Octopussy

Tuesday 20th May

Onto the penultimate Roger Moore film; problem is from the title and previous Moore experience I’ve decided I hate it before I even put it on.  

So we start in East Berlin with a clown; who is actually agent 009 (why doesn’t he get his own films!) being chased and killed by knife-throwing twins – well it’s a more original start than *insert big pieces of machinery* has been stolen and someone’s annoyed.  Instead a dying clown annoys a group on people by falling through their window on party night holding a counterfeit Faberge egg.

To help him get over the death of his friend, Bond is off to a Sotherby’ auction to look at shiny things; and some hope that this film might not be so bad begins to rise. Unfortunately we’re not shopping for very long, just to witness the auction of the aforementioned Faberge egg for an obscene amount of money; bitter that he didn’t win Bond swaps the original egg for a fake, a clever idea but it didn’t really do much good.

Bond doesn’t actually meet Octopussy until at least halfway through the film, and thankfully it’s merely an unfortunate nickname her father gave her. As always when Bond seems to be making a lady-friend drama ensues and someone tries to kill them both; giving Bond a way out; essentially faking his own death to avoid any of the “you never called me” conversations later on.

Back to Germany, back to the circus and back to the knife throwing twins, but now as well as knives they have a rather powerful bomb that the Russians are out to cause mischief with.  Something I don’t think we’ve seen before is Bond chasing a train in a car, I’m pretty sure that until this point all the vehicle chases we’ve seen have been fairly matched and it’s no surprise that the poor car end up in a canal.

The Russian bomb is poised to go off in the middle of a circus show on a US airbase in Germany – at least I think that’s what happened… it’s the final few seconds as Bond struggles to convince people to the existence of the bomb; though in their defence you don’t normally believe the things people dressed as clowns believe you. Surely with such a powerful device disarming it is out of the question, well apparently not and when all else fails you just take it apart yourself, with 1 second to spare of course, just for added affect.

Of all the Moore films this one isn’t bad I mean a man got killed by taking an octopus to the face, at one point Roger Moore was dressed as a crocodile and at another a gorilla and Q came to the rescue in a hot air balloon so it can’t be classed as terrible if only for those bits.  It didn’t bore me though personally I would have liked a bit more of the whole Octopussy diamond merchant story and a bit less hide and seek in a circus caravan park.