‘Sometimes irreverent, sometimes camp but always deeply affectionate, Thunderbook is a big fat love letter to the Bond franchise. John Rain’s main endeavour is to make us laugh and he achieves this with great aplomb. It’s beautifully observed and a laugh-out-loud joy’

KATHY BURKE

‘An affectionately droll Bond-by-Bond stroll through the films we know and love, whether we like them or not; the rest of this endorsement will avoid puns like Double Oh Heaven and Licensed to Thrill’

AL MURRAY

‘A book full of Bond love and occasional bewilderment’

SAMIRA AHMED

‘Nobody does it better. John Rain delivers his love letter to Bond with a raised eyebrow that would do Roger Moore proud’

JOEL MORRIS

First published in 2019 by

POLARIS PUBLISHING LTD
c/o Aberdein Considine
2nd Floor, Elder House
Multrees Walk
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Distributed by
BIRLINN LIMITED

Text copyright © John Rain, 2019

Illustrations by Phil Beverley
Kall Kwik WGC
phil@kkwgc.co.uk
www.kallkwikwgc.co.uk

ISBN: 9780957507623
eBook ISBN: 9781788853279

The right of John Rain to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

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This is an unofficial publication. All material contained within is for critical purposes.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

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A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Designed and typeset by Polaris Publishing, Edinburgh

Printed in Great Britain by Clays, St Ives

For Nicola, James and Alex

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1: Dr. No

2: From Russia with Love

3: Goldfinger

4: Thunderball

5: You Only Live Twice

6: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

7: Diamonds Are Forever

8: Live and Let Die

9: The Man with the Golden Gun

10: The Spy Who Loved Me

11: Moonraker

12: For Your Eyes Only

13: Octopussy

14: A View to a Kill

15: The Living Daylights

16: Licence to Kill

17: Goldeneye

18: Tomorrow Never Dies

19: The World Is Not Enough

20: Die Another Day

21: Casino Royale

22: Quantum of Solace

23: Skyfall

24: Spectre

List of Illustrations

Our first glimpse of Bond, playing chemin de fer in Le Cercle at Les Ambassadeurs Club in Dr. No. MGM Studios/Getty Images

Sean Connery and the first (and probably most iconic) Bond Girl, Ursula Andress (Honey Ryder), pose for a promotional still for Dr. No. MGM Studios/Getty Images

Canadian actor Joseph Wiseman playing ‘Chinese’ villain Dr. Julius No. Popperfoto/Getty Images

Bernard Lee (here pictured with Lois Maxwell’s Miss Moneypenny in From Russia with Love) played the role of M brilliantly for eleven movies. Always cantankerous when dealing with Bond, he could also be touchingly affectionate. Sportsphoto/Alamy

Bond, Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) and Donald ‘Red’ Grant (Robert Shaw) prepare for the shocking faux pas of having red wine served with fish in From Russia with Love. United Artist/Getty Images

Shirley Eaton, playing Jill Masterson, covered in gold paint on the set of Goldfinger. Popperfoto/Getty Images

Lois Maxwell, the wonderful Miss Moneypenny, with Sean Connery during the filming of Dr. No. Collection Christophel/Alamy Stock Photo

See, I told you his hands were massive! Desmond Llewelyn shows off one of his new gadgets to Bond in A View to a Kill. Sportsphoto/Alamy

Jetpack! Bond flies to his car in Thunderball. United Artists/Getty Images

Donald Pleasence as Bond’s arch enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld on the set of You Only Live Twice. Express Newspapers/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Mr and Mrs James Bond. George Lazenby, in his one appearance as Bond, with Diana Rigg (the Contessa di Vincenzo) in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

Blofeld (Charles Gray) checks out the ‘plastic transformation’ process that allows his scientists to create doppelgängers of himself in Diamonds Are Forever. Collection Christophel/RnB © Eon Productions/Danjaq/Alamy

Roger Moore makes his debut as Bond in Live and Let Die with (from left to right) Julius Harris (Tee Hee), Jane Seymour (Solitaire), Geoffrey Holder (Baron Samedi), Yaphet Kotto (Kananga) and Earl Jolly Brown (Whisper). Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

