REVIEW: The Worst of Bond, Part 3: Die Another Day

"Damn, I could use a silencer, now that I think about it. I'll trade you this nail clipper I swiped from Q-division for it."

Ah, Die Another Day. The movie that epitomizes the word #*$@&%#!. This was the fourth James Bond movie in the Pierce Brosnan era, which included the utterly awesome GoldenEye, the mostly harmless Tomorrow Never Dies, and the completely corporeal The World is Not Enough. Most people, including myself, agreed that Brosnan was one of the better Bonds, combining most of the best traits of previous portrayals of the character. I can’t speak for everyone, especially those who grew up with Connery, but when I think of James Bond in general, not a specific movie, my image is basically that of Pierce Brosnan. But just as Brosnan himself was good, but generic, so were his movies. They were basically all similar globe-trotting, action-heavy entries that tried to keep seriousness and humor, realism and fantasy in pretty close balance, all while making sure to scatter three or four huge action scenes throughout. They basically tried to appeal to everyone. And since the Bond fan base is composed of people who favor the jokes, sexiness, action, espionage, and travelogue scenes in different measures, I guess that was smart from a business perspective.

"I looking for John Connor. I need your clothes, your boots, and your... Oh, wait. I already have them. Never mind. Good day, sir."

So I suppose I should almost find it courageous that for Brosnan’s fourth go-round, they actually stopped riding the fence and actually went right after one audience. They modeled a film more for the people who loved the action and spectacle over the drama and thin ties to reality, the same thugs who were complicit in making a XXX sequel possible. Die Another Day was essentially the latest iteration of You Only Live Twice and Moonraker. And considering my previous two reviews, you might imagine where I stand on that idea.



First of all, the title. Die Another Day? Doesn’t that have almost the exact same meaning as Tomorrow Never Dies? Or maybe the exact opposite meaning. I’m not sure, but in any event, it sounds like it was devised using some James Bond-themed magnetic poetry.

Ah. So maybe this movie's actually a very subtle satire of foundationalist classroom pedagogy.

Actually, the sad thing about this movie, for me, is that it actually starts out kind of well... Er, it starts well after it starts out really badly. In the opening gun barrel sequence, we actually see a computer-rendered bullet flying directly into our faces. Now, the gun barrel opening is just a tradition and a fun little logo for the James Bond character, so I shouldn’t think much of it, and I should just be happy that there’s no disco twang to the music, like there was in some of the Roger Moore films. But I have to question the logic a bit here. Why is Bond shooting a bullet back down the barrel of his opponent’s gun? And after he makes his shot, why does blood spill down? Whoever designed this sequence does realize that there’s a difference between a gun barrel and a targeting scope, right? Right?

And thus, we get one step closer to the much-anticipated James Bond/Col. John Matrix team-up movie.

So anyway, aside from the stupid title and the silly opening gun barrel logo and the promo material for godawful TV shows on the Regal Cinemas “Twenty”--which, in all fairness, might not have been DAD’s fault--the movie starts out well. It opens at night with Bond and two South Korean agents surfboarding into North Korean territory, sneaking through the jungle. If you have to come up with a James Bond surfing scene, that’s about as good as any reason to do it. Furthermore, I liked that this is one of the very few times in a Bond movie that Bond is actually fighting an enemy nation. Even during the Cold War, the ultimate villain was nearly always a trans-national, completely fictitious organization or a rogue industrialist or military officer. Here, even in its grossly simplified way, the film actually depicts a real nation as villainous, which is a very small step away from political correctness that I wholeheartedly approve of. Even if in real life, North Korea is only threatening because the international community couldn’t convince a paraplegic dog to stay off the couch, much less a dictator to stop building a nuke. North Korea may have a madman at the helm, but it’s a dirt-poor nation propped up by China’s support and other nations’ refusal to take military action against it; it’s not exactly an imposing evil empire.

Filmed on location in South Korea, Hawaii, England, Iceland, and Hell.

The mission is to ambush some arms dealers before they can board a helicopter, then steal their identities and hide a bomb in a suitcase full of diamonds they’re planning to give to North Korean general Moon (Kenneth Tsang) in exchange for weapons. As Bond arrives, Moon is managing his stress by kickboxing a punching bag (yes, I guess you’re allowed to do that) that is later revealed to contain his anger management therapist; clearly, this guy aspires to world terrorism or playing for the Knicks, one or the other. Bond’s cover is immediately blown when someone snaps a picture of him, sends it to some unknown informant, and is informed that he’s a secret agent. I guess all those years of blasting bad guys while using his real name has caught up to Bond, although you would have thought that radically changing his appearance four times (not counting the Woody Allen phase) over the last forty years might have bought him some anonymity.

"I can finish the mission, M. Give me a chance. It's so easy, even I could do it."

Bond compensates for his weaknesses in the area of disguise by showcasing his strengths in the area of blowing the living hell out of everyone and everything in the region. The initial explosion that saves him from a firing squad comes courtesy of a Q-gadget, but otherwise, it’s just Bond shooting stuff up, killing more people in the film’s first six minutes than Connery managed in six films. The battle continues as Bond chases Moon (or vice versa, I’m not sure) in a hovercraft race across a mine field. Yes, they’re down to hovercrafts as far as vehicles Bond has not yet driven to death goes. Hovercrafts armed to the teeth with rockets, machine guns, and flame throwers. I’m not sure who thought a flame thrower was a good idea for this vehicle--even if it’s more plausible here than on a damned helicopter for God’s sake--but it does prove to be an effective weapon for Moon to not kill Bond with. The chase ends with Moon and his hovercraft going over a waterfall, presumably to their fiery ends, and Bond surviving, but finding himself in custody by the North Korean army.



Yes, Bond actually gets captured. And tortured! For 14 months! In fact, the whole opening title sequence chronicles Bond’s imprisonment, complete with a techno/acid rock song by Madonna that helps bring Bond’s pain to life.

Well, now I understand a little better how Cubans can afford their health care.

After the titles finish, Bond is surprised to find himself released, traded back to the British in a swap for the terrorist Zao (Rick Yune) after the Brits come to think that Bond has been giving up secrets under duress. Scruffy Geico Caveman Bond insists that he never said a word, and wants to chase down Zao and force him to spill the identity of whoever gave up his identity; and he’ll definitely need Zao for that, since half the world’s population knows who he is. M (Judi Dench) rescinds Bond’s 00-status and license to kill while they figure out what to do with him, and that works about as well as it did in License to Kill, the last time that happened. Bond proves a pioneer by daring to actually travel around the world and kill people without government certification, after he jumps off the British medical frigate and surfaces at a dock in Hong Kong, in front of a green screen so obvious that the Hong Kong skyline might as well be black and white stock footage from the Korean War.

"Arr, there be a great leviathan of the seas off yonder port bow. It be chewing scenery mercilessly!"

