fictional and movie characters became critical, dangerous knowledge in Bond, who uses that knowledge both to detect his enemies' intentions and to show up everyone else's shallowness. In the film Diamonds Are Forever, Bond exposes two waiters as assassins when they fail to identify Chateau Margaux as a claret, and in >From Russia with Love 007's suspicions are aroused when a false British agent orders red wine with fish.

No character before Bond had ever made such connoisseurship sexy, so much so that the sales of Dom Perignon Champagne soared after Bond showed his preference for that bubbly in the early films, although in Fleming's books, Bond drinks Taittinger Blanc de Blanc '45, which 007 calls "a fad of mine" in Casino Royale.

Bond's impact on Champagne sales was so great that the champagne houses began paying hefty fees to have the secret agent drink their marque on screen, with Bollinger already appearing in eight of the Bond films, starting with Live and Let Die in 1973.

For the film The Living Daylights Bollinger traded on the Bond name by producing a limited edition poster headlined, "Bollinger, the Champagne of James Bond 007". So, too, Bond pioneered the innovation of the vodka martini, which he introduced in Casino Royale, naming the drink after a lover named Vesper.

His directive on how to make the cocktail - "shaken, not stirred" - became a mantra by which even his worst enemies identified him.

One can only imagine what Stolichnaya paid producer Cubby Broccoli to have Roger Moore hold up a bottle of Stoli to the camera at the end of A View to a Kill. Or the money Hennessy forked out to have George Lazenby in On Her Majesty's Secret Service tell the Saint Bernard that has restored him with brandy after being nearly killed in an avalanche: "Good fellow, but I do wish it had been Hennessy."

Even while trapped in his enemies' grasp, Bond cannot resist strutting his epicureanism, informing Auric Goldfinger what the correct temperature for serving sake should be, and he is not even above embarrassing his superior, M, in front of the head of the Bank of England by describing his host's Cognac as "a 30-year-old fine indifferently blended, with an overdose of bon bois".

In the books Fleming took pains to describe in detail Bond's preferences and eccentricities when it came to food - strong coffee made from beans purchased from De Bry in New Oxford Street, Norwegian Heather Honey from Fortnum's, Cooper's Vintage Oxford marmalade, and, being a Scot, Scottish smoked salmon.

Abroad, Bond is delighted to try anything - stone crabs in Florida, fried chicken in Harlem, even the poisonous fish fugu in Japan.

He despises tea, calling it one of the reasons for the downfall of the British empire, and, as he says in Diamonds Are Forever, the perfect woman should be "somebody who can make sauce Bearnaise as well as love". (Oddly enough, Fleming seemed to be an underachiever in the kitchen: Noel Coward thought the food Fleming prepared at his Jamaican resort, Goldeneye, was inedible.)

Living the high life, it is no wonder Bond's diet has sometimes been an object of concern at headquarters, where, in the book Thunderball and the movie Never Say Never Again, a report on his physical condition - furred tongue, high blood pressure, and a liver "not palpable" - causes M to chastise 007 for consuming too much alcohol, fatty foods and white bread, to which Bond replies: "I don't eat all that much bread, sir."

He is sent off to Shrublands health clinic to purge his body of "free-radical toxins", but after refusing a meal of "lentil delight" and goat's cheese brought by a beautiful nurse, Bond seduces her by breaking out his secret hamper of Beluga caviar, Strasbourg foie gras, quails' eggs and vodka.

One must assume that Bond will go on this way well into the next century, as long as the franchise holds, even if Pierce Brosnan looks as though he hasn't had a square meal in years.

But whatever Bond consumes, he will do it with unflappable grace and good manners, as when he makes a rare show of sympathy in You Only Live Twice, apologising to his Japanese host for wincing at being served live lobster. "I have made a mistake," he says, bowing. "It crossed my mind that honourable Japanese lobster might not like being eaten alive" - a fate James Bond has himself thus far avoided.

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Southam Inc./Calgary Herald

Brosnan remembers his first ' Bond ... James Bond'

A small tuft of Pierce Brosnan's chest hair peeks above his open-neck dress shirt. He is much more compact in person than he is on screen and very much a movie star. He's also intensely likeable thanks to a self-effacing sense of humour that makes him seem very much like his character James Bond.

The World Is Not Enough is his latest Bond feature. He says he'll never forget rehearsing for 1995's Goldeneye, and reading for the first time the words, ''Bond. James Bond.''

''You look on the page and you see it in the dialogue and you do practice it, I mean you can't help but just have some theatrical take on it,'' he says. ''There is a way of saying it. You can say it many different ways but timing is everything.

