Octopussy (1983)
Unfortunately,
For Your Eyes Only finished on about as low a note as possible, so surely things can only be uphill for the follow-up, the marvellously-named
Octopussy. But can Moore still convince in the title role? And after the down-to-earth course corrections of the last movie will
Octopussy really get the series back on track?
Pre-Existing Prejudices:
Moore in clown make-up. Something about an egg. Jumbled-up memories of India and a countdown. Nothing overly suspicious (well, OK, maybe the clown make-up), though it will come as no surprise to know that I’m aware this movie has a less-than-stellar reputation. Still, so did
The Man With The Golden Gun and I ended up really rather liking it, so let’s go into this with an open mind and hope that some redemption can be found.
The Actual Movie:
This time we get to open on some trucks! And a Range Rover with a horse box! Feel the glamour… There’s a Castro-alike (green combat fatigues, beard, cigar) who steps over to a woman in a white dress. Bond steps out of the Land Rover in full tweeds and flat cap and changes into the same green combat fatigues that not-Castro is wearing, while the woman tells him to be careful and gives him a stick-on moustache. We get the first pun of the movie as his cover name is revealed as “Toro” – “sounds like a load of bull”. Sigh. Bond makes his way past some soldiers, and plants a bomb on some unidentified equipment, before being taken prisoner by the real Toro and his bomb removed. Well this is fairly standard fare but it’s pleasingly low-key – just Bond on a mission I guess. The woman helping him sees Bond being driven away as a prisoner and pursues in the Land Rover. She shows a bit of leg to distract the guards (who are handily wearing parachutes) and Bond pulls their ripcords to get rid of them. There’s a small fight, which sadly ends up with the truck crashing into a chicken coop, then Bond informs her he’ll “see her in Miami” before the horse box opens to reveal a small plane which Bond takes off in. But it’s not over yet – a missile is fired at Bond and there’s a bit of (fairly decent) areal acrobatics as he tries to avoid it. He flies back to the hanger with the missile in hot pursuit and uses it to destroy the thing he was trying to destroy before (they don’t bother to tell us what it is, but then again they didn’t bother to give the woman helping him a name, or even an exit line). Then the plane shows a fuel warning and he lands by a gas station. “Fill her up”. Well, that didn’t last long.
Wow, this is the worst Bond theme and title sequence we’ve ever had. By quite some distance in fact.
Well, now that monstrosity is over, we’re off to East Berlin, and a circus featuring a fleeing clown, in full wig and grease-paint get-up and trailing balloons. The clown looks terrified (makes a change from clowns terrifying others I guess) and is being pursued by some knife-throwing henchpeople, who eventually get him with a knife in the back. His body floats off down the river, but he’s not quite dead yet, and makes it to the British Embassy, where he crashes unconvincingly thorough some French windows and drops a Faberge egg. That was a good sequence, actually. Then we’re off to the Moneypenny scene (standard fair, though some nice line deliveries from Lois Maxwell) before Bond gets to meet a new M (played by Robert Brown – no explanation is given on-screen for the changeover) and Fanning. Bond is told the clown was in fact fellow agent 009, killed on his mission. He’s shown the egg the clown died protecting (there’s a sentence you don’t get to write every day) and is informed it’s a fake – the real one is being auctioned that very day at Sotheby’s and Bond is to accompany Fanning to the sale. The Minister (yup, he’s there too) tells Bond he thinks the fakes may be a way of raising funding but that “it’s not a lot to go on”. No kidding. Then we’re off to Russia and some kind of Soviet council meeting, where our old friend Gogol is present as is… oh dear, Steven Berkoff as Orlov, who has apparently never heard a Russian accent before. He’s agitating for war while the rest of the council are proposing adopting NATO guidelines. He has a plan to take over big chunks of Europe but is held back by the Soviet chairman. Then we cut to the Kremlin Art Repository, where Orlov is informed a reproduction has been stolen – the one 009 died to get back to Britain. Orlov tells them he will reach their people in London to get the original back. Then Sotheby’s, because auction houses are certainly the home of action movies…. Bond starts budding to see how badly the purchaser wants the egg, and spots a beautiful woman, Magda, standing beside Kamal Khan, who buys it. Back at M’s office, Bond informs M that he switched the fake egg for the real one, and that Mr Khan and his blonde assistant went to India, so that’s where he’s off to now…