With a little help from the Chinese, who are ceasing their support of the North Korean government just long enough to help Bond bring it down, Bond follows Zao to Cuba, continuing his tour of the world’s socialist paradises. Posing as a tourist, he scopes out the experimental medical clinic on the beach that Zao’s been admitted to. While there, Bond meets Jinx (Halle Berry); she’s a sassy American who, unknown to Bond, is actually a CIA secret agent! Quite a twist, there. The two are immediately attracted to each other’s ability to weave naughty one-liners into their conversation, even though their puns don’t have any literal meaning whatsoever, and the whole thing amounts to a variation on the “Yo Mamma…” joke battle (and yes, she will eventually actually say “Yo Momma“ in this movie). This sad little exchange naturally leads to sex, and for what I think might be the first time in a Bond movie, the two are shown actually doing it, not making small talk afterwards. Way to stay classy, movie. They make the first Bond movie with an African-American actress in the lead role, and decide that also makes it the right time to move the series closer to soft-core porn.

James Bond: both licensed to kill and an RN...

The next day, Bond raids the clinic, and finds that Zao is undergoing an experimental DNA surgery to permanently change him to look Caucasian. Even having finished the film, I’m not entirely sure why this would have been necessary, but I do know that Zao might have wanted to have the doctors pull out those diamonds embedded into the side of his face first if his goal was to blend in. You see, when Bond set off his exploding briefcase of diamonds at the beginning of the film, a bunch of the diamonds embedded into Zao’s cheek. Personally, I think that Diamondface might have been a less horrible title for a James Bond movie, and at least would have had some vague connection to the plot. But in any event, the ever-inventive Bond spars with Zao, using an MRI and a gas tank as his weapons of choice, but Zao gets away anyway. And so does Jinx, who’s independently assassinating the doctors, but gets cornered by Cuban soldiers at the edge of a seaside cliff. She escapes by stripping down to her bikini, flashing Bond a coy wink, and transforming herself into a computer effect from Dead or Alive Volleyball long enough to dive backwards about 200 feet into the ocean, where a boat is waiting for her. The Cuban soldiers are shocked, wondering how it’s possible that she survived the fall. The simple answer is that it’s not possible, but in a James Bond movie, nobody ever fails at anything as long as they’re smug while they do it.

...although he's been known to confuse the two licenses.

Having recovered one of Zao’s diamonds, Bond discovers that it’s a conflict diamond or something like that, but everyone thinks it actually came from a mine in Iceland owned by British entrepreneur Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens). If that doesn’t make any sense, it doesn’t have to, because its only purpose is to identify the bad guy. Bond jets back to London, in a scene accompanied by the song, London Calling by The Clash. That’s beautiful. He’s a British agent who visits London at least once every movie, and yet this time around, they decided to make a joke about it.

"Hey, I just asked what color it was. I didn't ask you to demonstrate it."

More beautiful is the scene where Bond confronts Graves, a petulant little snot, at a fencing club. Graves’ fencing instructor is played by Madonna, blessing the film with her acting skills after already providing the banshee wail over the opening credits. Thankfully, Bond does NOT sleep with her; at this point, only drug-addled old men would go for Madonna, like Alex Rodriguez for example. Graves is rather irritated that Bond accuses him of building his empire off the blood of Africans, and decides that the best way for him to get rid of Bond without exposing his villainy to the world is to attack him with a broadsword. Fortunately, old Mordred gets bested by Bond, and shows he’s a good sport by inviting him to a scientific demonstration in Iceland. Thanks, Gus. Bond goes along with it, either because he figures that turning himself over to his mortal enemy’s hospitality is the best way to stay a step ahead of him, or because he’s just hoping the scientific demonstration involves something cool like zombies being reawakened.

The Young Charles and Camilla Chronicles

But before he goes, M wants a word with him. You know that whole deal about Bond being mentally scarred by his year of torture and his own country accusing him of treachery and disowning him? Yeah, that’s LONG gone. That sounds like a Timothy Dalton movie, and the producers were going more for something like a cross between Roger Moore and Mike Myers. Instead, M now supports Bond’s mission to figure out what Graves is up to, and sends a hot young female agent named Samantha Frost (Rosamund Pike) along to help Bond, but with orders not to sleep with him. You know, I’m sure that somewhere on the MI-6 payroll there’s a competent male agent other than James Bond. If M’s such a puritan that she can’t put up with him having an inappropriate personal relationship while he saves the bleeding world, maybe she should stop pairing him with hotties.

"We can finish materializing it once the rest of the bailout money comes in."

Bond’s stop by MI-6 headquarters also brings him a handful of gadgets, presented by Q (now played by John Cleese, who’s clearly not used to being in movies quite this silly):
> A ring that can shatter glass. Sounds nifty and practical. Verdict: I approve.
> A rebreather. Also sounds handy. Verdict: Very good.
> Virtual reality goggles that Bond uses to train in a simulated hostage crisis. Yeah, because Bond hasn’t gotten nearly enough practice shooting people in this movie so far. Verdict: I disapprove, unless this is all just a joke at Pierce Brosnan’s expense for Lawnmower Man.
> A patented Q-car. Aside from the usual features like rockets and a nearly indestructible exterior, what could be the big gag for this one? Turns into a submarine? Already done it. Can be remote-controlled? Been there. Flies? Nah, that would be far too unbelievable. Morphs into a giant walking robot? Copyright infringement. We’ll just have it turn invisible instead. Verdict: The hell?

"Yes, the ice is interesting and all, but do we get HBO?"

So with order restored to the universe--Bond has no emotional baggage, he’s loaded with ridiculous gadgets, and his opponent is clearly defined and obvious--it’s off to beautiful Iceland, where Graves’ reception is being held at a hotel made entirely of ice. Now, you’d be right to accuse this of being a completely absurd locale, stuck in the movie just for the sake of being weird, and to give the movie an ‘ice’ theme for the marketing department to play on. But apparently the ice hotel in this movie is based on a real place in Iceland, where rich tourists can pay gobs of money to spent a night encased in ice. It’s kind of like they created a Titanic-themed hotel, but one focused on the last leg of the journey moreso than the first.

"I hope you have a very good reason for interrupting my 3D deep sea nature documentary."

There’s a huge party underway at Mr. Freeze’s hideout, where even Halle Berry/Jinx has shown up. Showing not even the slightest interest in maintaining a cover, she and Bond and Frost engage in a three-way… of godawful quasi-sexual puns. When the subject of their conversation turns to science, Frost asks if Bond told her about his “big bang theory,” to which Jinx responds that she “got the thrust of it.” When she says the line, she literally--literally!--has tongue planted in cheek. That’s epic. And once again, while I tend to prefer double-entendrees to have the initial entendree covered--in other words, for the non-lewd meaning to exist--I guess something more clever would have gone over the heads of the 12-year-olds and lower primates that this film was aimed at.

"Whoops. Sorry darling, but, er, how do I put this? Dante's Peak just erupted a little earlier than I had predicted."

Graves demonstrates his new toy, a massive diamond-based space satellite with the power to reflect the sun’s light and redirect it at the dark half of the world, enabling plants to grow better and the post office to stay open past 5 o’clock or something like that. Of course, we all know that Graves really intends to focus the beam more and turn it into an orbital death ray. I have a couple of problems with this gadget. First, Bond has enough experience dispatching orbital super-weapons, especially those built from diamonds, to know something’s up. Second, I find it a bit unlikely that one tiny satellite could reflect enough light to illuminate more than about a millionth of the Earth at a time, considering that the whole damn moon does a crappy job of it. Third, I highly doubt you’re going to be able to throw a lavish gala for idle rich Euro-trash and get much support for a project designed to bring about global warming.

