And the marathon continues...
Never Say Never Again (1983)
Embarrassing money grab. Horrible theme song.
Skyfall (2012)
Bond vs a creepy Eurotrash hairdresser!
This one is popular but I don't care for it. Look, if a movie has a character named Plenty O'Toole I'm not going to nitpick plot holes and such, but if the new Bond movies want to be serious I'm going to hold them to a different standard.
The bad guy's plot makes zero sense. Absolutely none. Secondly, Daniel Craig's Bond wears thin pretty fast; scowling is no substitute for a personality. Thirdly, why should I care about M or anyone else in these stories? They are all two dimensional and M (in any iteration) has never been a likable or interesting character. The ending is also stupid. It's like they lifted a few pages from a home invasion movie. The 70+ year old head of MI6 isn't going to use any of her vast army of spies and billions of dollars worth of sci-fi weapons technology to stop the bad guy. Instead she's going to make her final stand with one agent who has seen better days and an 80 year old groundskeeper. Oh, and they have to borrow a gun from the old guy because they just forgot that they might need one or something. And what about the list with all the undercover agents names?
On the plus side there are some beautiful location shots, and the action scenes were well done.
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
This is my favorite from the Moore era but it still isn't very good. It has an intriguing premise: a sexy Russian spy is forced to work with Bond to save the world even though Bond is responsible for the death of her lover. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't really do anything with this idea. Part of the problem is Barbara Bach; she can't act at all. She doesn't even try to. She's just a lump. A sexy lump, but a lump nonetheless.
How bad of an actress do you have to be when you can look this hot and still **** up a movie?
The first 40 minutes or so are pretty strong; the opening ski/parachute scene is great, Karl Stromberg has a great intro scene where he feeds his mistress to a shark, Richard Kiel makes his debut as Jaws, and there are some nice location shots in Egypt. And then it starts to go wrong. It starts with a lot of cheesy one liners in the first Bond/Jaws clash and the tone for the rest of the movie is never as serious as it should have been considering the movie's premise.
The comedy is bad, but the lackluster direction is what really does the movie in. Scenes that should be thrilling consistently fall flat.
I would love to see this one remade.