The Long Road to Redemption

Any time a thought about rewatching the James BondThe world's most famous secret agent, James Bond has starred not only in dozens of books but also one of the most famous, and certainly the longest running, film franchises of all time. films comes up, I always dread it. Specifically it’s because of the Roger Moore era. He is the most prolific Bond in the series clocking in seven, the highest of any actor so far to take on the role, and his films vary wildly in quality. I’ve groused about the Connery era previously, and it does have its issues, but Moore’s films are just so bad, generally speaking, that it’s really hard to muster the energy to watch his films without some kind of incentive (such as doing them all as part of the podcast).

Which is a pity because I do think, honestly, that Moore himself is a pretty solid Bond. He’s a good actor who tries his level best to actually elevate the films around him while embodying all he can about the role. His Bond isn’t quite as much of a lech as Connery’s (although there are times where he does get pretty skeezy), and there’s no doubt that he’s not the best action performer among all the Bonds. But he does try, and he does all he can to not make his films complete crap. Sometimes it works, and other times it does not.

Certainly his first film is one of the worst of his set. Live and Let Die was clearly designed as a Connery film, with Moore stepping into the role after Connery elected not to return again (after he returned post-Lazenby for Diamonds Are Forever). The film feels like it was written with Connery’s performance in mind, and Moore just has to play that kind of character even though he feels ill-suited to, well, everything about the film. Whoever thought putting a white, British man in the middle of a Blaxploitation film really needed someone to set them down and say “no.”

Live and Let Die is awful. It’s a racist and misogynistic film that doesn’t even seem to know how bad it is, capped by a boring villain that isn’t able to carry his side of the movie. Moore makes attempts at playing a Connery-style Bond so that the film at least works, but his efforts don’t really help matters. Plus, he seems like he’s uncomfortable any time the film makes him be sexual with his co-star, a young Jane Seymour. Really just about every aspect of this film needed a big rethink. It’s a bad first step for Moore, and the era takes a while to get going after this first stumble.

In fairness, the next two films are better even if they don’t completely correct the sins of Live and Let Die. The second effort was The Man with the Golden Gun, which pits Moore’s Bond against a trained killer who wants to test his mettle against the famed secret agent. That villain, Francisco Scaramanga, is played by an always fantastic Christopher Lee, and it feels like the two actors really worked well together here, playing off each other in their various scenes. When it’s hero versus villain, the movie sings.

Unfortunately the film doesn’t have faith that a cat-and-mouse storyline between Bond and Scaramanga is enough, so it also saddles the villain with a standard McGuffin that can be used to end the world, and he has to demand a big payout from the world’s countries because this is a James Bond film and that’s how things are done. The entire last act gets ridiculous, to the point that even the final confrontation between Bond and Scaramanga feels forced. It runs out of steam right when it should have gotten good, knocking this film down in score a few pegs.

The Spy Who Loved Me, the third film in Moore’s era, is also flawed, but for different reasons. This time we have Bond pairing up with his Russian counterpart, Barbara Bach's Anya Amasova, aka Agent XXX, and the two have to work together to get… well, another McGuffin that doesn’t really matter, long term. Moore’s era is littered with McGuffins that could destroy the world, and this is just one of many. That’s really a problem for this whole era because after you see Bond stop a few of these threats, you start to notice how recycled all the plots are, and this one feels especially recycled.

The good parts of the film come from the interplay between Moore’s Bond and Bach’s Amasova. The two have their own cat-and-mouse game, feeling each other out and searching for weaknesses, and you honestly get the vibe that if Bond could be paired with more secret agents to work with, there might actually be a good formula here. Unfortunately the last act completely sidelines Amasova, making her little more than a damsel in distress for Bond to save while he takes out the completely forgettable villain in the process. What started as a solid new take on James Bond material becomes just another boring retread of the same old story, and The Spy Who Loved Me sinks right as it could have swum.

With that said, Moonraker is much worse. Coming on the heels of The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker is such a bold rehash of the same material that you have to wonder if the writers were stupid or just incredibly lazy. Bond pairs with an American counterpart, Lois Chiles's Holly Goodhead, so the two can find a McGuffin that could end the world, all while an incredibly boring villain tries to end it. The only real difference between the two stories is that The Spy Who Loved Me had a villain obsessed with the oceans, while Moonraker takes place in space. Otherwise they feel like badly crafted carbon copies.