There's a reason why the British don't go to their dentists very often.

In any event, Jinx suspects that something’s up, so after Graves finishes his 45-second demonstration that he flew everyone to Iceland to observe, she goes sneaking around in an inconspicuous red leather jumpsuit. She infiltrates Graves’ big greenhouse dome thing by climbing to the top of it and lowering herself down on a rope, gambling that none of the thugs guarding the dome ever look up or towards the center of the huge open room they’re in. But since they’re so diabolical, they somehow find her, and she’s to be executed by Graves’ henchman, Mr. Kil (Lawrence Makoare). There’s been a lot of milestones in film history--first talkie, first full-length cartoon, first movie in color--but I think first James Bond movie to have a villain named Mr. Kil is a singular honor that earns this film a place in any classics collection. But fortunately for Jinx, Bond also suspects that the man who recently tried to kill him in public with a broadsword might be looking to cause trouble. After fulfilling his contractual obligation by sleeping with Frost (Whew! He was at risk of being monogamous for the course of the movie there until now!), he awkwardly sneaks into the greenhouse with the help of his invisible car. But it’s kind of difficult to get a car into a greenhouse, so he has to go at it on foot. Damn that fatal design flaw in the stealth car! When he reaches Jinx, she’s tied down and about to be carved up by dancing laser beams, Goldfinger-style, but Bond starts rasslin’ with Kil as the lasers go spinning out of control. Bond and Kil keep punching and kicking each over as deadly lasers jump all over. It might have been a pretty tense scene if the lasers weren’t obviously edited into the movie to purposely avoid the two of them, and if Bond and Kil had made even the slightest effort to avoid them while beating the tar out of each other. In the end, Kil gets killed by a laser. Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

It was risky, but he had to try it. The extra life was within his grasp.

Bond confronts Graves and discovers that he’s actually Colonel Moon, who’s already undergone the DNA replacement and has taken over the identity of the real Gustav Graves. His whole scheme was to impersonate the billionaire capitalist and build a super-weapon that he could use to help North Korea conquer South Korea. Not to put down the country of South Korea, but aside from the Wachowski brothers and fans of cheap and crappy MMORPGs, I suspect Western viewers think that taking over South Korea is low on the totem pole of things a bad guy might do with a super-weapon. But still, Bond is of course determined to stop it. Unfortunately, when he fires on Graves, he finds his gun empty. Miranda Frost enters, and reveals herself to be not only a traitor, but THE traitor who sold out Bond and gave him 14 months in a North Korean prison (or 3 minutes listening to a Madonna song, whichever you think is worse).



But whaddaya know, Bond manages to escape with the help of his supersonic ring, which proves very useful when he’s about to be executed on a glass floor. He escapes in an ice dragster and is chased by a giant solar death ray across an ice shelf. Wow, that’s extreme! How could it get more extreme than that? Well how about the death ray (having failed to catch up to Bond because he drove faster than light) melts enough ice to create a tidal wave. But Bond’s an expert surfer, remember, and he’s learned from Jinx how to transform into a Playstation character, so he rides out the tidal wave on a board and a sail. Now THAT is extreme! That’s more extreme than even a Mountain Dew commercial. I could TOTALLY see Bond holding a Dew bottle in this scene and saying something extreme to the camera like, “I like my Dew shaken, not stirred… although I need to let it sit a bit afterwards because it gets fizzy.” Yeah. Extreme.

And a light shone down from Heaven, guiding the wise men as they journeyed in their luxury sedans to the Ice Manger.

Back at the hotel, the villains trap Jinx in her hotel room and aim the death ray at the ice palace, which (and I never would have thought the movie was heading in this direction) causes the ice fortress to start melting. Bond has to get back to rescue Jinx before she drowns. He heads back to his invisible car, but Zao spots him and gives chase in another “fully-loaded” car, as Q would have said. Yes, this is the movie that finally brings to life the great idea of having two Q-cars go at it. They fire missiles and counter-measures at each other, and fire machine guns, and… missiles. And that goes on for a little while. They drive their way through the melting ice hotel, but Bond uses his invisibility power to trick Zao into driving into a lake, where he finally gets impaled by a falling chandelier. It’s such an ironic death, because the movie had established early on that he absolutely loved chandeliers. And Bond says to him, “Who turned off the lights?” Or maybe that was just my growing schizophrenia talking.



Bond rescues Jinx from her now-submerged hotel room, taking her back to the greenhouse where he submerges her in a hot spring to avert hypothermia and performs CPR on her. She coughs and sputters her way back to life and quips, “What took you so long?” At which point Bond pulls out his Walther PPK and shoots her in the head.

"You sure this worked when they did it in the Strangelove movie?"

Yep, he definitely shoots her in the head there. That’s the end of the movie. There’s definitely no scene where Bond and Jinx are sent in alone to stop Graves in North Korea. He definitely wasn’t wearing some Starship Troopers power armor on a jumbo jet, having decided that the best way to make use of his death ray was to clear the mine fields in the DMZ and lead the way for conventional ground troops. Definitely didn’t happen. It’s kind of an ironic ending, but quite poignant. Bond, the raving sexaholic, had finally found someone who was incredibly gorgeous, but so teeth-grindingly obnoxious and spiteful that he was willing to end his life and career, and sacrifice world peace, to avert the many horrible one-liners that Jinx would have perpetrated. And for that, Bond deserves our thanks. And I, for one, welcome our new North Korean overlords.

"Control, this is Bond. I have target sighted. Cannot get a clear look, but I estimate there's a 30% chance it's Madonna." "Control to Bond, you are cleared to take the shot."

There are many things wrong with this movie, but I’d like to single out Halle Berry for a moment. She’s very pretty, but she’s also a horrendous actress. I’ve never seen Monster’s Ball, for which she won the Academy Award, but I’d rather watch a 96-hour marathon of Dragon Ball Z than endure another of her performances after watching her in this, X-Men 1-3, Swordfish, Catwoman, and Gothika. She’s not just bad at speaking her lines with any dramatic urgency or comic timing, but she’s absolutely contemptuous of the movies she’s in. Watching her wink and smirk her way through this role, determined to show that she was in on the joke, rather than attempt to play it somewhat straight, was revolting. When she’s not the center of attention in a movie, she sulks and phones in her part (like in X-Men), and when she’s actually the star, she gives a horrible performance. If Hollywood just wants an attractive and talented black leading lady, I know of plenty who are vastly better at what they do than Halle Berry.

"Now, who's ready for some Rollerball?"

Not to say that she’s the only one to blame. I don’t know what happened to Lee Tamahori, who once upon a time directed the wilderness survival movie The Edge, from a script by David Mamet, that pit Anthony Hopkins against a Kodiak bear. How he went from that fine film to ice palaces, orbital death rays, DNA-swapping, an inexplicable cameo by Michael Madsen of all people, and flame thrower-equipped rubber hovercraft that blow up bunkers by crashing into them I’ll never know. But if this was the movie that killed his career, we at least have the satisfaction that his career found its just reward and went straight to Hell: his movie after this was XXX: State of the Union, a film that needed all of its computer-rendered effects to make you believe that yes, indeed, Ice Cube could jump.

"Are you sure you want this?" "Yes. No matter how much I scream, I need you to remove every inch of skin that Billy Bob Thornton touched."

