My favorite Roger Moore Bond film.

Roger Moore's best bond and easily a Top 5 for the series. Best opening sequence for the series, fun plot and the most dynamic locales (skiing in the Alps, the Pyramids, underwater in Italy, etc). For my money, this has always been my favourite Bond.

Well well well... Bond films seem to be falling into a Windows pattern, or albums by The Who: you should pay attention to every *other* one. This is worth while, the last one is a bit of a shambles, the one prior to *that* is worthwhile... Right from the outset we're told "and now here's where Bond starts getting silly", what with the pre-titles skiing incident. Everything now is HUGE!!! DEATH-DEFYING!! WORLD THREATENING!!! LAWS OF PHYSICS DEFYING!!! DISBELIEF IGNORING!!! That said, however, there's some fairly decent stuff in between the urges to throw things at the screen. There's a knock-down, drag-out fight on a Cairo rooftop between Bond and Sandor (Jaws's partner in crime); there's some grand sneaking around in Stomberg's sea-going lair "Atlantis" (hardly an imaginative name for an sub-ocean city, however); and there's a jim-dandy car chase that involves a motorcycle, a car, another car, a helicopter, some frog men on little zoomy things, and a little two-man submarine. The threat to the world actually feels possible here, as far-fetched as it might seem. The dimension of the theft of world assets (i.e.: three entire nuclear powered submarines) and their storage inside a freighter is a bit odd, but the crowd scenes of three groups of submariners pitted against one large army of Evil Henchmen® is a welcome return to the era of "You Only Live Twice" and "Thunderball". Plus, Bond's resourcefulness of using a warhead's detonator as an offensive weapon is solid, and all too rare in the movies; typically he simply pulls out the little thing Q gave him and [BLAM] all is solved. It's nice to see Bond get to be smart for a change. The down side of all this is that it does get a tad much for itself in some ways. The ad hoc HQ which MI-6 and the KGB establish inside Abu Simbel, for instance, seems more like someone taking advantage of an opportunity to film something in s neat looking place than an actual opportunity to advance the plot. Even the presence of M, Moneypenny, and Gogol seems more than required for the task. Surely a telephone call or telegram would have sufficed? The emotional conflict between the two agents is good, and adds an unusual level of turmoil to a Bond story, even if it's not as effective as it might be. 007 wins the lady over far too easily, given the circumstances, and all it might have taken would have been a longer and smarter block of dialogue between the two agents when the crisis is revealed. Jaws shows up here, and ultimately survives the predictable dénouement (apparently due to crowd reaction), so we'll see him again. In the end: good. Not amazing, but it's far from crap as well.