''The timing on that particular day was quarter to one -- lunchtime -- and crews and actors like to be fed on the dot at one o'clock. The camera came around on me, it was a page and a half of dialogue, Famke Jansen and myself, she was off camera. It was the casino scene, and all the extras were behind the camera just waiting for me to say this line -- and also for lunch. I thought, 'Do I say to them: Can you clear my eye line?' And then I thought, ''No, just let them all be there and just step up to the mark and say the line.'

. . . I don't know if I said it well or not, but I went back to the dressing room mumbling the line over and over during the lunch break.''

Robbie Coltrane played Valentin Dimitreveych Zukovsky in Goldeneye, and is happy to be back in The World Is Not Enough. He says it was hard sustaining the limp he acquired for the role. ''The worst thing about having a limp is you forget which leg. What happens is you think it's the one opposite the stick but as you are waiting for the shot you change legs and then the continuity girl goes, 'Wrong leg!' So an old actor's trick is you put a penny in your shoe or a stone or something so you can feel it and go, 'Oh yeah, it's this one.' Then the next day you really do have a limp from the stone in your shoe so you've solved your problem.'' He throws back his head and laughs heartily. ''Of course real professionals simply cut off their big toe.''

John Cleese, who plays R in The World Is Not Enough, wasn't prepared to cut off his toe, but he jokes that he is ready to take off his clothes any time a director asks.

''In Out Of Towners I wasn't nude, I was doing a dance in a fur coat and women's clothes and a woman's hat -- but not actually nude, which I think is a first for me. There may be a movie at the beginning of my career where I didn't take my clothes off but I can't remember what it was . . . Maybe there wasn't one. Basically what the producers say is, 'John, (take off your clothes) if you don't mind, because it's the best way to get people into the cinema!'''

As a kid, I lost a lot of sleep after watching the 1958 animated version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow narrated by Bing Crosby. Now, 41 years later, Tim Burton has created a version starring Johnny Depp that will keep adults up all night.

This is the third time Johnny and Tim have worked together; their previous films were Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Ed Wood (1994). Johnny says they communicate with few words. ''There is a kind of a shorthand, in fact a verbal shorthand, emotional shorthand. When we're on the set almost none of the crew can understand what we're talking about. . . . It's like a festival of stutters, in a way.''

Johnny likes to save mementos from his movies but says on Sleepy Hollow, the pickings were slim. ''(I like to keep) pretty much everything, but I think I had two costume changes in the entire film. I had one suit through the entire thing. I think it's important to hold on to that stuff. Then I can give it to my kid when she's older, or my kids if I have more.''

GRAPHIC: P Photo: Fred Prouser, Reuters / Pierce Brosnan, with Maria Grazia Cucinotta, left, and Denise Richards, stars of the new James Bond film, The World Is Not Enough, pose together at the film's premiere last week in Los Angeles.

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The Gazette (Montreal)

Babes, Bad guys and Bond

Owl. Grey Owl.

Oops. Wrong film. However, fans will be forgiven for thinking that Pierce Brosnan's body is in the 19th James Bond spectacle, The World Is Not Enough, but that his mind is elsewhere - possibly in the recent film Grey Owl, in which Brosnan played a crusading environmentalist.

Brosnan has even hinted that Bond has run its course, that the British spy should die in the next instalment. Fat chance. Not with the most successful franchise in film history. Not when the last two flicks each grossed $350 million.

Regardless, Brosnan is doing his part to kill the 007 cachet. He looks like he's walking through this movie, bored out of his wits. Brosnan would probably settle for a martini that is stirred, not shaken, as a major plot development at this point.

Small wonder that he would be disaffected. The series has been reduced to a parody of itself, and Brosnan has become but a cliche.

Bond is all about formula. But this is ridiculous. The babes, the bad guys, the gadgets, the locations, the cornball sexual innuendos, the pyrotechnics - they are as predictable as power blackouts in this province.

About the most exciting innovation is the addition of the whacked-out John Cleese, filling the bill as R, apprentice to gadget-guru Q (Desmond Llewelyn). And, sadly, R is only on screen for about two minutes.

It's hard to fault vets Judi Dench, as Bond boss M, Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty), as the renegade Renard, or Robbie Coltrane, as the dubious Valentin Zukovsky. They do what they can within the constraints of the script. On the other hand, Bond babes Sophie Marceau, as oil heiress Elektra, and Denise Richards, as - right - rocket scientist Christmas Jones, can't act.

The biggest mystery surrounding this film is how producers were able to entice Michael Apted to direct. Apted, who made Incident at Oglala and Gorillas in the Mist, is not an obvious choice.

There are numerous writing credits attached to this project, but it would appear that a computer was largely responsible for the connect-the-dots scenario.

