Friday, November 13, 2020

For Your Eyes Only

It was better than I remembered.



I seriously didn't like this movie much when I first saw it some few years back and truly dreaded seeing it again, but looking at it now it's actually pretty good! I appreciate the producers wanting to go for a more small scale personal story, and I have to say it works great! Bond is on the hunt this time for a missile communique machine which leads him to cross paths with a woman named Milena who is on her own personal vendetta, as they work together for simultaneous different and similar reasons. Something I never thought I would see in a Bond movie, in this case a more personal story about revenge is done amazingly in my opinion with Milena seeing her parents gunned down and is hell bent on finding the person who ordered them to be killed, is genuinely interesting and actually segueways with Bond's recent actions in the pre-title sequence where he finally gets vengeance on Blofeld after visiting his wife's grave. I simultaneously like that opening and hate it, Diamonds Are Forever should have been the revenge story but they tried to distance themselves so far from Lazenby's film and it's a shame. I see what they try to do, to make a compelling and grounded story about how vengeance is not really the answer, and while it does have it's moments it's not really touched on too deeply. This film and The Spy Who Loved Me were Roger Moore's favotite Bond films and I can see why, he just has such good material and situations to work off on, including a downright ruthless killing that may not suit the Moore era greatly but is still such a good scene I honestly don't mind. Carole Bouquet is damn good in this, though I will say her personality flip flops from stone faced dead eyed killer, to a charming yet broken woman still grieving for her family, but she handles both sides very well. Julian Glover though a fantastic actor has nothing to really play off with the character of Kristatos, now I'm not sure if that's just the fact we've had so many colorful and full of personality villains that he just pales tremendously in comparison, or if it's just not a well defined character that while suiting the more grounded reality of this film just isn't terribly interesting. Again, I know Julian Glover is fantastic and I'm always happy to see him in a new movie but the character just had nothing going for him. Surprisingly most of all, Charles Dance appears with this being his first theatrical film and I couldn't even believe it. It's sad he didn't have much to do in fact he's really in a blink and you miss him scene, but just the fact we have two great actors from Game Of Thrones appearing in a single Bond film is really neat. There's not much action in this one, but it has the best car chase in the series so far! I'm serious this car chase floored me, and the fact that it's not in Bond's Lotus Esprit but a little dinky car that looks like a mix between a Volkswagen Beetle and a 1940s mafia car just makes it even better in my opinion. This movie had an awful lot that I enjoyed and really shot up in my estimation this time around, I just had a blast with this movie. It's going to be tough ranking each individual Bond movie collection, especially with Roger's cause I've enjoyed every last one of them greatly. I give this movie, 3 stars, 7.5/10! Next time, Roger Moore's penultimate Bond movie Octopussy.

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