And that’s where we are. A bit of the usual standard establishing shots – the Taj Mahal (nowhere near Udaipur), the Ganges, you know the sort of thing. Bond gets off a boat while a snake charmer plays the Bond theme. Yuk. Anyway this is Vijay and we also get to meet the Head of Section, who drives a tuk-tuk. The Monsoon Palace is where Khan hangs out, we’re told, but first to the hotel where Khan plays backgammon. After checking in (why
do all the Bond movies feel the need to show us this? We understand how check-in desks work!) Bond spies the blonde boarding a boat with an Octopus flag… then it’s later, and off we go to the backgrammon table where Khan is playing against the Major (sweaty colonial type) and Bond approaches Magda at the bar. She basically gives him the brush-off, then back to the backgrammon table, where Bond takes over from the Major and puts up the Faberge egg as a bet. Switching dice, he wins, exposing Khan as a bit of a fraud and is advised to “spend your winnings quickie” while his henchperson, Gobinda, crushes the dice with his bare hands. There’s a bit of casual racism (“that should keep you in curry for a few weeks” says Bond as he hands fat wads notes to the section chief), then Bond and Vijay are off in the tuk-tuk again. Bond informs Vijay they’re being followed, to which the reply is, “no problem, this is a company car!”, so cue the chase sequence. Vijay looks positively thrilled at the prospect of being possibly chased to death, and holds off a few henchpeople in the pursuing jeep with tennis rackets (complete with comedy “bwoooing!” sound effects). They briefly abandon the tuk-tuk so we can get a walk (well, run) through of a few stereotypical bits of Indian culture (firewalkers, a man lying on a bed of nails, a sword-swallower – all dreadful and unfunny) then back to the tuk-tuk to make their escape into the bit of the film that Q’s in. The standard “comedy” weapons are tested, then we’re told a homing device and microphone have been placed in the Faberge egg (Bond can track it with a startlingly cheap-looking Seiko watch), plus a fountain pen full of acid, and some crash-zooms on a pair of breasts. Hilarious! Christ, Connery’s movies weren’t that sexist and they were made twenty years ago…
Back at the hotel, Magda is waiting, and they share a meal, then a bed (during the dinner scene Moore is outright awful and she’s not a lot better) where Bond asks about her tattoo and is met with the immortal line, “that’s my little Octopussy!”. Ah but outside the hotel Gobinda is dropped off… The next morning, she steals the egg (though Bond is aware) and she makes her exit off the balcony, which is at least an unusual way out, and is picked up by Khan. Bond is knocked out, somewhat unceremoniously, by Gobinda. Khan is rowed across to an island palace with the egg… and delivers it to a mysterious woman in a kimono feeding an octopus. Khan is keeping Bond at the Monsoon Palace, but the mysterious woman insists Bond is brought to her. Cut to – Bond at the Monsoon Palace, and Moore has never looked so old as he gazes out the window. Then he’s taken to dinner, where Magda and Khan are waiting for them. There’s some guarded conversation, the serving of “stuffed sheep’s head” including Khan eating the eye (I suppose we should be grateful it’s not monkey brains), then Bond is sent off to bed. Alone. Though rather amusingly for people who think Craig and Bardem flirting with each other in
Skyfall was the first obviously gay moment for a Bond, here Bond does invite Gobinda in for a nightcap in what doesn’t appear to be just a crass gay joke, which is rather unexpected. He uses his acid fountain pen to get past the bars on his window and creeps round the outside of the palace as a helicopter lands – it’s the Russians, and Berkoff’s Unfortunate Accent! Bond slips back inside the palace through Magda’s room and follows the Faberge egg, listening in to the conversation between Orlov and Khan via the bugged egg on an earpiece. Bond misses part of the conversation thanks to a hairdryer (!) while
something is loaded on to the helicopter in a metal cylinder. Orlov destroys the fake egg, revealing the bug inside (Orlov misses this, somehow but Khan doesn’t) – Bond hides in a meat storage room to avoid detection, complete with bodies, and gets locked in as Orlov departs. Bond escapes in a body bag as the other corpses are removed during an elephant hunt (naturally), and Bond legs it, while Khan declares, “let the sport begin!” Yes, Bond is being hunted by men on elephants now, as he runs through the jungle and encounters the usual collection of animals – tarantulas, a tiger, a snake. Then – for fuck’s sake – we get Bond swinging through the trees doing a Tarzan yell, dealing with leeches, a crocodile (this one appears to be wind-up), but finally he makes it to the banks of a river (which river? Good question), and onto a tourist boat. “Mr Bond is a very rare breed,” Khan informs us, “soon to be made… extinct!” Louis Jordan appears to be drunk delivering these lines. I don’t blame him one little bit.