If nothing else, though, the title is prophetic. The world is clearly not enough, not when they have to schlep Bond off to Azerbaijan. It is here that our dashing agent encounters the fabulously wealthy Elektra, who is trying to build a pipeline to the West through Asia Minor. Though she apparently means well, someone is trying to sabotage the pipeline and 007 is consequently engaged to keep an eye - nudge, nudge, wink, wink - on Elektra.

James does what he can. But there are forces beyond even his powers at play here. Like the diabolical Renard, who in the grand tradition of Bond villains, wants to reduce Earth to rubble, just for the fun of it. His choice of mass destruction is, natch, a nuclear bomb.

But the baaad Renard is tough to bring down. He has no feelings. Literally. A bullet lodged in his brain has deprived him of his ability to experience pain, among other things. One presumes this condition would also cover Renard's sense of smell. Otherwise, like the film's hero, he, too, would know he was in a stinker.

The World Is Not Enough

Rating two (two stars)

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Southam Inc./The Ottawa Citizen

It's Bland, James Bland

The World Is Not Enough, Rating two 1/2

Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Sophie Marceau, Robert Carlyle, Denise Richards

Directed by: Michael Apted

Written by: Neal Purvis & Robert Wade and Bruce Feirstein

Rating: AA

That James Bond is one lucky guy.

The British spy, whose identity is the worst-kept secret in Britain since Dennis Thatcher, is issued the 007 licence to kill -- to kill villains, to knock the ladies dead, to slay audiences with his cool puns -- and everywhere he goes, he's issued villains who can't shoot straight, nuclear physicists and oil heiresses who are beautiful babes, and bystanders who deliver set-up lines as if they were Bud Abbott. Bond barely has to arch his eyebrow to be deadly, sexy and funny.

Take the opening of The World Is Not Enough, for instance, when Bond (Pierce Brosnan) goes to beautiful Bilbao to pick up some cash at a Swiss bank. And wouldn't you know it, but the Swiss banker here is a lovely, curvaceous woman who hands him a receipt and says, ''Would you like to check my figures?'' Now let's face it: Henny Youngman has enough on the ball to handle that ad lib (for the record, the correct reply is, ''Oh, I'm sure they're perfectly rounded.'') James Bond is licensed to kill fish in a barrel.

The point is, Bond has it all handed to him: the gadgets, the locations, the women, the special effects. Since he doesn't have to work for the raw material, we expect him to handle it with an increasingly slick level of panache. It's a franchise that has to keep getting better, but at No. 19 in the series, The World Is Not Enough doesn't deliver.

Part of the problem is that we may have been spoiled by all the high-tech explosive excitement of the previous Bond films. The bar rises higher, and from the opening, pre- credit sequence -- an oddly two-pronged sequence, one of many double doses in this film -- we can see that The World Is Not Enough is, well, not enough.

It's not that a boat chase along the Thames can't be wild, but after falls out of airplanes and ski chases down perilous slopes and all the rest, we expect to be astounded in the pre-credit sequence of a James Bond film, and this one provides a chase that even Jackie Chan has done better.

It does, however, set the stage for a plot that is as incomprehensible as you could ask for. A Bond film with a coherent plot would be a huge disappointment but The World Is Not Enough might set a franchise record for the speed with which you get lost. It has something to do with protecting a beautiful heiress (Sophie Marceau) from an international terrorist (Robert Carlyle), but you can be sure that the whole world will be at stake by the time we get to the closing part, where Bond and the beautiful girl get to hide out naked from his bosses. The theme of two of everything means that there is a second plot as well, but fortunately, it serves only to complicate matters.

James Bond: In his third outing, Pierce Brosnan is settling in to the character. He no longer seems too thin and harmless: he's fleshed out a bit. Unfortunately, his strength -- being suave -- isn't featured much here. This is a physical James Bond rather than the casino habitue model, which doesn't suit Brosnan as well.

The Villain: Not much happening here. Robert Carlyle's Renard is an anarchist. ''His only goal is chaos,'' someone says, a lack of direction that is apparent in his dull and pointless characterization. Renard's gimmick is that he has a bullet in his brain that makes him impervious to pain: he feels nothing, and neither do we. Maybe this is what passes for evil genius these days, but Auric Goldfinger could have kicked his butt. A second villain appears later in the movie, one who is no improvement.

The Locales: Bilbao is nice, but we spend most of the time in The World Is Not Enough in Azerbijan and environs, looking at oil fields. Where is the Caribbean? Where is Japan? Where's the exotic world tour? James Bond without a travelogue is like a vodka martini that is mistakenly stirred. (What happens, by the way? Does it bruise the olive?)

The Setpieces: Another place where we see how Bond has been overtaken by other films. There's a sequence where Bond and Elektra are chased down a ski slope by badguys in parasails. How many Bond films have these closeups of the stars on skis, followed by the long shots of stunt doubles skiing? Director Michael Apted works well in women-centred dramas (Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist) and has no feel for the action genre.