This movie also had the conceit, since it was released on the fortieth anniversary of the first official Bond movie, Dr. No, and was also the twentieth Bond movie in the official series, of paying tribute to all of the previous films in some subtle way. Usually, this manifested itself in an action scene being lifted, such as parts of the hovercraft chase mirroring the boat chase from The World is Not Enough, or Zao’s death by chandelier mirroring 006’s death by satellite dish in GoldenEye. Then there was Halle Berry remaking the Ursula Andress bikini scene from Dr. No and the 10-minute golf match between Bond and Zao, ripped straight from Goldfinger (I’m pretty sure it was a deleted scene). Even though all the little references make the movie even less original and more disjointed, trying to catch all the little in-jokes at least gives a Bond fan something other to do than pay attention to the insipid story screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade were vomiting back in our faces, so I guess that’s a point in the film’s favor.



Fortunately, the Bond franchise redeemed itself with Casino Royale, as it (sort of) had with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and For Your Eyes Only in response to my last two reviewed films. That’s how the Bond movies work: they build themselves up to horrible, brain-dead, plot-free excess, then after hitting rock bottom, they come back with a serious and level-headed movie.

I decided that a shot of a vehicle and random non-explosive crap blowing up around it would be a fitting way to finish this review.

And then they piss it all away each time by making Diamonds are Forever, Octopussy, and Quantum of Solace. So much for that redemption thing. But enough Bond movies for now. Reviewing the same friggin’ movie three times in a row kind of wears on me.



The End of The Worst of Bond. James Bond will return in You Only Review the Worst of Bond Twice.

REVIEW: The Worst of Bond, Part 2: Moonraker

Hey, have you ever seen Roger Moore and the face on Mars in the same room together? Makes you think...

James Bond movies are almost never original. They’re purely reactionary, reacting both to the popular trends of the time and to the critical success of the previous film. If one film bombs, critically or financially, the next one is radically different. If a film succeeds, the producers do whatever had worked before, but with MORE. That’s why we got Moonraker. The film before it had been The Spy Who Loved Me, a huge, goofy, over-the-top action epic that was actually pretty entertaining, even for dull old Timothy Dalton fans like me. And with Star Wars having recently popularized big outer space battles, all the momentum pushed the series to the ignominious task of putting James Bond 007, smooth-talking, worldly secret agent, into astronaut gear, firing laser beams against goons in a giant exploding space station. The result was… well, the fact that I’m writing about it might give away my conclusion.

"All right, you win. I'll turn off all my electronic devices."

The film opens with a carrier plane transporting a Moonraker space shuttle on its back, taking it to the UK to contribute to the apparently-existent British space program. Excuse me, space programme. And wow, how fast do you need the shuttle that you need to ship it atop another plane, rather than using boats and trains and stuff? But the British “We need a space shuttle on short notice; got one laying around, mate?” approach is very convenient for the plot. There are a couple of bad guys stowed aboard the shuttle; they hit the ignition and fly the shuttle off, destroying the plane in their wake. They head off to God-knows-where, because we know that space shuttles are impossible to track on radar.

"I promise, I'm just borrowing it!"

So of course James Bond (Roger Moore), returning to the UK from Africa, is assigned to the case, but not before we get the highlight of the film out of the way. He’s caught by bad guys aboard a small plane high in the air, and shortly after he kicks the villain carrying the last parachute out of the plane, he himself gets booted. In one of the most wonderfully audacious action scenes I’ve ever witnessed, Bond intercepts the villain in mid-air, wrestles the parachute off his back, and clasps it onto his own. It’s one of those stunts that’s so outrageous, yet just close enough to theoretically plausible that it’s a treat to behold. Unfortunately, they ruin it by adding Jaws (Richard Kiel), The Spy Who Loved Me’s 7-foot-tall, metal-toothed assassin, who dives after Bond and nearly bites his leg off, but pulls the cord on a defective parachute (guess the props department couldn’t procure an anvil to complete the effect) and yet manages to land safely on a circus tent. Moonraker, I thought you were going to manage to pull off one good full scene there. Think you could try it again later on? Er…

"I am glad you could join me, Mr. Bond. Now, allow me to fetch Raggedy Ann and Bobo the Bear, and our little tea party can begin."

Anyway, the space shuttle’s been stolen, and the British don’t have any leads whatsoever, so Bond decides to go visit the Drax Industries complex in California where the shuttle was made. I guess that a random stab in the dark’s as good an approach as any, and fortunately, Bond’s guess is entirely correct. He goes to meet billionaire industrialist Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale, apparently thinking that “Moonraker” is a sleeping pill and acting the part), and Bond plays himself and everything; there’s no pretense at all of being anything but an agent of the British government out to learn how the Moonraker shuttles are made in the odd event that the secrets to unraveling an international conspiracy lie in a glorified Kennedy Space Center tour. Drax decides that the best way to avert suspicion from himself is to tell his Chinese (for no particular reason) henchman Chang (Toshiro Suga; hey, same continent) to kill Bond. Yeah, because if a British agent were killed five minutes after arriving, it’s not like they have any other spies they could send. Well, actually, judging by these movies, they might not.

"Heh-heh-heh. Boobs. Huh-huh-huh."

So Drax has his people try to kill Bond as he participates in a variety of pointless recreational activities--riding around in a centrifuge chamber, pheasant hunting, Skee ball, Mario Kart--but it’s all in good fun, because even as people are being shot out of trees, neither Bond or Drax decides to drop the pretext and just shoot each other in the back. Bond’s knack for securing undying devotion from buxom females at first sight of his rugged British smirk comes in handy, as he gets some help from Drax helicopter pilot Corinne Dufour (Corinne Clery, whom Moore kept calling “Mildred” on the set for some reason). She semi-inadvertently helps him find mysterious blueprints, and for her assistance, Bond leaves her behind and never finds out about her brutal death by Drax’s hounds. But at least Bond was generous enough to sleep with her first. You know what they say to future Bond girls: stay off the Moore. Thank you! I’ll be here all week.

His espionage skills had served him well. She never suspected that he wasn't really at least 52 inches tall.

The blueprints are for a glass vial, which Bond traces to a factory in Venice (you know, I wonder if these Bond villains are ever going to get something manufactured in Akron, Ohio). There, Bond once again runs into Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles, apparently on whatever depressants Lonsdale is), a scientist working for Drax, whom he remembers flirting with inanely back in California. Suffice to say she’s clearly not what she seems, but Bond isn’t curious enough at this point to find out. Because who needs detective work when bad guys just keep trying to kill you whenever you follow up on a thin lead? It’s like an international game of Marco Polo. The attack in question comes as Bond is lounging around in a gondola, apparently relaxing after his hard day of walking around a factory for a few minutes and talking to a pretty lady. Villains attack him from speedboats, so Bond reveals that he’s actually in a Q-division gondola, which has a really powerful motor and even turn into a hovercraft to go on land, kind of like a reverse of the far more practical submarine car from The Spy Who Loved Me. You know, I just have to admire Q-division. They must have put millions of dollars into developing a “fully stocked” vehicle that could only possibly be valuable in Venice. In fact, I suspect that the team leader of Q’s Canal Warfare department staged the attack merely to justify funding.

"Do you need something, grandfather?"

