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.

Taxi (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Only the IFC has dared to open against the Bond picture today, although none of its three new offerings is particularly notable. Much the most entertaining of them is the action movie, Taxi, scripted and produced by Luc Besson and so heavily influenced by American cinema that it invokes Pulp Fiction in its opening music and is replete with nods to US movies of the genre. In Britain it is released today simultaneously in sub-titled and dubbed versions.

Set in Marseilles, the movie's slender story-line revolves around Daniel (Samy Naceri), a young pizza delivery man turned taxi driver who relishes speed and leaving his passengers gasping for breath, and Emilien (Frederic Diefenthal), a young police officer who has failed his driving test for the eighth time and coerces Daniel to help him catch German bank robbers who flee in powerful Mercedes from the scenes of their crimes.

The likeable, unfamiliar young leading actors lend the formulaic proceedings a certain freshness in a movie where the driving and the stunts constitute the movie's raison d'etre, even though its lean 85-minute running time contains a good deal of unwelcome padding before it cuts to the chase. The action sequences are efficiently directed by Gerard Pires, making a feature film comeback after years working in commercials - many of them for cars.

The Children of the Marshland/ Les Enfants du Marais (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

Another veteran French film director, Jean Becker, makes poor use of an accomplished cast in his sentimental and turgid film of disparate characters observed over the course of an early 1930s summer in Les Enfants du Marais. This exercise in Rare Auld Times a la francaise is a contrived and patronising picture of bucolic provincial life populated by would-be endearing eccentrics and salt-of-the-earth simple folk given to uttering lines such as, "We're paupers, but we have our pride".

The focus of the film is on two of them - the brooding, war-traumatised and too-good-to-be-true Garris (Jacques Gamblin) and his bumbling neighbour Riton, played by Jacques Villeret, the John Belushi look-alike who was the butt of the nasty humour in the recent Le Diner de Cons. Director Becker unwisely allows Villeret to overact wildly, although his hamming is eclipsed by the ludicrous over-playing by Eric Cantona in the underwritten role of a hot-tempered boxer.

For no imaginable reason Becker ladles on some intermittent narration, purportedly viewing events which she could not have understood, even if she had witnessed them, by a five-year-old girl who amounts to a peripheral character. Her function does prompt such grating cliches as voice-over statements that declare "September went by, like all Septembers".

LA Without a Map (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

The quirky Finnish filmmaker, Mika Kaurismaki, makes a lamentable US debut with the plodding and tiresome LA Without a Map, which he and Richard Rayner adapted from Rayner's autobiographical novel of the same name. It opens in England, in a Bradford cemetery where Richard, an undertaker played by the gormless David Tennant, becomes so smitten by an aspiring American actress (Vinessa Shaw) that he drops everything, including his girlfriend (Saskia Reeves), to follow her to Los Angeles.

This rambling and consistently heavy-handed movie follows the parallel problems in her acting ambitions and his attempts as a screenwriter, along with the impact of these upsets on their personal relationship. The shallowness of Los Angeles life and the duplicity and pretentiousness of the city's overpowering film industry are the softest of targets for satire, but only the perfectly oily portrayal of a wholly insincere Hollywood agent by James LeGros gets remotely close to the cutting edge of superior antecedents such as The Player.

An eclectic, briefly featured and absurdly underused supporting cast includes Vincent Gallo, Joe Dallesandro, Amanada Plummer, Cameron Bancroft, Anouk Aimee and Johnny Depp. And as a reminder of Kaurismaki's altogether more interesting Finnish films, there's a cameo from the flamboyant Leningrad Cowboys.

Jim Morris, the president of Lucas Digital, the largest and most advanced special effects company in the world, is among the speakers lined up for The Big Picture 2, a conference designed to explore the key concerns and opportunities facing film, television and multimedia professionals, which will be held in Clarinbridge, Galway next Thursday and Friday. It will be chaired by producer and strategy consultant Jonathan Olsberg, and the keynote address will be given by the Arts Minister, Sile de Valera.

The speakers also include film producer Arthur Lappin; critic and broadcaster Mark Cousins; Ossie Kilkenny, who chaired the recent government film industry think tank; Bo Erhardt of Nimbus Film Production, which pioneering the Dogme low-budget style of film-making; and Gerry Reynolds, head of broadcasting, RTE. Booking and further information are available on (01) 6708177 and at ion@indigo.ie.