Back at the hotel, Bond has a quick word with Vijay about the wealthy woman Khan reported to earlier. She’s known as Octopussy, so there’s a danger we might be getting to the point of the movie, and she lives on the island where no men are allowed (“sexual discrimination” muses Bond, idiotically), so he’s off to pay a visit, arriving in a hilariously unconvincing underwater crocodile disguise/submersible. Bond sneaks into Octopussy’s room and they share some chat. He asks why 009 was killed over the egg, though she knows nothing. She mentions General Smythe, and we get some backstory the end result of which is that he killed himself and Octopussy is his daughter. She wanted to thank Bond giving her father the dignity of suicide rather than face trial as a traitor, but as she does there’s a knock on the door and a spandex-clad lady announces Khan, who strides in and announces Bond has escaped. He’s curtly dismissed, and rather furious about it, and we’re told that it was Octopussy’s father that gave her that nickname. Eesh. Bond is shown to his room by some more spandex-clad ladies (they look like cut-price superheroes). Khan meets with some fellows who he bribes to kill Bond (with a sort of chainsaw yoyo) but, “the woman must not be harmed.” Meanwhile Vijay and Q are keeping an eye out for Bond from the opposite bank. Bond finds a flyer for Octopussy’s Circus, she announces that she’s off to Europe for business, then throws a strop about not needing to apologize to Bond for what she is. Bond beds her as a way of convincing her “they are two of a kind” – this is all deeply awful, and ends on a pan to a fucking chandelier. Back to Vijay, and he’s unceremoniously taken out by the chainsaw yoyo, while the attackers Khan paid slip onto the island. Bond and Octopussy are attacked, there’s a fight (lots of chainsaw yoyo action!), one of the attackers is killed by the octopus, Bond and his attackers go out a window… and Bond makes his escape in the crocodile thing from earlier. Q helps him on to the bank, Moore has his one moment of acting so far in the movie over Vijay’s dead body, and we’re of to East Berlin. To go to a circus.
M is there and gives Bond his cover, and… yes, it’s Checkpoint Charlie (M bails before crossing into Soviet territory)! Then we actually
are at the circus – some blindfold knife-throwing, a human cannonball – and Octopussy and General Orlov are there. The knife-throwing duet are the two guys who took out 009 at the start of the movie (how very, very long ago that seems). It sounds like the band are about to start playing the theme to Monty Python (which would have been genuinely funny), but sadly don’t. Bond grabs a stagehand jacket – not his most detailed disguise – and they all pile on a train. We get to see the cylinder that was loaded onto the Soviet helicopter earlier (that feels like ages ago too) and is full of jewels, while a fake Romanov star is revealed in Moscow, then back to the train where the cylinder is being loaded (and welded in, no less). Bond is underneath the train as it takes off, having overheard some plans, and the train car with the jewels is switched out for one with a nuclear bomb. Bond realizes its going to be set off at an American airbase in West Germany, while Octopussy informs Orlov and Khan that the jewels will get them 300 million. Bond breaks into the train car but one of the knife throwers is there. He takes him out with a human-cannonball cannon (as stupid as it sounds) and he slips into a disguise. The canister with the jewels is loaded into a car, and Orlov goes into the train car… and is taken hostage by Bond. “Who are you?” Orlov asks. “I’m British secret service,” replies Moore, convincing no one. There’s a bit of explain-the-plot (a nuclear bomb will detonate on the American airbase, everyone will assume it was an accident rather than having been fired from Russia, which will result in unilateral disarmament across Europe, so Orlov can walk in. What?), then Orlov escapes. Of course. In a train. Of course. Bond pursues in Orlov’s car which… um, ends up getting its tyres shot out so he drives the car on to the rails (lucky Mercedes manufacture cars with the same gauge as train tracks, really). Some rear-projection takes out Bond’s car as he gets on to the train with the bomb… wait, is any of this making sense? And didn’t I start watching this film about a week ago? Orlov’s car (the one Bond wrecked) is dragged out of the lake and Gogol finds the jewels. My, that recovery truck turned up quickly. Oh, and Bond is now hiding in a gorilla suit. A train pulls out of a station, crossing the border into West Germany… Gogol’s helicopter approaches… Orlov, still following in a car, sees the train and tries to run across the border, only to be shot by the guards, who he must have
known would shoot him. Christ that was dumb. Gogol catches up with him before he dies and calls him a common criminal, which Orlov agrees with, then says that the following day he will be a hero of the Soviet Union. Then he, and one of the weirdest performances in all of James Bond, dies.