It’s obvious the only reason that Moonraker exists is because EON Productions, the company behind the James Bond series, wanted a film that could compete with the then new original Star WarsThe modern blockbuster: it's a concept so commonplace now we don't even think about the fact that before the end of the 1970s, this kind of movie -- huge spectacles, big action, massive budgets -- wasn't really made. That all changed, though, with Star Wars, a series of films that were big on spectacle (and even bigger on profits). A hero's journey set against a sci-fi backdrop, nothing like this series had ever really been done before, and then Hollywood was never the same. films. “Let’s put James in space!” was the whole thought process, and then they recycled as much as they could to space adventure out the door two years after The Spy Who Loved Me. Quality wasn’t the concern, they just wanted to compete. I guess they succeeded on that front, but Moonraker is otherwise a bad effort all around.

It’s odd, then, that after four questionable films, Moore finally gets one really good one. For Your Eyes Only is a legitimately decent spy thriller, with James called in to, yes, find a McGuffin that could be used to cause much havoc in the world. But where the other Moore films didn’t really seem to understand how to utilize Bond as a secret agent, this film makes him actually work, doing espionage, going undercover, making connections. He’s a spy, and the film makes him do spy things, which feels practically novel for these movies.

It does help that the film isn’t a complete retread of plots we’ve seen before. A double-agent for the Soviet Union gets a U.K. control chip that could reveal their whole fleet, and Bond needs to find a way to get it back. First, though, he has to figure out who the bad guy even is, gathering intel and working his connections, all before he can even begin to play the role of action hero and actually do the various Bond things we’re used to. It’s a tighter, leaner story that has some solid twists and turns, and it actually makes you realize that if Moore was just given good material he could actually turn out a good James Bond film.

Sadly that doesn’t happen very often. Octopussy almost immediately ruins it all, being a massive step back for the series right as it started to get good. Here James is put on the case of a potentially counterfeit Faberge egg, and this gets him sucked into a plot about stolen Russian treasures, illegal exporting, and a circus. Weirdly there are aspects of the film that work, like the plot the film sets up about agents working within the USSR to try and bring down the Western world order, but it mashes so many other ideas on top that the whole thing ends up feeling like a sloppy mess.

The big issue is the circus. The film, for whatever reason, thinks that setting much of its plot around evil circus performers is somehow interesting. It has to struggle to get this part of the plot going, and then it wastes a lot of time on the plot machinations just to continue justifying all these baffling decisions. By the time a nuke has been snuck onto a circus train so it can roll into West Germany, you no longer care if the idea makes sense or not. James is in clown makeup and you’re utterly bored. Octopussy is just plain bad.

Thankfully the era is nearly over. For his seventh and final film, A View to a Kill, Moore (looking pretty damn long in the tooth at this point), is stranded in a dull rehash of Goldfinger. Moore’s Bond is put up against a terribly miscast Christopher Walken, who plays Russian agent-turned-tech industrialist Max Zorin, and the whole time I kept waiting for Pussy Galore to wander in and spice things up. Before we even got to a scene with a dirigible crashing on the Golden Gate Bridge, my brain had shut off.

The fact that the film, which has Zorin trying to crash the tech market so he can control the entire world’s flow of microchips, basically is just a bas relief rubbing of Goldfinger is the main thing holding it back. We’ve seen this plot before, and it was done much better eleven films back. But even if we can set the rehashed plot aside, Zorin isn’t that interesting of a character and Bond’s love interest, Tanya Roberts's Stacey Sutton, is even more forgettable. Nothing about this film really clicks together like it should, leaving you bored long before the explosions happen.

If I could, I’d go back and say, “hey, let’s just end Moore’s era with For Your Eyes Only.” It features Moore right at the tail end of his prime, which he was still fun to watch and didn’t seem too old for the role. It had a good story, with solid production values, and it gave Moore his best film of the era. He could go out on a high note, and the writers could have had time to come up with better plots than Octopussy and A View to a Kill. Sadly, that didn’t happen, and Moore’s Bond slides out into retirement on a couple of duds.

In the end, what does Moore have? One good James Bond film, two marginally okay ones, and four duds. It feels like we have to evaluate which of the bad films are the worst, which sucks because I really do like Moore as Bond. He just got some of the worst material in the whole franchise.

Ranking Moore’s Films (Best to Worst):

1. For Your Eyes Only
2. The Spy Who Loved Me
3. The Man with the Golden Gun
4. Moonraker
5. Octopussy
6. A View to a Kill
7. Live and Let Die