The Secondary Characters: The usual collection of thick- necked henchman, although there is one bad guy assistant who dresses in gold. He looks like Liberace might have appeared if he went into henchmaning instead of piano. The rest of the cast is wildly overcrowded. Robbie Coltrane returns as Valentin Zukovsky, a villain in GoldenEye and a good guy here. Q is back, and he has an assistant -- another case of the doubles -- and Judi Dench returns as M, in an expanded role that only serves to show down the film at the expense of ''character development.'' As if.

The Women: Two Bond girls are better than one. Sophie Marceau, as Elektra, is probably the most beautiful woman in movies, now that Catherine Zeta-Jones has been seen with Michael Douglas. Denise Richards (Wild Things, Starship Troopers) plays Christmas Jones, a nuclear physicist who is a sure bet for the Playboy Girls of the Plutonium Isotope issue. Judging from her acting, it's a good thing she wasn't cast as a rocket scientist.

The Ambience: Boring, really. The film is more than two hours long, and although there is pleasure in hearing those familiar lines -- ''We've got one chance,'' and, ''James, it's too risky,'' and, ''Take the girl to the helicopter'' -- the life seems to be seeping out of this once-vibrant series. The truth be known, it's bland. James bland.

GRAPHIC: CP; P Color Photo: The World is Not Enough has Pierce Brosnan using more braun than charm while Denise Richards, as nuclear physicist Christmas Jones, adds little more than her looks to the disappointing film.; Black & White Photo: Bond fans expect to be astounded by special effects and action. The World is Not Enough, the 19th instalment of the Bond franchise, doesn't deliver.

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Sun Media Corporation/The Ottawa Sun

HUGE, BRAINLESS FUN

It has been so long since we last saw a James Bond movie on the big screen that we'd quite forgotten what huge, brainless fun they can be.

The World Is Not Enough is the 19th outing for the world's most famous secret agent, third for Pierce Brosnan as 007.

Action? This one kicks off with a betrayal, a brutal shoot-out, a clever escape out a window, killer currency, an adrenalized boat chase, several massive explosions and a grisly suicide and all this, gentle reader, is before the opening credits.

The story here is, ah, well ... forget about it.

Essentially, some rich guy gets killed, Bond is sent to protect the rich guy's daughter (Sophie Marceau), there's a terrorist on the loose (Robert Carlyle), some oil pipelines are involved, Robbie Coltrane shows up again as a Russian double agent, most of Istanbul may blow up and Bond -- aided by the de rigueur nuclear-weapons-expert-with-large-breasts (Denise Richards) -- must save the world. Not much new here.

But the gadgets! And the stunts! And the beeeeutiful clothes that Sophie Marceau gets to wear! Oh, we love this stuff. The World Is Not Enough is a story of betrayal and very good jewelry, with Brosnan doing a jolly-well-done job of leading us all into major escapism.

Leaping from exotic locale to exotic locale, littered with boats that fly and cars that pack missiles (and bagpipes that are flamethrowers), The World Is Not Enough is endlessly inventive and tongue-in-cheek.

Brosnan has the sense not to raise those eyebrows too high; nobody in the cast goes for camp, realizing perhaps that with this script it would be gilding the lily.

This is a film, after all, in which Robert Carlyle plays a scarred, droopy-eyed baddie with a bullet in his head; the bullet is slowly robbing him of his senses, one by one. He cannot feel pain anymore. Or, as the doctor explains, "The bullet will kill him, but he'll grow stronger every day until it does." Hilarious? It's wonderful stuff.

Director Michael Apted keeps things moving at a stupendous clip, all the while keeping a tight rein on a support cast that includes Dame Judi Dench (as M), John Cleese, Desmond Llewelyn and Samantha Bond, each of whom could pop off the screen at any time.

Like all Bond movies, The World Is Not Enough is a series of cliff-hanger situations and eye-popping gadgets and toys.

It's humourous and exaggerated, and even the so-called sex scenes are really all about expensive bed linens.

Whether you're a Bond fan or just a regular 11-year-old boy, you won't want to miss this.

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH

Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Sophie Marceau, Robert Carlyle

Directed by: Michael Apted

Rated: AA

Sun Rating: 4 out of 5

GRAPHIC: photo PIERCE BROSNAN as James Bond and Denise Richards as Dr. Christmas Jones have a close encounter in the latest 007 adventure The World Is Not Enough, directed by Michael Apted.

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Great Start Keeps 007 Shaking, if not Stirring

Pierce Brosnan's growing confidence as James Bond shows in the fight scenes, the bed scenes and his adroit handling of the outrageous sex puns.

