“By this point, Roger Moore has certainly found his niche in the Bond world. He’s the ridiculous one. We talked about this ad nauseum in Moonraker, but the insanity doesn’t end there. Oh no. Not by a long shot. Let’s look at Octopussy. There’s the fake horse hiding the getaway plane at the beginning of the film, which isn’t as insane as the fake alligator hiding Bond sneaking onto Octopussy’s island later. Clown who turns out to be a secret agent is chased to his death early on. Sure, that’s fine. Until you set most of the climax at a circus and put Bond in clown makeup. Then there’s that chase scene in India (I couldn’t YouTube it in English, but it’s the visual that matters).
I should clarify. I do like comedy in my action movies. However, I like for it to be smart comedy, not slapstick. I also feel that James Bond, in particular, needs to be smooth yet edgy. He’s approaching Maxwell Smart territory. As much as I adore Agent 86, that’s not what I want in Agent 007. The one gag that did make me chuckle was the assistant posing as a snake charmer who played the Bond theme to get our man’s attention.
Also, what is it with villains and their weird obsessions. Goldfinger and his gold. Octopussy and her Octopi. My dad called me Precioussss, that doesn’t mean that this blog is named Preciousss or that my cats are Gollum and Smeagol, or that I wear a gold ring on a chain and find myself hiking up volcanoes. Boundaries, people, c’mon.
Time to talk about those opening credits (YouTube, why have you failed me?!) We’ve got another theme independently titled from the movie, this time Rita Coolidge with “”All Time High””. Mixed feelings on the visuals. We’ve got some laser lighting projecting 007 across the girls. That’s new. I realize I’m okay with the 3-dimensional looking girls like we have here, instead of the flatter ones we’d been seeing earlier. Or at least I thought that until there was the close up near naked torso shot (oh maybe that’s why it’s not on YouTube). Some fun silhouette play, I’m liking that this is a thing now, but those figure skating spins? Didn’t we have a figure skater in the last movie? Yeah, how well did that turn out?”