After riding to safety across the square in a floating hovercraft boat, a scene so goofy that a cheaply-edited double-take from a bird is fairly low on the scale of offensive sight gags, Bond skulks back to the factory at night. He finds a laboratory and inadvertently causes two scientists to die after being exposed to some kind of deadly-to-humans-only toxin that’s being transported around in those glass vials. Sneaking out, Bond is confronted by Chang, who attacks him with a giant bamboo stick. And since the glass shop sports a suit of armor (???), Bond gets to pick up a real sword, stunning Chang with the realization that sharp metal tends to be more effective than rounded wood. Bond ends the fight by tossing Chang through the glass face of a clock tower, and he crashes into a piano far below, prompting Bond to unleash the pun, “Play it again, Sam.” Well, maybe it’s not a pun, but it’s a joke. Well, it’s not so much a joke, but it’s definitely a sentence.

"You awe a cunning foe, Mistaw Bond. You wemind me of a certain nemesis I fought wong ago..."

Bond confronts Goodhead (God, I hate writing that name) back at her hotel room, and after playing around with her pen and perfume, he finds that they all contain hidden weapons (acid, a flamethrower), which clearly means that she’s a fellow secret agent from the CIA. Because as we all know, there’s nothing that defines you as a secret agent beyond how many goofball weapons you have hidden in pedestrian items. It’s also a good enough pretext for the two to have sex and put off busting Drax’s bio-weapons operation until the morning. Which proves to be Bond’s undoing, because when M and the Defense Minister arrive to inspect the glass shop (showing a hands-on interest in Bond’s affairs for once), they find that the lab no longer exists. There’s only Drax, standing there confused at their arrival in gas masks into his massive ball room… out back of a glass shop. Nope, not at all suspicious. The Defense Minister is humiliated, but M believes Bond and unofficially dispatches him to Rio de Janeiro, where Drax is moving his operation; once again, I’d really like to suggest a place like Peoria, Illinois if Drax is looking for a solid industrial workforce. But he’s more concerned at the moment with finding a good henchman to replace Chang. So he calls eFelony and is thrilled to hear that Jaws is available. Jaws? I can imagine Drax drooling over the guy’s resume:


Name: Jaws
Objective: To provide killing while expanding my skills as a wacky comic relief antagonist.
Skills:

• Massive size and strength, which can be used to overpower any opponent who is either incredibly slow or already cornered.
• Excellent disguise skills, so long as I am operating in a circus, European basketball game, or have access to Abraham Lincoln makeup and costume.
• Completely indestructible, so long as attacks are aimed directly at my mouth while it is closed.

Accomplishments

• Have come very close to defeating James Bond on several occasions, and would have succeeded if Roger Moore had wasted just a little more time mugging for the camera.
• Have survived more James Bond movies than Oddjob, Scaramanga, Baron Samedi, Red Grant, or George Lazenby.

Past Employment:

• Karl Stromberg (1977-1977). Served as chief assassin. Employment terminated when employer was killed by James Bond.

Definitely putting at least one of the words into the term, "The Gay Blade."

Bond heads down to Rio, where he has sex with his contact, Manuela, as if it’s a bodily function. Which, er, I guess it is. They head out that night so he can wander aimlessly around an empty warehouse. Seriously, I think the world was out of disposable thugs by now. But while Bond’s bumbling around in hopes that more thugs attack him and make his espionage job easier, Jaws fools him by going after Manuela instead. But she and Bond are saved not once, but twice by a band of flamboyant dancing revelers on their way to Goofy Local Festival #856A. Remember, theatergoers won’t realize a joke is funny unless you make it twice in the span of a minute.

"Come to bed, darling." "Shortly, dear. Just need to finish adding one more boat chase and one more boner joke to the Fleming novel."

Jaws tries to get at Bond again, this time after Bond and Holly meet up and start traveling down from an overlook in a cable car. With the help of an exceptionally compliant operator, Jaws has Bond and Holly’s car stopped, then rides down on his own, banking on Bond having left his Walther PPK on the nightstand so that he doesn’t just shoot the 7-foot-tall target. Which, of course, proves to have been a well-played gambit. Bond and Jaws rassle for a bit, while Holly proves her CIA agent credentials by slapping Jaws’ ankles in the meantime, having also left all of her deadly gadgets on the nightstand. The whole thing ends with Bond and Holly escaping (whew, I was worried there for a second) and Jaws and his car crashing through a building, after which he runs into a 2 ½-foot-tall blonde girl with ponytails, and they fall in love. And then… Then…

Spy (and his supervisors) vs. Spy

I’m sorry, I don’t know how much longer I can take this, so I’m just going to zip through the next several “action” scenes:

• Bond escapes from an ambulance full of Drax thugs. Unlike the guy who attacked Bond 15 seconds beforehand, they apparently do not have orders to kill Bond on sight. Bond escapes, but they get away with Holly.
• In search of the orchid that Q has determined Drax is using in production of the nerve gas, Bond rides up the Amazon in a Q speedboat, and oddly enough, gets attacked by bad guys in other speed boats! Mind you, this is a new speedboat, not the Q speedboat disguised as a gondola. And remember, nothing is certain in life except death, taxes, Cal Ripken, and Jaws ending an action scene with a pratfall and then surviving a horrible crash.
• Bond wrestles with a rubber anaconda. He then stabs it with a pen, which is mightier than a bamboo sword.
• Drax leaves Bond and Holly to die underneath the exhaust port of a Moonraker shuttle as it launches. They, uh, get away.
• Bond and Holly knock out some Moonraker pilots and replace them on a departing shuttle. Fortunately, Bond’s learned how to hold his air conditioner correctly by now, so nobody notices. They head up into space carrying a bunch of beach party bingo rejects.
• They get up to a space station that’s hidden to radar. From here, Drax plans to wipe out the human race with nerve gas orbs and then repopulate the planet with his genetically-perfect supermen and superwomen, ushering in an era of peace or some such crap. He captures Bond and Holly again. He orders them to be thrown out an airlock. They get away. They break the radar jammer.

Jaws: Raising the bar for gimmick villains since 1977.

Now, this is where the film gets really interesting. Because apparently NASA has a team of space marines, armed with laser rifles, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. Once they get word that the big thing in space is not the Russians, they decide they need to destroy it, which seems like a bit of backwards logic to me. The shuttle full of space marines heads toward the station, but while NASA was thinking small-scale, figuring that little dudes with ray guns would be enough to tackle anything space threw at them, Drax figured, “Hey, how about I just blow up their ship?” So Bond and Holly have to escape. One. Last. Time. This time, they do it by convincing Jaws that Drax won’t let his Mini-Her girlfriend be a part of his master race. As if he was really going to keep the 7-foot-tall ugly guy in suspenders be a big part of his eugenics program anyway. So Jaws helps them escape and stop Drax from blowing up the shuttle with a big laser, which forces him to send out a bunch of little guys with lasers. The film climaxes with the immortal battle between guys in white space suits with lasers versus guys in yellow space suits with lasers. It’s positively operatic.

"Screw Venice. I'm in flavor country."

