STUFF YOU GOTTA WATCH

OCTOPUSSY

(1983)
With Roger Moore, Maud Adams, Louis Jordan, Kristina Wayborn, Kabir Bedi, Robert Orlov, Robert Brown, Desmond Llewelyn, Lois Maxwell
Directed by John Glen
Reviewed by JL and JB

Roger Moore's penultimate Bond film is one of his better efforts, if not in a league with THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. Louis Jordan and Robert Orlav make for fairly decent Bond villains; Maud Adams, in her second go-round as a Bond girl, is lovely and mysterious as the titular character; and there are a couple of chase scenes that are good for cheap thrills. Other than that, it's the standard Bond formula, well executed. The lingering image for those disdainful of the Moore years is that of Bond in a clown suit, but I won't go there. There, I got through the whole paragraph without making a single wisecrack about the title. ½ - JL

OCTOPUSSY is certainly a mixed bag, containing the best and worst elements of the Moore/Bond era. The clown suit scene is where both elements come together. Undercover at a circus, Bond must get rid of a bomb before it goes off and hurts dozens of innocent bystanders (shades of Adam West in BATMAN!). It is a tense, suspenseful sequence in which Bond, under the circumstances, happens to be dressed as a clown. And Moore gets away with it! Out of all the actors who portrayed James Bond through the years, Moore is the only one who could pull off a scene in a clown suit, since Moore was widely accepted by this time as the most clownish Bond of all ("The Most Clownish Bond Of All!" would have been a perfect advertising slogan for just about any Bond film from Moore's tenure) . Clownishness aside, this is a decent entry of the series, one which features Louis Jordan's immortal line to Bond: "You seem to have this nasty habit of surviving!". - JB

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