The nuclear bomb has been set! There’s no tension here whatsoever, so it’s kind of difficult to care. Bond slips out of the gorilla outfit, narrowly avoiding decapitation, and makes his way on to the train roof, narrowly avoiding decapitation – what do you mean the film’s run out of ideas? There’s some running-along-the-train-roof stunt-work, then some going-along-the-outside-of-a-train stuntwork… More outside of a train stuntwork… And some more… Bond and Gobinda (yes, he’s here too) fight on the roof of the train…. They’re joined by the remaining knife –thrower. He and Bond are thrown from the train and Bond takes out the knife-thrower in revenge for the killing of 009. Moore briefly acts again, which is nice. We’re off to the American airbase now and the circus. With the nuclear bomb. Bond has now been reduced to thumbing a lift… Connery would never have put up with this shit.
David Niven would never have put up with this shit. We get a few stereotypical Germans (beer and bratworst), Bond steals a car… Octopussy and Khan are at the circus… I don’t care! Dear Bowlpup this is bad. Bond is being followed by a few police cars, gets to the base…. The countdown is at five minutes… He takes precious time to dress up as a clown (including perfectly-applied make-up – I guess MI6 really
do teach you every skill you need in the field). Bond makes it into the ring… some clown antics… Bond
finally gets in front of Octopussy and begs her to help prove who he is…. She remains silent for plot-convenient reasons, a fight breaks out, but finally Octopussy helps him and Bond manages to get to the bomb and defuse it with about half a second to spare. But, somehow, we’re not done yet, as Khan is making a break for it. So we’re back in India. Using performers from Octopussy’s circus, they breach his palace walls (some of them are still in far-from-discreet-for-night-time-assault red spandex). Octopussy gets inside on a long pole (no tittering at the back) while Khan burns the evidence. She confronts him with a pistol, but he’s able to get past her, and a fight breaks out. Well I say a fight, it’s more a series of comedy circus stunts with occasional nearby explosions, while Bond approaches in a hot air balloon (why? Is a highly explosive balloon full of gas a good thing to fly into a battle zone? Does it matter?) with Q. Bond spies Octopussy and goes after her. There’s some acceptable stunt work while Khan makes his escape – he still has Octopussy with him though it’s not at all clear why beyond the fact that a girl needs to be rescued. There’s a plane awaiting them, and in they get while Bond follows down on horse. He’s able to jump on the rear of the plane just before it takes to the air – sensible move – and Khan does a bit of loop-the-loop and barrel rolls to try and shake him off. Bond is able to disable one of the engines – another sensible move – while Gobinda is sent out to deal with him. He’s knocked off by an areal to the face – not dignified – and Bond is able to force the plane down. He and Octopussy jump for it, and the plane crashes, killing Khan. They do a bit of dangle-off-the-cliff stuff, then we cut to…
… a very sharp-suited Gogol, calmly stating that his government denies any event ever occurred. He’s talking to the minister over drinks in London, who agrees, and also to the return of the Romanov star. It
almost qualifies as satire. Almost. Then a final scenes with Bond in traction… then in Octopussy, while the shitty 80’s saxophones strike up and we’re “treated’ to the movie’s theme (“All Time High”, that is, not the Bond theme, sadly). Never has a Bond theme been less appropriate for the movie it’s in…
In Conclusion:
A bewildering whirlwind of “exotic” India, Cold War politics of the crassest kind, fake Faberge eggs, infantile plans, and inconsequential jewel smuggling, it is something of an understatement to say that