The space marines start blowing up the station, and Bond chases Drax down one of the docking tubes, until Drax reaches the air lock and pulls a (non-laser) gun on him. Looks like it’s over for Bond, who didn’t think it necessary to bring one of the ten thousand laser pistols on the station along for this task. That is, until Bond uses a Q-division wrist dart thing (cleverly disguised as a regular wrist thing) to shoot Drax in the heart, before he launches him into space out of the air lock. And since there was clearly no ship out of the air lock, one questions Drax’s logic in choosing to flee there. Maybe he figured he could just hold his breath on his way down to Earth, then try to land atop a circus tent, Jaws-style.

"That joke about fashion had better have been at the expense of my lackeys."

But there’s still the issue of three nerve gas pods that have already been launched towards Earth, each containing enough gas to kill 100 million people. Boy, you must be able to fit a lot of gas in a 6-by-6 foot glass bubble. Bond and Holly take off in Drax’s laser-armed Moonraker to shoot them down before they reach the atmosphere. I wonder if Ian Fleming, long-since passed on by this point, watched from the afterlife and regretted calling his novel Moonraker. Although a synopsis of the book shows that it was hardly understated, involving Bond’s attempt to stop a nuclear missile from destroying London, I can’t imagine that Fleming knew this would lead to a film adaptation in which his clever gentleman-spy would wear a yellow jumpsuit and shoot laser beams at nerve gas pods before sleeping with a CIA agent/astronaut lady named Goodhead. I think that if he was aware of that, he would have called the novel something like A Delightfully Dapper Dust-Up to foil Hollywood’s attempts to turn the novel into a big-screen game of Galaga. Then again, they did eventually manage to take a story called Quantum of Solace and turn it into a movie about people stealing Bolivia’s water, so probably no matter of prophecy could have averted the apocalypse known as Moonraker.

Moonraker for the Magnavox Odyssey. Definitely brings the film to life.

I’ll just leave it to you to imagine Bond’s final victory and the wacky hijinx that ensue when MI-6 accidentally broadcasts footage of him having zero-gravity sex with Holly to Buckingham Palace and the White House.

"The State Department mistranslated it! 'Mir' actually means 'die Yankee buttheads'! We're doomed!"

I’m not going to say that Moonraker could have been a good film if they had done a few things differently, because that’s like saying the Sun could be inhabitable it were just a bit cooler. It’s the silliest Bond movie ever, and it’s not remotely funny. Michael Lonsdale, who’s actually a pretty good actor, delivers a couple of drolly funny lines--“James Bond, you appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season,” “At least I shall have the pleasure of putting you out of my misery,” and the absolutely poetic, “Allow me to introduce you to the airlock chamber”--but looks like a Muppet Baby version of Czar Nicholas II, and is about as threatening as a foam rubber Andy Milonakis doggy chew toy. He even gets upstaged on the quasi-intentionally hilarious, completely unintentionally homoerotic line front when Bond refers to Drax’s space station as a “flying stud farm.” As for Lois Chiles? Well, all I can say is that at least many of the previous Bond girls have had the excuse of not having English as a native language.

"Don't mind me. Just taking a very large step with my mankind. And activating my thrusters. And exploring this lady's angry red planets. After that, I'm going to penetrate her lower atmosphere. Oh, and she's going to stick something in my gas giant, where there are lots of asteroids and Klingons. Let's see, what can I say about Pluto..."

Fortunately, the producers never attempted to one-up their shooting of Bond into outer space by having him battle Galactus or something. No, but even if it took a while to manifest itself, Moonraker did eventually have its spiritual successor, a film that would make this look like Syriana by comparison…

REVIEW: The Worst of Bond, Part 1: You Only Live Twice

Jack Bauer, however, lives as many times as he damn well wants.

I’m a fan of the James Bond film franchise; I just don’t like that many James Bond films. Everyone has their favorites, and I gravitate towards the few that have at least a hint of seriousness and believability to them, and which actually depict Bond doing the occasional spy stuff, not just acting like a horny college student and machine-gunning bad guys in alternating scenes. Thunderball, For Your Eyes Only, The Living Daylights, License to Kill, GoldenEye, and Casino Royale are all good or great in my book. They all manage to work in humor (well, okay, that wasn’t Dalton’s forte in his pre-Hot Fuzz days), but also had actual espionage, detective work, and covert operations involved. There’s a bunch more films that are silly, but mostly pretty enjoyable.


Then there’s the dregs. And no discussion of the dregs of the series can begin without the nadir of the Sean Connery era, You Only Live Twice.

If that's Sean Connery, I'm Arnold Schwarzenegger.

After the requisite gun barrel opening (back in the days when Bond was wobbly-kneed and wore that awful hat), we cut to a space capsule in orbit around the Earth. Don’t worry, we’re not to Moonraker yet; Bond (Sean Connery, if I haven’t made that clear yet) does all his work planetside. It’s an American capsule, and out of nowhere, another ship appears, barely detectable by radar. It bears no markings, and as it approaches the capsule, its bow opens up and the whole thing envelops the smaller capsule. The Americans blame the Russians, and the Russians deny knowing anything about the mystery ship. Gee, I’m glad the Bond series managed to wait an entire five movies after this one before completely and utterly ripping off the concept I just described. Except I guess that means I’m ripping on The Spy Who Loved Me, which I actually liked. Whatever.

"Odd. You taste like... David Niven?!?!"

For no comprehensible reason whatsoever except that the Brits are smart and the Americans are dumb cowboys, it’s the British who suspect a third party is to blame, and it’s their responsibility to investigate the suspected landing site of the ship, which is near Japan. And of course, their entire investigation is to be carried out by Mr. James Bond 007; hey, with all those billions going to Q Division, you can’t afford many actual field agents. He’s in Hong Kong, in bed with a Chinese girl and making inane observations about how Chinese girls taste like Peking Duck or some such crap. It’s like a Seinfeld routine performed by a bored Scotsman. But the girl betrays him, folding his bed back into the wall and bringing in a guy to machine gun him. When the cops arrive, they pull him out, apparently dead, and they observe that at least he died on the job. Wait, so even the Hong Kong police know who Bond is? I know Hong Kong was under British control at the time, but doesn‘t being a celebrity throw a monkey wrench into his “secret“ agent status? And is he really such a horse’s ass that British police officers, while the world is on the brink of nuclear war, are making dirty jokes about their country’s greatest hero getting killed? Well… come to think of it, he was kind of a douche bag sometimes.

American: "They spelled 'color' wrong!" Brit: "They spelled 'Technicolour' wrong!"

The opening titles feature an execrable theme from Nancy Sinatra and a shocker of a credit: Screenplay by Roald Dahl, as in the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory author. As someone who likes James Bond movies with at least a tenuous connection to something resembling a skewed version of reality, I at least appreciate the film for giving me fair warning.

"I'm here for my senior portrait."