The masters at work: Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and Harry Saltzman with Roger Moore on the set of Live and Let Die. AF Archive/Alamy

Bond and the three-nippled assassin Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) prepare for a duel in The Man with the Golden Gun. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

Jaws (Richard Kiel) chomps through a plank of wood during a fight with 007 on a train in The Spy Who Loved Me. United Artist/Getty Images

Bond goes to space (of course he does, space is COOL) in Moonraker. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

Looking more like her uncle than her sexy spy lover, Bond checks out Melina Havelock’s (Carole Bouquet) crossbow in For Your Eyes Only. John Bryson/Sygma via Getty Images

Bond disguises himself as a clown in the ridiculous dénouement of Octopussy. AF Archive/Alamy

Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) and May Day (Grace Jones) hold Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts) and Bond at gunpoint in A View to a Kill. AF Archive/Alamy

There’s a new man in town: Timothy Dalton takes on the role of Bond in The Living Daylights, while Maryam d’Abo (playing Kara Milovy) tries to act cool after apparently tripping over. Sportsphoto/Alamy

Dalton takes on the threat of drugs in Licence to Kill. Here Dario (Benicio Del Toro) holds Bond at gunpoint while Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) examines the goods in his lab. AF archive/Alamy

Q aims to impress the latest incarnation of Bond (Pierce Brosnan) with his plaster cast gun in Goldeneye. Frank Trapper/Alamy

Bond and Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) assemble some kit to take on ruthless media mogul Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) in Tomorrow Never Dies. United Archives GmbH/Alamy

Anarchist Renard (Robert Carlyle) mid-gun battle with Bond as he steals weapons-grade plutonium from a Russian missile base in Kazakhstan in The World Is Not Enough. PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy

Zao (Rick Yune) proudly shows off his diamond-studded face while torturing Jinx Johnson (Halle Berry) in Die Another Day. AF Archive/Alamy

The first blond Bond (as if anyone cares), Daniel Craig, takes on Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) at poker in Casino Royale. Collection Christophel/Alamy

Looking hot. Bond and Camille (Olga Kurylenko) wander lost through the desert, much like the production of this entire film – Quantum of Solace. Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

M(ummy) issues – Judi Dench enjoys her final full outing in the franchise with an angst-ridden Bond in Skyfall. Francois Duhamel/©Columbia Pictures/Everett/Alamy

The author of all our pain. Christoph Waltz assumes the role of the iconic baddie Blofeld in Spectre. WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to: Joel Morris, Jason Hazeley, Marc Haynes, Great Big Owl, Julia Raeside, Polaris (Pete, Julie and Alison), Scott Innes, Stephen Graham, Jason Sinclair, Paul Litchfield, Sean, George, Roger, Tim, Pierce, Daniel, EON, Mum, Dad, Chris, Pete and Mannie . . . and my classic family.

INTRODUCTION

AS BRITISH AS tuppence, yet as international as the Beatles, James Bond is truly a hallowed cultural institution. A solid link in the long, winding chain of the national DNA. A friend on bank holidays, flourishing among the war movies, Carry On films and The Two Ronnies specials. 007 has been a companion to an entire generation of children who were raised on Sean flinging a hat into the bars of Fort Knox, George telling us it never happened to the other fella and Roger skiing off a mountain. He was a window into the world during a time when the world was less travelled. Who needed to go abroad when you could watch James Bond do it instead? People either wanted to be him or be with him. He had the best cars, the best clothes, the best watches and, at times, magic powers. He could drive, fly, glide, sail, hover or swim anywhere, and could outsmart the very smartest around. His only weakness was, it turned out, appalling misogyny.

When Ian Fleming sat down and decided to turn his insider knowledge of the highly dangerous and exciting world of espionage into a book, he would have had no idea that he was about to create an icon. The places Bond would go, the things he would see – all stemmed directly from Fleming’s pen. The tragedy was that he died during the making of Goldfinger, and therefore never got to see the boob-zoom bit from Octopussy, which he would no doubt have appreciated.

