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Octopussy (1983)  Bond: Roger Moore The Villian: Louis Jourdan, Steven Berkoff. The Bond Girl: Maude Adams Director: John Glen IMBD: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086034/ Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab0iK34HCbc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab0iK34HCbc "It was the worst of Bonds, it was the best of Bonds." - Charles Dickens This movie is incredibly uneven, and there is a sharp division between the first and second acts that makes this movie a curiosity to watch. The Bond Franchise went overboard with self parody and stelf depricating humor in "Moonraker" (also directed by Glen), and there was a clear attempt to correct this made in "For your eyes only", by the same director. That movie's tone was more serious, and the humor had been mostly downplayed, and yet for some reason, the humorless jokes are back again in Octopussy, and zanier than ever before with scenes like Bond telling a wild tiger to "Sit!", and the tarzan yell as he swings from vine to vine. These moments actually manage to trump some of the worst scenes in Moonraker, and about halfway through the movie, you feel like the movie is going to end up as fodder for MST3K. There are a couple of good jokes ("I see you're a Toro, too!"), but most of them are just too sophmoric to actually be funny.  No 80's Bond filem would be complete without a sexual innuendo. But then, suddenly out of the blue, you get a fantastically tense race to West Gemany which is one of the best non-stop action sequences in Bond ever, and some suprisingly good acting from Moore which changes the tone of the movie to far more serious than anything previously done by Moore. This is probably his finest hour, and if this had been his last Bond movie, it would have been quite a swansong compared to the steaming pile of dung that is "A view to a Kill".  James Bond in "Raiders of the lost Opportunity". I think that the real problem is the script, which can't make up it's mind what the movie is about. The original plot of the movie centers around General Orlov, but right after the beginning of the movie, this storyline is almost abandoned, and not revisited until the third act. Because there is a lot to do in the meantime, the story with the other villian, played by Jourdan is used as filler to get two hours out of the movie. The smuggling story, and the real motives of General Orlov seem forcibly grafted together, since the tone of each story is so different. This causes me to believe that the two storylines were written independantly of each other, and then put together without much effort to make them fit together cohesively.  Roger Moore screentests for Stephen King's "It". This movie could have been one of the best: The concept of the hunt for Bond in the Jungles of India sounds like a fantastic premise for an entire Bond movie (even better than "Man with the Golden Gun", where the sequence was supposed to originally appear) , but because of way it is handled, all tension is depleted, and it tends to fall flat. For all of the problems with the script, and the producers / writers inability to determine what kind of movie this is (comedy? suspence?), it's still worth watching if you get past the disappointing first act, and just concentrate on the second act, where the movie comes into it's own. My Score:  
Yabanjin fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Sep 21, 2009 |
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Sep 20, 2009 13:50
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 13:28 |
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