Octopussy makes no sense whatsoever. Not even slightly, not even one tiny bit. I mean, it seems obvious that Orlov’s plans don’t make any sense, but then again neither did Goldfinger’s and that didn’t particularly stop that movie from being entertaining. Villains don’t have to have real-world-makes-sense plans for the movie around them to succeed, but Orlov’s plan doesn’t seem like it would have any traction in what passes for reality in Bond’s world either. He’s just a mad Russian general who gets a bit carried away with himself and so we need to sit through this movie as a result. Gogol should have had him shot after the first Soviet council meeting and saved us all a lot of bother. Sadly that didn’t happen though, so we’re given Steven Berkoff’s wandering Russian accent and eye-rolling lunacy of a performance. Berkoff plays Orlov as a sort of spoilt man-child, throwing sulks when he doesn’t get his own way and screaming like a baby who’s just lost his favourite toy when his plans go awry. That’s not
necessarily a bad way to approach the character – especially it were to be linked more explicitly to a kind of satire of how the rich elite of Soviet society are just as spoiled and decadent as the West they so vocally condemn – but how Berkoff plays the role doesn’t connect with anything else in the film, so he’s left completely unsupported when surrounded by a bunch of Soviet generals all playing it very seriously. As a result he looks like a fucking idiot. Which he is. Yet the
real problem here is that Orlov barely even feels like he’s in the movie– and is he the bad guy anyway? Sure, he wants to nuke an army base in West Germany as a hilariously misconceived way to get the West to disarm, be he gets barely ten minutes screen-time in a movie that’s two and a quarter hours long, and the rest of the time we’re focussed on Khan. So we have two principal villains, one who’s ostensibly the real bad guy (Orlov) but whom we barely see, and the other (Khan) who’s more of a stand-in gangster but who gets all the screen time. See the problem? Their stories do kind of, sort of, come together by the end, but it’s pretty muddled when all is said and done. By failing to pick a villain and stick with it, the movie dilutes rather than doubles the threat these two present.
Well, I say threat, but there’s no hint of threat here at all. The pacing in this film is
appalling, arguably the very worst paced Bond film so far covered. There’s absolutely no sense of tension or drama here, though this isn’t entirely down to the script (though the script is certainly part of it). The direction is largely flat and lifeless, and we get a more than a few crash-zooms as stand-ins for tension, always the sign that something’s going wrong somewhere. The perennial bugbear of Moore action sequences, the misconceived use of rear-projection, is back again and yet again undermines otherwise successful stunt work, such as the fight on the train roof or the climatic plane flight. John Glen just doesn’t seem to have any idea of how to put an action sequence together here, so the action sequences are directed with the same panache as the exposition scenes, which is to say none. We’re stuck with him for the next three movies though – and he also directed
For Your Eyes Only – so let’s hope his craft improves somewhat. It’s not all his fault though. The script is just cluttered and confused beyond redemption, and no director could have made it more coherent without just cutting big chunks of it out. The film’s about the smuggling of a priceless Faberge egg (which then gets a price)! No wait, it’s about a crazy-ass Russian general who wants to invade the west! Now it’s about jewel smuggling in India or something! Khan’s doing something! No wait… there’s…um… Hang on, Bond has a hitherto-unmentioned connection to This Movie’s Leading Lady! Now a nuclear bomb has arrived (and “nuclear bomb” would be an all-too-apt description for this film). And… other stuff! It is, in other words, incoherent, rambling, and completely unfocussed. It’s just a mess, and not even an entertaining one.
