Octopussy

Here's another Moore Bond film I didn't really appreciate, mostly because it seemed more concerned with making the audience chuckle than exciting them. It's sort of like Moonraker, but instead of an utterly absurd final act it's just pervasively silly almost the entire time. It's just hard for me to be interested when action sequences are played for laughs instead of any sense of tension or suspense. There's a part on a speeding train late in the movie which is decent, but otherwise it's a pretty goofy film. An early scene in India is less a chase than a personal challenge by the filmmakers to see how many clichés they could stuff into a single scene. Sword swallowers! Walking on hot coals! Juggling torches! I mean, at one point Bond is trying to escape some pursuers in a jungle and swings away from them on some vines, and the iconic Tarzan shout plays. Just for no reason. This movie is fucking stupid.

It does have some decent elements, though. The plot involving Fabergé eggs, nuclear weapons, East/West Berlin, and the tenuous truce between the USSR and the western world is one of the less terrible ones in Moore's tenure. Maud Adams, in a rare return for a Bond girl actress and I believe the only one to do so as a different character, has been treated relatively kindly by time in the nine years since The Man with the Golden Gun, and is still pretty good at it. And I mean, Jaws isn't in it. The main henchman is a big, mostly quiet Indian fellow, and pretty forgettable... but he isn't Jaws. The final action scenes are a mixed bag, the stuff with the circus people in the chateau is silly as usual, but the airplane sequence is fairly tense and an okay climax. It's a shame the movie is so silly, because otherwise it's really not bad.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "All Time High" by Rita Coolidge
Foreign locations: Latin America, India, Germany
Bond, James Bond: 31:20
Martini shaken, not stirred: 1:08:40 (Unspoken)
Ladies seduced: 3
Chases: 2
Kills: 13 humans, 1 spider, plus explosion victims
Non-lethal takedowns: 10