1983 - Octopussy
Alternate Title - Senior Citizen Love Fest '83
PG - 131 minutes
Director - John Glen
Stars - Roger Moore, Maud Adams, Louis Jourdan
Eggs. The movie’s about eggs. I wish I was kidding but the crux of the plot involves Bond chasing down a ring of counterfeit Faberge egg makers. As if that wasn’t stupid enough, the movie is also book ended with some of England’s finest dressed up as clowns. In the beginning another agent is running away from the circus, dressed as a clown and at the end it is Bond as a clown running into the circus to stop a bomb from exploding. Sunrise. Sunset.
Bond tracks the egg ring to India and this results in the next forever amount of screen time consisting of Bond wandering around India like a doddering old man. He doesn’t blend in well even in the slightest with the apparent Indian tradition of wearing fuchsia dresses all the goddamn time. He seems to be wandering the beautiful set pieces with no goal in mind and just happens upon main characters and plot points.
The main villain, Kamal Khan is overthrowing his boss, the sanely named Octopussy. At one point Octopussy says that her father was the one that gave her that name. She never says if he was imprisoned for child molestation charges or not. I guess we will have to write our own story there. Regardless, Octopussy looks like a 60 year old in this movie which isn’t that bad if you consider that Roger Moore still makes her look young by comparison. Remember Pussy Galore from Goldfinger? This title suggests that Octopussy is 8 times better than her but in reality it appears that she’s just 8 times older.
Anyway, Khan’s rag-tag crew consists of a bunch of expendable henchman and a guy that uses a saw blade yo-yo. I shit you not. Nevermind the fact that the blade would never be able to go fast enough to cut through half of the things it does. It’s clearly in the movie because it’s fucking cool and cocaine is a great way to make movies.
Bond kills all the sub-villains (including knife throwing twins) and chases a train that leads to the circus. There is a bomb hidden in the clown cannon for some reason. He sneaks into the circus dressed as a clown for absolutely no reason whatsoever. He walks past the guards and literally three seconds later is discovered and has to run anyway. He might as well have just walked the hell past them to begin with instead of wasting precious time changing into highly detailed clown makeup and outfit. He fights the heavy circus security and our elderly duo disarm the bomb and save the day.
Meanwhile, a bat-shit crazy scene has Octopussy’s women attacking Khan’s men one at a time like ninja-sluts. Octopussy shows up and confronts Khan while Q literally hot-air balloons Bond into the scene. It’s like they ran out of time so instead of editing they made forty action scenes converge onto the same location. This all leads to a strange plane scene that has Bond holding onto the skin of the plane like the creature from The Twilight Zone. Bond crashes the plane but not before our geriatric duo bail out to safety. The fall would have killed a fit man so in reality these two would be reduced to dust. But this is a movie so they easily survive hitting the ground at a brisk 140 miles an hour.
Overall it wasn’t horrible despite all the crazy shit described above. The first half moves more like a suspense movie than a Bond movie which is rather enjoyable. There is a horrible scene where Bond swings from vine to vine like a monkey. The villain, Kamal Khan is awesome but the supposed ‘villain’, Octopussy is a cougar in a silk robe. All in all this movie felt like it was clearly a reaction to Raiders Of The Lost Ark which came out a couple of years previous to this one. Swap out the Ark Of The Covenant for priceless Faberge Eggs and change the Nazi’s to… well, that part is still Germans. That country is so evil it can’t be contained by one movie franchise.