Because the ultimate damage here is done by the leading man. Moore’s past caring, that much is obvious, and the amount of time when he seems to be bothering to put in any effort at all doesn’t quite clock up to sixty seconds in the entire movie. It’s a great shame really – he’s often been the saving grace of his poorer movies, but here he’s not even trying to save the film, and it’s a fatal flaw. There’s just no fun in watching someone who clearly just doesn’t want to do this any more go through the motions for the sake of a bag of cash. Despite his advancing years, it’s
still not the age issue that’s the problem for the most part – I mean, he’s now conspicuously older than he was in
Live And Let Die, but of course he is, ten years have passed. No, the problem is that there’s just no conviction to anything he does, and it’s not just the action scenes. He’s not playing the comedy with any conviction either, and that gives neither him nor Bond anywhere to go. There’s a sense that, since he can’t apparently be arsed to turn in a good performance, he’s just camping it up, but not even enough to make this a tongue-in-cheek performance. It’s just exhausted. It’s all a bit depressing really, because elsewhere there’s a couple of decent performances that do help to lift the film. Though she gets far, far too little time on screen, Maud Adams does a commendable job of playing a character with as stupid a name as
Octopussy, and she’s a refreshingly different kind of protagonist – cocksure, strong, and utterly uninterested in justifying herself or what she does to Bond. The “family connection” with her father is ludicrously strained and amounts to exactly nothing, but Adams herself is terrific in the role, and there’s a real sense that Bond is dealing with a
woman, not (as he often does), with a girl or a bikini prop, something thrown into sharp relief by her spandex-clad assistants. In fact, since she survives, it’s a shame she’s never seen again – she wouldn’t’ need to be in the lead role, but it would have been lovely to have her pop up in the next movie for a few minutes, a bit like Robbie Coltrane will do during Brosnan’s time in the role. Louis Jourdan, as Khan, is a bit more variable – he starts of strong, but appears to be permanently drunk on camera from about the elephant hunt onwards – it’s not clear if he started strong and just gave up, but when he underplays it’s a fairly effective performance, even if the character feels relatively inconsequential. And we get a bit more screen-time for Gogol too, which is very welcome – I haven’t really praised Walter Gottel that much but he’s generally (ha!) terrific at playing Gogol and his expanded time on camera here is most welcome.
There just such a sense of exhaustion about
Octopussy that no amount of pretty bits of India can ever quite cover up or paper over. The toned-down nature of
For Your Eyes Only is still being adhered to, so apart from a digital watch and pen full of acid there’s not much in the way of gadgets, and the fact the movie is trying to be a bit more “credible” is in it’s favour. But there’s also a slight sense that nobody could really be bothered to come up with anything more exciting than that, so here it is, let’s plod through the motions one more time. It’s very dispiriting, and there’s a joylessness to
Octopussy that just stops it from ever threatening to become entertaining. How you manage to have Roger Moore in full clown make-up defusing a nuclear bomb on a West German army base be joyless I’m not quite sure, but that’s still what we’re faced with. Bond is often ludicrous, and often entertainingly so, but there’s a key element of fun that’s entirely missing in
Octopussy, so it never amounts to anything more than a series of so-so action pieces strung together by a lead man who looks like he doesn’t want to be there any more and put together by a director who’s doing at best workmanlike activity. Even the humour is largely tedious – the unfunny grinding gears of someone who doesn’t know when to stop telling awful jokes no matter how badly they go down or how hard people wince at them. Sure there’s the “that should keep you in curry!” which is awful, or the Tarzan cry which is both unfunny
and tactically stupid. The frustrating thing is the little glimpses of worlds we don’t normally get to see – that sequence with 009 escaping just after the titles, only to get a knife in the back is terrific – there’s no explanation and it’s genuinely creepy in a way Bond movies almost never are. It. Does. Not. Last. Bond jets off to exotic parts of the world in just about every movie, but glimpses of East Berlin feel far more intriguing and interesting than yet another jungle fight scene or r yet another contrived countdown. It strange in a way – this is the
thirteenth Bond movie yet this is the first time Bond has set foot in the German capital. And when he gets there, probably
the key location in the Cold War that isn’t Moscow or Washington, he goes to a circus then immediately leaves again! That’s all we get! Aargh! The feeling of wasted potential here is huge, and that’s incredibly symptomatic of the film as a whole. This is a tired, dreary drag of a movie that’s tough to sit through for any number of reasons, and rather sadly suggests that Bond has run out of places to go, or at the very least, this Bond has. What the Bond series desperately needs at this point is something to re-invigorate it, something to give it a fresh lease of life and find a new direction for the world’s most famous spy. New ideas, news stories, new approaches – that’s what’s required.