The World Is Not Enough

Starring Pierce Brosnan, Robert Carlyle, Sophie Marceau and Denise Richards. Directed by Michael Apted. At Famous Players and Cineplex Odeon theatres.

The formula still works

The bimbo scientist cuts through the macho bluster in The World Is Not Enough, the new Bond, James Bond movie.

''You want to put that in English for those of us who don't speak spy?'' she demands of Secret Agent 007, played for a third time by Pierce Brosnan.

It's an unnecessary request. The fact is, after 19 Bond films, everyone can ''speak spy.''

We know all about Bond's penchant for fast women, faster cars and vodka martinis that are ''shaken, not stirred.'' We know he will be handed strange toys and sent to exotic destinations to save the world from creeps with weird habits.

It's the universal language of 007, and the strengths and weaknesses of it are both in evidence in this film, named for the Bond family motto (remember the coat of arms from On Her Majesty's Secret Service, trivia fans?)

It's become a cliche to comment on how Brosnan is settling into the role, but he really does get better each time out. His confidence shows in the fight scenes, the bed scenes and his adroit handling of the outrageous sex puns.

The movie has the most thrilling action prologue in memory, a 17-minute straight rush from a bank job in Spain to a bomb blast at Bond's London headquarters to a high-speed boat chase along the Thames.

There's a decent villain in The Full Monty's Robert Carlyle, who plays Renard, a terrorist slowing dying from a bullet lodged in his brain. He's a good enough actor to make us almost forget his character's absurd diagnosis, straight out of an Austin Powers parody, that Renard will ''grow stronger every day until the day he dies.''

As Dr. Evil would say: ''R-i-i-i-ght.''

Familiar faces add the comfort of recognition. Judi Dench returns with the expanded role of MI6 boss M, Robbie Coltrane (GoldenEye) is back as sardonic Soviet arms supplier Zukovsky and Desmond Llewelyn makes his 17th appearance as gadget guru Q, who is amusingly aided by his new ''young'' assistant, Monty Python's John Cleese.

On the down side, the plot is convoluted and stale, an idea recycled from the energy crisis era involving nuclear bombs, greedy tycoons and essential oil pipelines.

If you've seen one bomb blast countdown, you've seen them all, and this film has an endless array of timing devices ticking away. The Bond people never have heeded Hitchcock's advice that real suspense comes from knowing about the bomb but not knowing when it will go off.

Ditto for the ski chase, which seems as if it were cut-and-pasted from any number of a dozen other Bond films.

Then there are the Bond babes, French actress Sophie Marceau and Wild Things' Denise Richards, who are simply not to be believed, even by the fantasy standards of this series.

Marceau would have been fine as a temptress Bond has his way with before the first product placement. But she's been handed a major role here, as the mysterioso oil heiress Elektra King, who mesmerizes both Bond and his nemesis. Her beauty doesn't compensate for her acting deficiencies; the movie drags even when she's seen semi-naked in bed.

Denise Richards is an equally poor casting choice, but at least she's intended as nothing more than eye candy. As nuclear weapons expert Dr. Christmas Jones, she's both a visual and verbal pun in a movie filled with groaners. She demands to be taken seriously while running about in an overstuffed tank top and hot pants.

The movie's finale is set in Turkey, for the apparent sole purpose of arranging a sex joke about Jones' first name. You can almost hear the rimshot through the explosions.

Advance junket hype had it that The World Is Not Enough would be the film where Bond reveals much more of his sensitive side.

Director Michael Apted, known for such character-driven films as Coal Miner's Daughter and Gorillas In The Mist, as well as the acclaimed 7 Up documentaries on life changes, was thought to be the man to humanize bond, much as Nicholas Meyer gave Capt. Kirk greater depth in the second Star Trek film.

Something must have happened in the editing room, or else Apted simply learned to ''speak spy'' along with the rest of us. Bond is no more sensitive than before, unless you include a dislocated shoulder he suffers , which turns out to be no more of an impediment than a hangnail. He shags 'n' bags as always and his trigger finger is itchier than ever - he actually uses that licence to kill for at least one unexpected takeout.

The World Is Not Enough offers enough to keep us happily in our seats, if not always on the edge of them.

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Although Brosnan has been able to make other non-Bond movies -- for example, the recent Grey Owl and The Thomas Crown Affair -- he knows that 007 is now a permanent part of his persona. ''I'm now in a situation where I live with this character everywhere in the world. We're joined at the hip, and if I fight it, he'll knock me down. So you make the best of it. He owns you and you're responsible to him.

''But I think we've struck a chord with this one in story-telling and character, and I'd like to think we can use this as a foundation for the next film to explore further who this man is.''

