James Bond: Octopussy

(This has been sitting in my Drafts folder for three years. Enjoy.)

First time, ladies and gentlemen, that a Soviet Russian is the Big Bad. (This film was made in 1983.) Second and last appearance of Maud Adams, making this the only film where one named Bond Girl looks an awful lot like a previous one (she was the doomed Andrea Anders in The Man With the Golden Gun).


Conventional wisdom holds that Octopussy is an average Bond film, either simply typical for the franchise as a whole or for the Roger Moore era.

We should be so lucky. Octopussy is somewhat better than its reputation suggests, and although it is mired down by enough to keep it out of the Top Five, it is considerably above "average."

To my mind, there are three valid criticisms about the film: the overly-complicated plot, Roger Moore's advancing age, and the silly stuff at the end, including a scene where Bond defuses a nuclear bomb while dressed as a clown.

The Plot
Exiled Afghan Prince Kamal Khan and Soviet General Orlov are stealing the Russian equivalent of the Crown Jewels and selling them in order to finance Orlov's Big Military Engagement Against the Decadent West, which is going to start with a nuclear bomb planted at an Air Force base in West Germany. Khan is using Octopussy's almost all-girl circus (there are twin male knife-throwers who turn out to be in Khan/Orlov's employ) as cover for their smuggling operation - she's in on the smuggling, but not on the bomb plot. Oh, and he's having the Crown Jewels forged so that nobody notices they're missing. Because apparently the KGB doesn't watch Southeby's.  Bond is only alerted to the whole thing when 009 steals a Faberge egg from the knife-throwers, which then turns out to be a fake.

The lynchpin to Khan's betrayal comes when the jewels are placed in a hidden compartment beneath one stunt cannon on one of Octopussy's circus's train cars, only for that car to be switched under a tunnel with an identical car with a nuclear bomb hidden under its camera. Unfortunately this scene is shot relatively poorly and it's not entirely clear what's going on. Also, as mentioned above, Khan's henchmen inside Octopussy's circus (and the men who perform the switch) are twins, making it harder to track which car is which.

Now, all of this does lead to an interesting scene amidst the Bond-dressed-as-a-clown stuff: when Bond informs the guy in charge of the Air Force base that there's a bomb in the cannon, Octopussy is hesitant to let him open it because she thinks her smuggled jewels are in there. It's been a long time since the Bond Girl has had to make a straight up "trust Bond or trust the bad guy" choice on the spot like that. The only thing marring this scene is the fact that Bond is dressed as a clown.

The Silly Stuff
Octopussy starts off with more promise than For Your Eyes Only's uneven start afforded us, with plenty (perhaps too much) intrigue as to what's going on. Aside from a snake-charmer playing the James Bond theme on his flute, there's very little indication from the script that this is a Roger Moore film.* Yeah there's a Tarzan yell and some silly reaction shots during a chase scene (in his commentary on the most recent DVD release, Moore suggests that the latter is a necessary part of the Formula). But there aren't a lot of gadgets and the Moore Bond's more obnoxious character traits are kept in check. In fact, until Bond falls off of Octopussy's train, this film is, honestly, on track to be the pinnacle of the Roger Moore era.

*Look, I think Roger Moore was one of the best actors ever to play James Bond, and there's no doubt, judging either by interviews or by the respective actors' performances in their final two films, that he enjoyed it more than Connery did. But the Roger Moore era is synonymous with ludicrous sight-gags, over-the-top humor (deserved) and ridiculous gadgetry (undeserved - unlike Connery's moon rover and Brosnan's invisible Aston Martin, Moore was spared the indignity of driving anything sillier than a fire-truck in his last film). And as you've noticed by now, he doesn't have any "C" films. His films are either really good or pretty terrible, and with For Your Eyes Only languishing in relative obscurity, people tend to remember the terrible ones better. So when I use the term "Roger Moore film" with negative connotations, I'm not talking about the actor or his take on the character, but rather the worst excesses of the scripts of that era.

Then something odd happens. Bond has trouble getting a lift to the circus. This leads to an escalating set of scenarios that somehow manage to be simultaneously silly, realistic, and alarmingly out-of-place in a Bond film. He gets trolled by some college students. He has to wait while a little old lady uses the pay phone (while the Moore Bond of The Man With the Golden Gun was a colossal jerkass, at least he'd never stand for that nonsense). When he finally resorts to stealing a car, a fleet of police cars straight out of The Blues Brothers chase him all the way to the Air Force base, prompting him to, yes, disguise himself as a clown.

If it had stopped there, I actually would have applauded it. Moore rather unexpectedly delivers a considerable amount of gravitas while dressed as a clown. The trouble is that it doesn't stop there. We'll skip over the bit where Octopussy's circus stages an all-girl assault on Khan's palace while Bond drifts in on a hot-air balloon, because that somehow manages to be more awesome than ludicrous (and any scene with Kristina Wayborn's Magda is a point in the film's favor). But after that, we're treated to a scene where Bond leaps from a galloping horse onto a plane, and then hangs onto said airplane as it tears through the sky.

Now, maybe it's because on the whole, Bond's airborne fights have not been spectacular (between the ones in Moonraker, Octopussy, The Living Daylights, and Die Another Day, really only the one in Daylights is any good).  Or maybe it's because we don't really expect even James Bond to survive when the plane does a barrel roll. Or maybe it's because his strategy of whipping the evil henchman in the face with the airplane's antenna comes off as too ridiculous. Or maybe it's because it's incredibly obvious that he's wearing a parachute under his breakaway jacket. Or maybe it's because that's obviously a stuntman in the wide shots. For some combination of the above, the climax to this film rings horribly false.

Which is a shame, because the film had so much going for it.

Roger Moore's getting old
Yeah, that's true.

A year before Octopussy came out, Paramount Pictures did Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, in which an obviously-aged William Shatner played Captain Kirk having a midlife crisis. In Moore's next and final film, A View to a Kill, Bond too would be facing a genetically-engineered superman. The result was an abject disaster, in case you didn't know.

The same year that Octopussy came out, Thunderball producer Kevin McClory finally got around to doing his Thunderball remake, Never Say Never Again, starring a greying Sean Connery.

It's worth noting that in either film that brackets this one, the main Bond Girl is young enough to be Roger Moore's daughter, which helps make the 18-year difference here between Moore and his leading lady less intrusive.