What’s that?
Connery’s back for the next one? Oh for the love of…
What Percentage Of This Film Could Be Cut?There’s a propulsive, interesting Cold War thriller buried deep inside
Octopussy, about mad ambition, power and control, and what happens to those who try to wield it unsuccessfully. Unfortunately that occupies around forty minutes of screen-time, and for the rest we’re “treated” to an extended visit to India, complete with just about every cliché imaginable, and very little of consequence. To say you could lose all the India material would be a bit of an overstatement, so let’s lose all of it bar about five or (at the most) ten minutes of plot explanations. The pre-credits sequence can go as well – it contributes nothing, it isn’t either funny or “funny”, and it’s very obvious that 009’s failed attempt to escape with the egg should have been the opener. This film feels
agonisingly long, so it’s hard not to want to just cut-cut-cut, and because it has such a poor grasp of pacing it just plods along. The final plane stunt can go too – the whole point of the film has been to stop an attempted war between East and West and that’s been done now, so a bit of fisticuffs atop a plane isn’t going to cut it, however impressive some of the stunts are (though there’s
lots of bad cuts to rear-projection that undermine this sequence somewhat). I’m gonna go for
50% - this film runs for two hours fifteen minutes, and at one hour seven and a half minutes might qualify as bearable.
Maybe.
Quip Level:
Not so much
Shoutbox Would Be Ashamed of This so much as
Shoutbox Would Never Stand For This, the quips start early and never let up. They arrive with tedious regularity, not one of them manages to actually qualify as funny, and Moore’s visibly lost all interest in delivering them. He’s a good comic actor but he just doesn’t care here, not one jot. Actually that’s not quite true – when he and Q approach the Big Climactic Battle in a hot air balloon (which isn’t even the tenth stupidest thing this film does, and let’s not get into the symbolism of a massive Union Jack being flown over India by the Agent Of Empire, shall we?), Bond asks Q if he knows how to handle it. He replies, “it goes on hot air”, to which Bond responds, “oh then you
can”. It’s a rare – well, unique, in fact – moment of naturalness in the movie, since there’s obvious rapport between Moore and Llewellyn and both deliver their lines perfectly. There’s a sentence you won’t be reading anywhere else regarding this film… For the rest it’s just the usual line-up of fatuous one-liners that lack any wit or charm, usually said by a man who seems to have given up on the idea of wit and charm altogether.
2017 Cringe Factor:
Well, there’s the name for a start. Now, obviously, the “pussy” part of the name has been used before, though not in the actual movie title, but still. It sounds decidedly peculiar whenever someone refers to her by her name directly – and beyond her father being called “Smythe” we never actually find out what her real name is anyway. Still, having a suggestive name (OK, it’s not really
suggestive so much as explicit) pales in comparison next to the visit(s) to India, which at best are neutral and at worst are beyond excruciating. Next to this
You Only Live Twice seems like a paragon of cultural understanding and inclusiveness. Using a culture specific to a location for some added colour and just being outright patronising is a thin line to walk, and
Octopussy doesn’t even try, wading in with tigers and tarantulas, sword swallowers and saris, and all to no avail. Vijay is only saved from being a hacky caricature by dint of Vijay Amritraj’s rather charming performance – in the hands of someone with less on-screen presence or natural likability this could have been diabolical. But there’s just so many awful, clichéd elements on show in the Indian portions – did I mention the snake charmers? – that it crosses the line into basic racism. There’s no sense that Bond ever explores India or its culture, its just there as another “exotic” backdrop for a series of tired jokes.
Over there we have East Berlin and a Cold War conflict – exactly where Bond
should be, and in
Octopussy we spend more time East of the Berlin Wall than we have in any other Bond movie, so why aren’t we over there, exploring that? There’s no convincing answer, so sorry,
Octopussy, you’re getting a well-deserved
Trumpshake.