Apted saw the challenge of doing an action film as a way of jump-starting his career and sending it into new turf. Besides, as a Briton, he respects the Bond films.

''James Bond is a fascinating piece of English culture. I couldn't care less whether it's American money that finances it because its Englishness endures. In film, nothing has been as durable in 40 years as the Bond phenomenon.''

GRAPHIC: CP Color Photo: Director Michael Apted; Color Photo: BEAUTY AND BRAINS: Pierce Brosnan as James Bond and Denise Richards as Dr. Christmas Jones in The World Is Not Enough.

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The World Is Not Enough

Starring Pierce Brosnan, Sophie Marceau, Robert Carlyle and Denise Richards.

Parental guidance. 128 min. Rating three 1/2

Inevitably, criticizing any given Bond performance comes down to comparisons of size, length, tempo and the number of breathtaking explosions the world's most famous secret agent can fit into one brief encounter. Oh yes, and let's not forget the general thrust and taste of those wonderfully blunt double entendres.

Watching Bond in action is a predictable enough exercise that the majority of humans on this planet have indulged in it at least once. As a result, comparisons are inevitable -- especially if this is your 19th time going around the world with the man who's always packing.

That said, I want everyone to know I've cared about more than one James Bond in my life. Some encounters are carved into my memory like some hot knife plunging into a pad of salted butter. Others, sadly, fell limp in the face of high expectations. Despite these hits and misses, my affection for Bond was always larger than any singular act -- no matter how weak, wrinkled, pointless or dependent on special effects the hero turned out to be.

With that in mind, The World Is Not Enough stands out as one of Bond's better seductions. Rising to the occasion with a stiff new villain in Renard (Robert Carlyle), a terrorist who was shot in the head and presumed dead by MI-6, this Bond episode proves more cerebral than most.

Renard survived the assassination attempt, but he doesn't have long to live -- he has a bullet planted deep in his brain that is slowly destroying his senses. This eventually renders him little more than a blind appendage of the devil with only one purpose, to bring the world to its knees.

His big plan revolves around stealing warhead- grade plutonium and then inserting the radioactive rod into the reactor core of a submarine, causing immediate meltdown and catastrophic destruction.

Because Renard has nothing to lose, his diabolical plans make emotional sense -- a genuine novelty in this type of rigid formula, where bad guys always want to blow up the world but rarely for a darn good reason.

The villain isn't the only one who gets a thicker emotional brush to paint with. Other characters -- most notably M (Judi Dench) -- are allowed to penetrate the script with a bit more depth than the brawny, and generally stupid, action genre demands. In this case, M feels responsible for the death of an old school chum who is blown to smithereens when she inadvertently gives him a booby-trapped load of cash.

In an effort to make things right, she not only vows to find the culprit, but to protect her friend's newly orphaned and beautiful daughter, Elektra King (Sophie Marceau). King has inherited one of the most powerful oil companies in the world, making her a target for Renard, who has designs on her European pipeline. After some cajoling, Bond convinces M that he is just the man to dispose of Renard's rod, protect the conflicted Elektra and send the Union Jack up the flagpole, making the world a safe place for all once more.

Over the course of his adventure, Bond shows a bit more humanity, humility and weakness than usual; he wears a sling after a 30-metre fall from a hot-air ballon on to the roof of London's Millennium Dome. This refreshing approach is no doubt thanks to the presence of ''serious'' director Michael Apted, the force behind such movies as Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist, Nell and Thunderheart.

Apted doesn't have a particularly strong script to work with here, but he does make the best of what accomplished screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Let Him Have It, An American Werewolf in London) manage get between the covers as they balance the requisite sexual allusions, pyrotechnics and seduction scenes with some essence of real emotion.

Good bits include the addition of John Cleese as the successor to Desmond Llewelyn's gadget man Q, techno-music celebrity Goldie as the nasty sidekick Bullion, the perfectly bimbonic performance by Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist with the weight of two big warheads on her chest and the thrilling chase sequences that make up the bulk of the movie.

In short, The World Is Not Enough pumps out every trick in the Bond book. We've seen it all before, and let's face it, it's hard for any Bond to exceed our unreal expectations. However, The World Is Not Enough tried hard and proved adequately filling, indeed.

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James Bond conquers the US box office

"The World is Not Enough," starring Pierce Brosnan as agent 007, earned 37 million dollars in its opening weekend, according to industry estimates.

The film had the best opening of any James Bond film since 1962 when the film series debuted. It is also the strongest opening of any MGM film.

Following James Bond, the new horror film "Sleepy Hollow" starring Johnny Depp and directed by Tim Burton earned 30.5 million in its opening weekend.

The animated film "Pokemon," inspired by a Japanese video game, was in third position with 13.3 million, beating out the cop thriller "The Bone Collector" with 6.5 million.

