1981 - For Your Eyes Only
Alternate Title - Four More Years Only
PG - 127 minutes
Director - John Glen
Stars - Roger Moore, Carole Bouquet, Topol
I’ll start out by saying that my first viewing experience was a confusing one. I remember being 1 ½ hours into this movie and having no comprehension of plot. We shall see how this second watching goes.
This movie opens with a scene that kills that whole theory that every actor that plays Bond is actually just a different person entirely instead of a continued story of the same agent. Bond visits the grave of his wife that he lost at the end of, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Well, there goes that bad-ass theory.
This is the movie where Bond finally kills Blofeld. Since they technically didn’t have the legal rights to refer to him as Blofeld or reference Spectre they just show him in a wheelchair from behind and let the cat do all of the talking and acting. This whole scene is done in a super sloppy manner that felt more like Inspector Gadget making fun of Bond. Bond takes control of a helicopter and drops Blofeld down a chimney. That’s it. That’s how the main villain of the series dies. It’s such a letdown to the showdown I was hoping to see.
For some reason Bond movies love to start on a submarine in peril and then cut to both British and Russian heads on a red phone. Apparently, Bond villains all have submarine fetishes and must include one in their plots.
There are plenty of car chases in this movie. They’re done really well but there are just too many of them. Plus, the whole time it’s scored by a horrible 80’s soundtrack.
A huge subplot of this movie involves a 14 year old figure-skater who is constantly giving Bond fuck-me eyes. I’m amazed that Bond has the power to turn her down throughout the movie.
There’s a large chunk of this movie that has Bond on skis and the bad guys are chasing him on motorcycles on the snow. If that sounds stupid, it is. It goes on forever. It even goes on a bobsledding track which FINALLY gives a sequel to the On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’s bobsledding finale.
Well, it happened again. I was over 1 ½ hours into this movie and I realized that I don’t really know what this movie is about. Other than the bad guy taking a piece of important equipment from the downed submarine from the beginning of the movie.
There is a pretty brutal torture scene in which Bond and a girl are dragged behind a boat and get cut to shit on the coral in the ocean so that their blood attracts sharks. Oh yeah, the villain doing this is the father of the 14 year old previously mentioned. He really should have banged her to piss off the villain more. When they get free and dry they are clued in on plot points by a fucking parrot. The bird repeats random shit it overheard the bad guy saying to someone else and relays it like a child that hasn’t learned the finer points of social cues.
Another big section of this movie has Bond sneaking up to a mountaintop base to rescue a girl like a goddamn fairytale. It takes up way too much screen time for such minimal payoff. They could have just had them drive to the top and use the leftover screen time on plot points. While Bond is climbing the rest of the crew is watching him like they are hundreds of yards away yet when Bond throws a guy off, the body lands eight feet in front of them but they don’t stop looking at him like he’s incredibly far away.
In the end the big solution to the problem is throwing the fucking submarine equipment off of the mountain and hoping it breaks. Apparently it worked because the guy that wanted to buy the equipment just flies away in his helicopter. Ends with an amazing scene in which Margaret Thatcher talks to the goddamn parrot thinking it is Bond.
Overall, fuck this movie. It’s so uninteresting unless you’re really into pointless action and car chases. Every Bond movie that came out before this had its own character. Even the shitty racist tones in Live And Let Die had more heart to it than this one did. It just felt flat. You can tell the producers were saying, “Shove tons of action in there and people will eat it up. What? Plot? Fuck plot. People don’t want to know what’s going on when things are blowing up.”