Spy Who Loved Me
By the time we get to the tenth installment of the James Bond franchise, certain elements were sadly starting to repeat themselves and it showed, despite the insistence of many fans that this is the best of the series. Lewis Gilbert was brought back here as director, and as such with his earlier You Only Live Twice, the villain’s lair is a vast steel structure manned by more uniformed henchmen than you can shake a stick at, and it’s all topped off by a long battle scene involving these soldiers and a platoon of good guys led by 007 who were all previously prisoners being held after capture. Likewise, the main villain of the piece, Stromberg, comes off as a lame Blofeld knock-off, a super-rich megalomaniac who wants to start a nuclear war so he can rebuild society in his underwater city (a shaky master plan as it was), but as played by Curt Jurgens, fails to make much of an impression beyond that of your usual arrogant fiend. That being said, Roger Moore continues to impress as Bond himself, even as he drops the habit of his wry one-liners and tries to come off as more ruthless (with a interesting reference to his late wife from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service). We also get not just one, but two of the hottest Bond girls on record: Barbara Bach as the Russian secret agent paired with Bond has beautiful blue eyes and luscious lips to match the rest of her goddess-like beauty, and holds her own pretty well to 007’s usual lusting; plus we get Caroline Munro in the sadly underwritten and underdeveloped role of Stromberg’s henchwoman, looking gorgeous whenever she’s on screen but sadly taken out in a way too abrupt manner. Even better is the inclusion of arguably the greatest of all Bond henchmen in Richard Kiel’s Jaws, an indestructible killing machine with steel teeth and a 7 foot 2 frame, always coming back whether being blown up in a car wreck only to dust himself off and walk away while his co-workers burn, to getting tossed in a shark tank only to have things end very badly for the SHARK, Kiel achieved a measure of immortality here, perhaps the only one to overshadow Harold Sakata’s Oddjob for being one of cinema’s greatest mercenaries. The usual Bond movie elements are all in place as expected, allowing the action to flow fast and free, as Bond spends much of this movie in Egypt as well as the Mediterranean kicking ass and taking names. Overall, while not totally worthy of the hushed tones that many speak of it in, a solid entry that could have benefitted from a little more originality…
7/10