Both beat out the comedy "Dogma" which has been criticized by Catholic groups, which earned 4.1 million.

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BOND PREMIERE PROMISES THRILLS FOR CHARITY

The charity premiere of new James Bond film The World is Not Enough opens today in aid of endangered children.

The World is Not Enough promises to captivate its audience at the Odeon in London's Leicester Square with a nail-biting opening scene featuring actor Pierce Brosnan landing on the roof of the Millennium Dome, following a high-speed boat chase on the River Thames.

Proceeds from today's screening will be donated to the Children's Promise which is helping children who have been physically abused and are in danger.

The film's producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli said: "It is refreshing to have a brand new icon featuring right at the beginning of our film.

"The Dome is photogenic and we believe it makes the opening sequence exciting and fun."

Children's Promise brings together seven leading charities which are asking people to donate their final hour's earnings of the millennium to their charities.

ChildLine, Barnardo's, BBC Children in Need and Comic Relief are just some of the charities involved.

The film's stars, including Maria Grazia - who plays female villain The Cigar Girl - Sophie Marceau, Denise Richards, Robert Carlyle, Dame Judi Dench and Robbie Coltrane are also expected to make an appearance at tomorrow's event.

The premiere is at the Odeon, Leicester Square, tomorrow evening.

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'I've a healthy sense of who I am'

By Elizabeth Grice

PIERCE Brosnan's cigarette-lighting routine is so absurdly stylish and archaic that it deserves a reprise, preferably on video. First, a Claridge's waiter toils along miles of carpet to the VIP suite bearing a packet of Marlboro Lights and a box of matches on a china plate. The recipient gives a courteous nod and lazily extracts the first of two beautifully spaced smokes. Then there is a masterful downward jab of match against sandpaper; a brief flare.

The spent match, precisely aimed, tinkles down on to the plate from a slightly unnecessary height. Brosnan leans back, narrows his eyes towards the ceiling and allows that first, fine exhalation to escape through one corner of his mouth. When he throws the cigarette packet down on the table, it lands upright.

This mesmerising sequence happens in one long, practised movement. It's like watching a clip from a Spencer Tracy film. Poetic, but a bit outdated. Sadly, it is about the only whiff of the James Bond persona that Brosnan allows to escape. Most of the time, he puts himself across as the softly spoken, thoughtful actor still grateful, on his third Bond mission, to have landed a part that frees him from the anxieties of mortgage repayments.

Brosnan's Bond is textbook sexy. A template of chiselled masculinity with chest hair like a hearth rug and rather pointless good looks. Most women you ask about his appeal will preface their reply with something like: "Well, I can understand why some women think he's sexy ", acknowledging that it is not in the best of taste to admit falling for such obvious bait.

Brosnan sensibly says he is amused to be considered a sex symbol, since he has never thought of himself as one, outside what he calls "the Bond machine". Some of his observations on the subject (eg "Great sex is when you don't want to wash for the rest of the day") suggest he is not as detached from the image as he makes out.

"It's part of the illusion, part of the Bond thing," he says, in a slow, Irish-American drawl. "I have a healthy sense of who I am and what I'm about and where my position is and the ramifications of being - quote unquote - a sex symbol."

The man behind the cigarette smoke, with his spiky Samuel Beckett haircut and monastic seriousness, actually looks younger and more fanciable than Bond. His charcoal sweater, charcoal trousers and trendy shoes with moulded rubber soles are not so much New Bond as anti-Bond. Once ridiculed for his limited range of expressions - deadpan, deadpan with raised eyebrow, ironic smile, ironic smile with raised eyebrow - he now seems quite ready to smile and even to contemplate a question without narrowing his eyes. At last - he is 46 - his temples are greying.

He likes to distance himself from 007's adolescent obsessions with gadgets and brainless girls. In his latest manifestation, Bond is comprehensively duped by the new woman in his life, a beautiful heiress played by Sophie Marceau, and though he exacts the ultimate revenge, Brosnan enjoys the fact that New Bond, "this character who's invincible, who's always bedded women and had the upper hand", is vulnerable to the wiles of a seductress.

Brosnan admits he is a complete technophobe, unable to use a computer or fix his car or work the video recorder. As if to prove his point, it takes him three or four attempts to find the light switch for the table lamp in his suite.

"Gadgets hold no seduction for me. I write letters longhand and someone else deals with the computer. After GoldenEye, they gave me a beautiful IBM computer which just sat there. After Tomorrow Never Dies, they said they'd like to upgrade me. I had to dust off the first one, so they bought me a second. I gave it to an assistant of mine. I realise sooner or later I will have to log on, hook in, hook up - but it will be in my time."