We see Bond’s naval funeral aboard a destroyer, and his sheet-wrapped body dumped into the ocean; a mysterious figure watches from the shore, apparently verifying that Bond is dead. Which he’d be able to do a lot better if the body wasn’t cocooned, but I’m not one to tell him how to do his job. As the body falls underwater, it’s recovered by a pair of divers and brought aboard a British submarine. They cut the body bag open and, lo and behold, there’s Bond alive (and in uniform), breathing through an aqualung. As M (who apparently feels the need to have both an office and reception aboard the sub as if people are going to just wander on in) is quick to explain, creating the elaborate ruse that Bond is dead will help prevent his enemies from coming after him as he goes about his mission. I guess we’ve already established that Bond’s cover gets blown as often as the rest of him is, so that makes sense. But if all you were going to show at the funeral was a wrapped-up body getting dumped in the ocean, why couldn’t it have just been a big bag of flour or something? Couldn’t you just have used a fake body and given Bond an elaborate disguise, like a moustache and glasses? No wonder tax rates in the UK are so high. Regardless of how preposterous it is that MI-6 would stage a highly public funeral to fake the death of a supposedly-secret agent, this quickly-forgotten gimmick is what the entire title of the movie hinges on. For the title, they could have either embraced the “faked death” theme, or they could have embraced the Japanese theme by calling it Super Fast Sean Bond Connery with Much Honor Time or You Only Set Up Us the Bomb Twice, so I think they made the right call.

"Her Majesty's government can wait. Can anyone here direct me to the nearest used panties vending machine?"

Bond is sent to Tokyo to contact MI-6’s contact, an expatriate named Henderson, who has been doing his own investigation into who might have been responsible for the mystery spacecraft and where their launch point is. And since the producers spent a lot of money to film on location in Japan, they’re going to milk the country for everything it’s worth. The initial meeting with Henderson’s representative, the supposedly-hot chick Aki (supposed actress Akiko Wakabayashi, who I just hope had the excuse of learning her lines phonetically) takes place at a sumo wrestling match. Later, we’ll see Japanese bath house prostitutes and ninjas. I guess that since Roger Moore wasn’t in the series yet, they stopped short of having Sailor Moon help defend Bond from Gamera.

"This was not what I had in mind."

Aki takes Bond to Henderson, who’s actually Blofeld. Or not. The actor, Charles Gray, wound up playing Bond’s arch-nemesis only two films later. I guess the fact that he’s on-screen for about 40 seconds before an assassin gets to him helped prevent people from remembering him too well. Bond chases the assassin on foot across Henderson’s estate, and it’s a good thing that the bad guy has gout or something, because it’s not much of a chase. Bond overpowers him, then puts on his heavy overcoat and surgical mask (???) to impersonate him back at his getaway car. The bad guys drive him to Osato Chemicals; man, I never would have thought that a chemical company in a spy movie could be up to something nefarious. Bond sneaks in, beats up a bad guy, and takes the opportunity to crack open a safe. How? Well, of course he went to meet Henderson with a safecracking kit in his pocket, silly. Carefully watch the scene where Bond hurries to crack the safe while a pair of guards wander on by and nearly discover him; if you can explain to me where they are in relation to him, I congratulate you on mastering four-dimensional physics. Opening the safe sounds an alarm, and Bond has only time to grab a few documents before rushing out. He’s shot at the whole way, but fortunately, Aki drives by to pick him up and drive him to safety. I’ll ignore the question of how she knew where he was, because I have bigger fish to fry. Or serve raw for $20 a plate, I should say.

"Don't get me wrong, Sean. You would make a fine Fu Manchu. I just don't believe you can slip into the role of a Japanese man the way I can."

Aki, the movie's designated driver, takes Bond to Tiger Tanaka (Tetsuro Tamba), the head of the Japanese secret service. He and Bond hit it off. Tanaka’s a fellow womanizer, and apparently Japan has such an incredible secret service budget that the man has his own private train system running below Tokyo, complete with hot babe engineers/geishas. What’s more, this guy is the head of the Japanese secret service, so he’s actually equivalent to M in rank. I guess that Japan’s such an awesome place that even administrators responsible for entire intelligence services can be playboys. No wonder all the pothead college guys love Japan so much.

"Now you see why they call me 'Tiger,' Mr. Bond."

While Tanaka starts analyzing the photo Bond stole, trying to figure out which coastline it shows, Bond goes right back to Osato Chemicals, masquerading as a businessman and meeting with the company’s owner, Mr. Osato (Teru Shimada), and his assistant, Helga Brandt (Karin Dor). They talk about, uh, nothing as far as I could gather. But Bond does manage to blow his cover, AGAIN, by bringing his Walther PPK with him, which Osato discovers by secretly filming him with X-rays. So once again, Bond gets shot at on his way out of Osato Chemicals, and once again, Aki drives up in her convertible and saves his Scottish ass. Hey Bond, how’s that faked death doing you? Keeping all the enemies off your back? No? Wow, thought that plan was foolproof. And fortunately, the Japanese secret service has extensive R&D funds for weapons you’d almost never ever need to use, so they have a big helicopter with a magnet to pick up the pursuing car full of bad guys and dump them in the ocean.

One thing the Japanese really do better than us: valet parking.

Wanting to learn more about the liquid oxygen (a key ingredient for rocket propulsion) that Osato has been importing, Bond heads to the company’s docks and gets IMMEDIATELY ambushed by bad guys. What is wrong with him? He might as well go everywhere in a spandex jumpsuit and a cape; it won’t hurt his ability to go around incognito. He’s captured and interrogated by Brandt, an interrogation that takes about a minute before it turns to sex. That didn’t take long. But the villainess either didn’t think Mr. Bond lived up to the hype, or she isn’t taking her job of getting information out of him very seriously, because she immediately tries to kill him by taking him high up in a light plane, trapping him with a spring-loaded tray table, dropping a grenade full of purple gas, and parachuting out while the plane goes down. Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’d have read a lot more books if I had only 1960s movies to watch. Anyway, it’s a Northwest plane, so Bond’s able to break the tray table like balsa wood and land the plane sort-of safely.

If you hated all the shaky-cam close-up action scenes in Quantum of Solace, I've got just the movie for you.

The villainous transnational organization SPECTRE is behind all this nonsense, and its leader, Blofeld (Donald Pleasance, attempting no particular accent), is none too happy about his lackey, Mr. Osato, failing to kill Mr. Bond. He feeds Ms. Brandt to his piranha fish as a warning to Osato. I’ll bet Blofeld loses a lot of people to the piranha that he doesn’t mean to sacrifice, though. Just to get into his office, you have to cross a railing-free, two-foot wide bridge that goes right over the tank. I’d say that even if Blofeld hadn’t dropped the trap door and dunked her in, there was a good 33% chance she’d have slipped.

"Dammit, woman, where the hell are my pretzels and ginger ale?"

Back with the swinging Japanese super-agent, Bond sends for Q and “Little Nellie.” Little Nellie is a tiny, easy-to-assemble helicopter (must have gotten it at Ikea) that Bond has apparently used to some effect before, although not in any of the films. Before Bond goes off scouting out the island that Tanaka says appeared in the stolen documents, Q gives Bond a quick overview of the new features, since Bond already knows how to fly the damn thing: machine guns, rocket launchers, heat-seeking missiles, aerial mines (?), and rear-firing flamethrowers (???). Wait a minute, those aren’t new features, those are all the weapons on the helicopter. So I guess we’re to presume that Little Nellie went from unarmed reconnaissance craft to flying death in one single upgrade. In any event, Bond goes to scout out the island, wearing a helmet with a big camera lens on the front; I have no idea what the camera’s for except to cement this scene as the most humiliating of Sean Connery’s career. That’s right, First Knight’s Starfleet uniforms and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s scenes with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hulk be damned.

"Bond to base. Will need three more tickets to continue with ride, over."

