[2.6]
Overly long, overly boring, and this is hailed as one of the best films in the Bond franchise? Roger Moore is completely competent as Bond: not as suave as Connery and not as intense as Craig, but just fine. The only problem is that he’s not charismatic or exciting enough to drag this plot out of tedium. His co-star, the only-mildly appealing Barbara Bach, is unconvincing and uninteresting as Bond’s love interest/ enemy, the Russian spy Anya Amasova. With one of the worst Russian accents ever to grace a major motion picture, Bach delivers her lines with no degree of emotion. Is she constantly cool, calm, and collected, or just bored? The opening action scene is handled well enough, with a fairly ludicrous shoot out on a ski slope (set to the disco-enhanced 007 theme music) ending in an amazing aerial shot of “Bond” skiing off a cliff, free falling for several seconds, and then up pops his Union Jack parachute. It’s a really incredible shot, taken from a distance in a single take, zooming out to reveal just how far the stunt double falls before he pulls his parachute. I can hardly imagine how much they would have to pay a stunt double, if they could even get insurance to cover it. Too bad the rest of this ‘action’ movie fails to match this sequence. The plot is hard to understand at first (a rich man living in a giant underwater spider has kidnapped both the American and Russian submarines that contain nuclear warheads), and the manner in which the two Cold War allies team up so easily and quickly isn’t exactly believable. There could have been some chemistry between Bond and Amasova, but it’s hard to get past the fact that they are simultaneously working together and against each other. The scene in Egypt makes no sense (Jaws shows up at some exhibition to kill some guy, and then shows up later at some club to kill some other guy…but at least the latter HAD something: the ubiquitous microfilm), but the car chase is pretty decent, especially when the Lotus flies into the water and transforms into a mini-sub. But, the last fight sequence takes way way too long to set-up and execute. Bond and Amasova go on an American sub, which gets captured by baddie Karl Stromberg, who reveals that he wants to blow up Moscow and New York in order to start his plans of building an underwater civilization (ummm, nevermind). After a long time, Bond escapes and fights all of the nondescript henchman, throwing their bodies over railings and punching them out with one punch, in action scenes that should be thrilling, but are the epitome of tedious. Bond disarms some warhead, but uses it to blow open some wall, and the American forces rush in and easily disarm the villains, while heroically (err, recklessly?) changing the missile courses at the last moment so that they blow themselves up (killing all aboard)! Then, Bond easily gets back on Stromberg’s Giant Spider and dodges a slow-moving bullet before quickly dispensing of Stromberg (worst fight with the main villain that I’ve seen in a while). His fight with Jaws is a little more interesting, sending him into the shark tank by using a giant magnet to attract Jaws’ metal teeth. Then, Bond and Amasova escape in the nick of time in some sort of pod and, just as she is about to kill him in revenge for Bond killing her ex-lover, he turns on his, ahem, ‘sex charm’, and they end up making love instead. What? The one-liners aren’t funny, the action is week, and I just waited for this long-winded mess to be over.
burning retina 