Director: John Glen
Cast: Roger Moore, Maud Adams, Louis Jourdan, Kristina Wayborn
Have/ I Seen it Before: Sure. TBS, the 90s. That whole bit. Felt a little bit weird writing down the title on a VHS label, but that’s how one started to amass their movie collection with a $5.00 allowance.
I sometimes wonder if re-watching some of these films on those VHS recordings might have a little charm to them. Would it be a delight to take a bathroom break in the middle of this film to see a commercial for the Bigfoot Pizza and In The Mouth of Madness (1995). I may never again see a movie that way again. I’m oddly wistful about that in this moment.
Did I Like It: I’m stalling, aren’t I? There’s a lot of this film that works. Moore in his element, doing switcheroos on Fabregé and making googly eyes at a woman far classier than him. There are several mildly funny digs at the state of the competition—namely Never Say Never Again (1983)—although I may have been reading too much into the “REAL BOND” sign oddly hanging over Moore’s head at one point, and it seems like they’re using about twenty percent more of the Monty Norman theme than the average.
Then there’s the clown thing. I’ve made no secret of how little I think of shooting Ian Fleming’s borderline sociopathic spy into space. It was such a dimly-considered chase of where the movies were in that moment. But in this one, the man gets out of a sticky situation with a nuclear bomb by dressing as a god damned clown. In Moonraker (1979) he tries to take a page out of Luke Skywalker. Here, for no other reason than Moore is a little bored in the role*, decides to start saving the world using Charlie Chaplin’s playbook.
I do dislike that more than the space thing. Sorry, Sir Roger.
*And might have been well-advised to bow-out after the far superior For Your Eyes Only (1981).