He claims to like a sense of danger, but says that, as a family man, he has no appetite for taking unnecessary risks. The film's promotional material makes great play of the fact that Brosnan performs many of his own stunts. The World is Not Enough has him exploding through the walls of the MI6 building in London, scything down the Thames in an 80mph boat chase and somersaulting down the skin of the Millennium Dome - just as pre-title tasters.

But his most impressive "controlled risk situation" was being chased by a fireball down the underground tunnel of a nuclear plant. "We did it first with the stunt guy," said the special effects man Chris Corbould. "Then Pierce said: 'I'd like to get my face in there'. So we shot the sequence again, this time with Pierce, and it looks absolutely amazing."

Why on earth did he need to get his highly bankable face in there? "It was do-able," says our hero laconically. "I just thought it would benefit the movie." He describes hanging on the chains, seeing the massed firefighters, the ambulances ready to scoop his charred remains out of the wreckage, sensing the quantities of petrol ready to explode behind him.

"But you are covered by so many safety precautions," he adds prosaically. "You could feel the heat but it wasn't as close as it appeared to be."

He says his fears are mainly for the future of the planet, not about his own demise. "It's in your being if you were brought up a Catholic in Ireland in the Fifties, as I was. The fear of dying is constant, but the enjoyment of living is much more."

Legend has it that Brosnan dreamed of playing Bond when he was a boy, newly transplanted from his native Ireland and growing up in Putney, south London. All part of the Brosnan mythology, he says. Sean Connery was, however, his hero. "He's the one I grew up with. He was Bond, the whole era of Bond. Comparisons will be made " But he says he doesn't find them odious.

"There's no question about it, Bond is a very, very ruthless man and Connery had a style about him which I can neither emulate nor would want to."

Brosnan says that when he went to America as an impoverished young man, the limit of his ambition was to be a character actor in feature films. Within weeks of arriving, he landed the part of the well-pressed detective star of the television series, Remington Steele, and was hailed as the new Cary Grant.

Weirdly, he had actually modelled himself on Grant, cultivating the image of the sartorial sophisticate that was to serve him so well when the hunt was on to replace Timothy Dalton as James Bond. "It's fascinating to me how I created this image for myself."

Brosnan believes it is dangerous for an actor to think he can depend on his looks. His comic fall-guy performance against Robin Williams in Mrs Doubtfire suggested he has a range that will ensure he doesn't have to. Does he fear becoming forever associated with the Armani suit, the dinner jacket and the perfectly knotted bow-tie? "First and foremost, Bond doesn't wear Armani. He wears Brioni.

"I have been typecast all my life, as most actors are, anyway, so I don't worry about it too much. Whether I can change that depends on how courageous I am, how talented I am how lucky. Although I might have painted myself into a corner with an image, I have patience. I'll go paint another colour, find another corner. I have no idea where the wind will blow."

Being patient, doing things his way in his time, is a favourite Brosnan theme. After years of being pestered by the media about when he will marry his girlfriend, Keely Shaye-Smith, the mother of his three-year-old son, Dylan, he says it will be next year - time and place not to be revealed; Hello! magazine not to be invited.

"I knew early on that this was someone whom I wanted to be with always," he says. "I always had a clock in my own head. We have set a date and a place and it will be quiet, simple. I feel happy again. It is a great feeling to have a wonderful partner whom I respect and admire."

It is more than seven years since the death of Brosnan's wife, the Australian actress Cassandra Harris. The mountain home they shared in California, a shrine to former happiness, was more or less washed away in last year's rain storms, seeming to signal the end of an era of his life. "I do agree there is a certain mystery about it all - if I allow it to be a mystery."

He sold the remains, in its six-acre site, only last week. "I had a wonderful life there but it was time to let go of it all. It was easy to let go and move on." Though he says California is home, he and Keely are looking for a second home, possibly in Ireland.

Brosnan says he's beginning to feel comfortable as Fleming's debonair, deadly agent and he is pretty sure there is at least one more Bond in him after The World is Not Enough. "We've come this far," he says. "It would be foolish to weigh out when I'm getting the hang of it and rather enjoying it and making it my own, so to speak."

Brosnan recognises the Bond "circus" for what it is, while professing great affection for it and respecting its traditions, including the predictable double entendres and liquorice jokes.

"Would you like to look at the figures?" Bond is asked as a heaving bosom hands him a balance sheet. "I am sure they're perfectly rounded."

And Bond aficionados will not need to be told the nature of the execrable final pun when 007 is caught by a thermal imaging camera as he scores with a pretty scientist called Dr Christmas Jones

"The Bond films bring a lot of joy to people," says Brosnan. "Generations have grown up with them. It's a legacy I am very proud to be part of."

The World is Not Enough opens nationwide on November 26.

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