Octopussy (1983)

Starring: Roger Moore, Geoffrey Keen, Maud Adams, Louis Jourdan, Steven Berkoff, Desmond Llewelyn, Kristina Wayborn, Kabir Bedi, Robert Brown, Douglas Wilmer

Director: John Glen

Genre: Action, Adventure, Thriller

Rating: C

I went into this movie with a lot of doubt and hesitation.  One of my biggest complaints about this series as a whole has been the depiction of women and I was rather concerned when I saw the title.  I mean... Octopussy?  Really?  It's not the worst name for a woman that the Bond films have used, but it's pretty much up there.  The fact that this is one of the more recent films - it's from the eighties! - makes this a more bothersome fact.  I would hope that these movies would be getting less misogynistic as they go on, but alas.

Octopussy sees Bond (Moore) investigating the murder of another MI6 agent, 009 (Andy Bradford), and the replacement of a Fabergé egg with a fake.  Bond travels the world in order to find 009's killer and... along the way meets a woman named Octopussy (Adams) and uncovers a plot to detonate a nuclear warhead on an American army base.  Along the way there's also a ridiculous bit at the circus, because everyone wants to see Bond dressed up as a clown.

Honestly, I'm really not sure just what the hell happened in this movie.  It was just.... so very, very weird.  I'm not sure if I would say that I disliked it so much as it confused me and left me uninterested.  It tries to be serious but at the same time fails to be so in a way that just doesn't really work.  When it was on I wasn't really annoyed by it, but when it was over I wasn't really disappointed that it was over.  Actually, I was more relieved, which is never really a good sign for a movie.  James Bond, you can do better.

The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

Starring: Roger Moore, Bernard Lee, Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland, Maud Adams, Hervé Villechaize, James Cossins, Clifton James

Director: Guy Hamilton

Genre: Action, Adventure, Thriller

Rating: B-

Holy fuck these movies are racist.  That was what went through my mind pretty much the entirety of this movie.  The series, so far, is rife with stereotypes and negative depictions of anyone who isn’t a white British subject.  These movies are really racist – like ridiculously so – and just seem to get worse as they go on.  Likewise with the misogamy.  I wouldn’t say James Bond, the character, is himself a mysoganist, but the movies definitely paint women in a certain way.

The Man with the Golden Gun takes Bond (Moore) back to Asia, this time Thailand where he’s searching for assassin Francisco Scaramanga (Lee), known as the man with the golden gun because he has a golden gun that he uses to shoot people with gold bullets.  One such bullet was sent to MI6 with Bond’s code etched into it, leading them to believe that Bond is his next target.  Along the way, Bond acquires an assistant in the form of Miss Goodnight (Ekland), who he is rather determined to sleep with, flirts heavily with Scaramanga’s mistress Andrea Anders (Adams), and comes up against Sacramanga’s dwarf manservant Nick Nack (Villechaize).

Midway through the movie I sent a friend a text saying “I just saw James Bond give a sumo wrestler a wedgie before being knocked out by an ugly midget.”  I’m not sure what else I can say to critique this film than the massive “what the fuck” that I thought when I saw that scene and that I’m expecting you thought when you read that sentence.  I think if I really put a lot into a review of this movie it would involve taking this movie as serious, and I can’t take something serious that involves a scene like that.

I kind of came to that conclusion about mid-way through this movie; if I don’t take them seriously and just go with the flow, no matter how ridiculous it gets, they’re more enjoyable. I don’t think these are actually good movies, but they can be fun.  That having been said, I'm still kind of annoyed with Miss Goodnight for sleeping with Bond.