ROBERT COTTON Elektra King is the first female lead villain in the series. Strong and well written. She is written along the same lines as Kristatos from FYEO. She begins well, making Bond her protector from the evil Renard only to turn it completely around on him. Deception is the key to her character and the key to everything she does. Daddy's tiepin, the private table at the casino, every word, every action is two faced and she revels in it. Even after torturing Bond to the point of death, she falls back on her ability to deceive. What fun. It's on her face when she tells Bond he won't kill her. She's playing her own odds and enjoying every second of it. Sometimes you win ... Renard is a surprising rewrite of the unfeeling Mr. Stamper from the previous film. A literally unfeeling killer who desperately wants to feel love while his life is slipping away second by second, written better he could have been a milestone in the series, instead he simply becomes the means to a confusing predictable ending. BILL KOENIG I´m in a rut. I´ll stand with my comments from GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies. JAMES McMAHON Elektra King - A new and unique villain to the Bond formula.  Neither we, not Bond, see this one coming.  She attacks Bond where he's weakest.  His physical strength does him no good, and Elektra uses and manipulates Bond without his knowing it.  It's nice to see something fresh in a series as long running as this one.  That said, Sophie Marceau isn't the actress to make this role believable.  Too bad, because it's a great premise and deserved better casting. Renard - A unique entry in the annals of Bond movie villains, a "main" villain who's not the main villain.  Interesting.  Some intriguing plot points are established, such as Renard's devotion to Elektra, and the premise that Renard can't feel physical pain, but we see precious little evidence of either, and he's ultimately far less than the sum of his parts.  Character is not the Bond film's strong suit, but this was a real missed opportunity.

ED WERNER I'm going to have to go with two villains here, Elektra King (Sophie Marceau) and Renard (Robert Carlyle). Renard is the character that you know is a bad guy through most of the film. The fact that he can feel no pain (or pleasure for that matter) is due to a bullet lodged in his brain that is slowly killing him. Let's think about this, you've got a baddie that you can't hurt and knows he's dying. What's to stop him from doing anything he wants? Then we have King, who throughout the first half of the movie, you think is the main Bond girl, only to find out that she's the mastermind behind the whole plot and actually killed her father to get revenge and become the leader of an oil empire. Powerful stuff here. Of the two, I think that Renard is the stronger of the two and you almost actually have to feel sorry for him during certain parts of the film. King is really just a socially retarded, immature, manipulative, homicidal bitch. TOM ZIELINSKI Elektra King - Now we're talking!  The delicious Sophie Marceau as primary antagonist was not readily apparent from the outset, and that the villain is a woman was a major and welcome change.  The plot to disrupt petroleum shipments to corner the oil market is simply the excuse to examine her (and Bond's) dark nature.  Their relationship, culminating with Bond's assassination of Elektra, is the stuff of the great James Bond films.  I wrote when the film was released that TWINE was the best Bond movie since 1969.  That was true at the time, and Sophie Marceau's Elektra is a big reason for it. Renard - Robert Carlyle is a wonderful actor and he brings just the right note of regret and melancholy over his unrequited love for Elektra.  As the man who feels no pain ("What's the point of living if you can't feel alive"), Renard would do anything for her including carrying out her evil plans even with the certainty of his own death.  Really good stuff.  The reveal that he is not the main villain is one of the more surprising and unlikely occurrences in all the films. PAUL BAACK Elektra King is one of the more psychologically complex villains in the series. Her crimes seem to be as much a reaction against her father's seeming abandonment of her, as they are motivated by the standard hunger for riches and power. She's also something of a mystery for James Bond to solve, while he's simultaneously trying to do his job protecting her, falling a little bit in love with her, and slowly coming to distrust her. Similarly, she also engages, at least initially, the audience's sympathy, so it comes as something of a shock when she goes bug-fuck evil and kidnaps M and plans to blow up Istanbul. The most yummy Sophie Marceau's combination of beauty and acting chops make both parts of Elektra's character, and her story arc, believable. Speaking of acting chops, Robert Carlyle similarly arcs his character, the terrorist Renard, from the film's presumptive villain to an (almost) sympathetic, (almost) victim of the sociopathic Elektra. Presented as an unstoppable monster with the power of not being able to feel pain, we finally see him as a dying-by-inches man, unable to feel anything, much less pleasure with the woman he loves. Hey, don't get me wrong, he's still a bad guy that must be stopped, and he gets a worthwhile comeuppance at the hands of 007, to the audience's general approval and entertainment. In this case, though, we get a little more with Renard. Kudos to actor Carlyle, writers Purvis & Wade, and director Michael Apted.

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