Flying over the island, he initially finds nothing. But fortunately, the bad guys send four machine gun-firing helicopters after him; after all, we wouldn’t want Bond to actually have to think about the possibility that he’s found the right target. (Nor would we want to give the audience time to realize that all the work Bond did since recovering those documents was apparently pointless.) There’s four helicopters, so what do you want to bet that Bond gets to use each of his weapon systems exactly once? (The machine guns are useless, so they don’t count.) That’s what I like in my Bond movies. A hero who serves purely as a delivery system for the tech nerds’ overpowered weapons, a guy who is skilled enough to fly a helicopter and wear a dopey-looking helmet, but otherwise needs only press clearly-labeled buttons when enemy aircraft wander into his weapons’ sights. Even the flamethrower, something I think tends not to be equipped on aircraft too often, gets to kill a bad guy in a Crusader Rabbit-quality special effects shot.

"Avenge me, Jet Jaguar!"

Time grows short: a Russian space capsule has been captured by the mysterious spaceship, leading the Commies to think the Americans are actually behind it, and if the soon-to-be-launched American capsule is taken, the Americans promise to start war with Russia. Because while the Americans can accept losing one space capsule to the evil fake Russians, two is just crossing the line.

"You will be pleased to know, Master, that we have cornered the world market in cheezburgers."

Now that we’ve established that something’s definitely going on in the island, Tanaka prepares an operation to sneak himself, Bond, and an army of secret service ninjas into the island village’s population so that they can look for the bad guys’ base unnoticed. In addition to training as a ninja--”Hey, thanks guys, but my people have already trained me in combat, and our side kicked your side’s ASS in World War II.”--it’s absolutely essential that Bond blend in. So he gets a bit of makeup so that he looks Japanese (well, more like the typical Western actor playing Fun Manchu, but I guess it’s close enough if you squint). But in Tanaka’s perverse world, blending in will also require that Bond actually get married, for real, to a Japanese girl.

"Good! Now you are ready when Blofeld's men come at you with pointed sticks. Next, we prepare for when the escalate and deploy bananas."

OK, Mr. Tanaka. We need to have an intervention here. I know your operation isn’t terribly fiscally responsible or efficient. You keep a private subway system for your own personal use, and you spend money on outdated (throwing stars) or spectacularly impractical (magnet-hauling helicopters) weapons. And that’s okay; it’s not like North Korea was being run a whole lot better, and it’s not like Russia saw you as a big target at this point. You could afford to waste time and taxpayer money on useless crap. But now that you ACTUALLY need to do something in defense of world peace, you’ve decided that the mission hinges on Bond actually, REALLY getting married to one of your agents so that his cover is authentic. I think it’s time for you to step down, Mr. Tanaka, in favor of someone more qualified to lead the defense of Japan: Shigeru Miyamoto, Sephiroth, Ultraman, Jet Jaguar, Ken (any of them), Pikachu, that freak who eats all the hot dogs, and The Vapors are all more viable options. What’s more, while Bond’s doing his ninja training, he’s attacked by an enemy agent who’s infiltrated the camp. If Tanaka had half a brain cell left, he’d know this meant that the bad guys had infiltrated his operation enough that a marriage ceremony wasn’t going to fool them, but dammit, Operation: This Marriage is a Hollow Lie is going to proceed no matter what.

"So how long is it until you girls get back into bikinis and start washing my naughty bits again?"

With the big day approaching, Bond finally boinks Aki, but as they sleep, an assassin sneaks in and tries to drip poison down onto Bond. Aki rolls over onto him at the wrong time and winds up taking it for him and dying. This leaves the movie briefly, distressingly, without a babe. And Bond’s pissed about it; while his unseen fiancee is on her way to the wedding, Bond pouts like a little bitch because he thinks his real/fake wife is going to be ugly. Fortunately, she (Mie Hama) is not, and she’s got the ridiculous name, Kissy Suzuki, to prove it. Unfortunately, she’s a committed spy (pretty much the only one in Japan) and isn’t interested in Bond’s advances for the time being, just on stopping SPECTRE.

"Um, sir, isn't putting all our flat panel TVs so close to the launch pad going to void the warranty?"

Bond and Kissy discover that a lake in a dormant volcano is actually not a lake at all: it’s a retractable roof for an underground facility from which the evil rockets are being launched. Bond sneaks into the facility, and tries to board the craft disguised as an astronaut, but Blofeld notices him on a security camera and realizes that he’s holding his air conditioner incorrectly (Hey, I’m just reporting here). Taken captive, Bond asks Blofeld if he can have a smoke while he watches footage of the evil spaceship about to capture the American capsule on the monitors. (So which spaceship did they send up there to film their own evil spaceship from a side angle?) Blofeld hasn’t watched any of the previous Bond movies, apparently, so he doesn’t know that the cigarettes are actually mini-rocket launchers. Bond blasts a guard to create a distraction and opens the roof to allow Tanaka’s ninjas to pour in and wage a huge battle against the SPECTRE thugs. It certainly looks like the filmmakers spent a lot of money, by 1967 standards, on the fight inside the base. But from this scene, and its clone in The Spy Who Loved Me, all I can gather is that both the Japanese and SPECTRE should have just spent the money to get everyone a handful of grenades, because every single time they‘re thrown, the grenades wind up killing three enemies. Forget the throwing star and sword crap, and focus on just bombing the bejeezus out of everybody.

"Did you see that film? Mike Myers does a terrible impression of me." "I know. It's the same thing with me and that zero Darrell Hammond. I hate him almost as much as I hate Alex Trebek."

Fortunately, the evil spaceship has a built-in self-destruct device, so after Bond escapes Blofeld and kills a few more perfunctory henchmen, he reaches the control room again and blows the thing up before it can reach the American capsule. Blofeld was foresighted enough to also equip the base with a self-destruct mechanism as well, one that sets off a series of explosions from random areas of the base that clearly don’t contain any actual explosives. Both Blofeld and the surviving good guys flee the base in opposite directions as the whole place goes up, with the volcano apparently even going active and spewing lava. Not really sure how Blofeld managed to arrange that. Regardless, Japanese-ified James Bond and Kissy swim out to sea and climb into an inflatable life raft that appears out of nowhere just as Tanaka and the rest of the ninjas disappear into nowhere. They start to make out until, wouldn’t you know, the British sub pops up from right underneath their raft and M demands that Bond be debriefed immediately. Um, yeah, not the same way Kissy would have done it.

Ninjas: Even they have reserves.

If it sounds like this movie was a bit short on plot, then I communicated it poorly, because it actually has no plot whatsoever. Bond movies are usually high on style and short on substance, and I can accept that. But man, if it weren’t for all the travelogue stuff about how great Japan is, this whole film would just be a series of vignettes where Bond goes somewhere, gets immediately ambushed by bad guys, and gets bailed out by either a Japanese agent or a Q gadget. SPECTRE’s plot to have the Americans and Soviets destroy each other, then fill the superpower vaccuum, is pretty darn goofy. As pure camp, I guess You Only Live Twice is watchable, but be sure to remember this movie and Diamonds are Forever next time you bash the Roger Moore movies for being too silly.

"Dammit! My Russian doppleganger from the future is messing with my mojo!"

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must be off to practice being more Japanese so that I can exponentially improve my greatness in all aspects of life. For great justice!