When I was eight years old I went to the cinema with my mum to see Ladyhawke, a fantasy adventure starring Matthew Broderick and Michelle Pfeiffer, in which a woman turns into a bird. However, when we got there we realised we’d got the times wrong and had missed it. Luckily, A View to a Kill was about to start on the other screen, and being aware of Bond via the Shredded Wheat sticker campaign during Octopussy and the odd viewing every now and then with my parents on bank holidays, I was only too happy to wander in and see what would happen next. As I sat in the dark and watched a 57-year-old Roger Moore run up the stairs of the Eiffel Tower, I knew that I had found my hero. I would spend the rest of my formative years becoming increasingly smitten with the frankly ridiculous premise of a middle-aged man relentlessly saving the world in increasingly bizarre circumstances, and just as obsessed with each new incarnation as it arrived.

I started Smersh Pod, the podcast celebrating the Bond films (by those who enjoy/hate/aren’t arsed about them), because I wanted to share some of my knowledge, observations and favourite moments from the 24 official films to date. If you’re aware of the podcast, you’ll know how this all works, but if you’ve never heard of it, then please come with me as we fix a complicated drink and journey through Bond in film, soaking up the thrills and spills and savouring the devil-may-care attitude of 007.

I hope this book will be seen as a vital and indispensable tool for the discerning Bond fan for many years to come. If I’m wrong, then obviously I deserve a laser-beam to the groin, swiftly followed by a dunk in the piranha tank.

John Rain
November 2019

ONE

DR. NO

1962

WHEN DR. NO was released in 1962 and cinemagoers flocked to their local theatres, they thought they knew what they were getting. The movie was based on the sixth James Bond novel by Ian Fleming, published in 1958 – a series which had already established itself as a cultural phenomenon. But as the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion roared and the screen cut to black, those fledgling audiences had no idea that they were bearing witness to the birth of a movie franchise that would come to dominate the film world for more than 50 years.

The first sound we hear is of radio interference. Then a gun barrel unfurls into view. And there he is . . . James Bond (in this instance Bob Simmons, a stuntman standing in for Sean Connery). He walks across the viewfinder and then suddenly he spins and fires a shot that rings out like the Big Bang. And much like the Big Bang, a new universe is created.

The opening titles and the gun barrel were the brainchildren of Maurice Binder, and a key part of establishing Bond’s on-screen identity. These carnivals of flashing lights, naked ladies and opulent typography are as vital to Bond as the Walther PPK.

This kaleidoscope is accompanied by John Barry’s lush arrangement of Monty Norman’s Bond theme, before someone apparently got bored and skipped the song to a man playing the bongos while falling down some stairs. This lasts for a couple of minutes until the hyperactive bongo player is usurped by an upbeat Jamaican rendition of the ‘Three Blind Mice’ nursery rhyme. In the space of just a few moments we’ve been given a taste of what is to come: exquisite cool mixed with the jaw-droppingly bizarre.

Dr. No feels like the demo version of a beloved song. There are blueprints laid out, but it’s not quite there yet. The film opens in Queen’s Club (private members only). John Strangways, the MI6 station chief in Jamaica, is playing cards with his friends. He’s won this game and is feeling pretty good about life. He leaves to take a call from his managing director, heading past the three blind men we saw in the title sequence and putting some money in their cup. A lovely gesture, but sadly also his last, as they murder him.

Back at Strangways’ HQ, his secretary calls London on a ham radio. She has the most awkward handle I’ve ever heard – ‘W6N, W6N, W6N’. However, before we can find out more, she is also murdered. The killers grab her keys, take her body away and steal two documents from the filing cabinet: ‘Crab Key’ and ‘Doctor No’. London are worried as contact has been lost with W6N in Jamaica, so they decide to send a message to their top agent.

Bond is at Le Cercle at Les Ambassadeurs Club in London – the kind of place where you could accidentally run over a poor person in the car park and no one would mind. He’s playing a game in which the dealer apparently needs to pass the cards around with a paddle. (‘Boat cards’, I think it’s called.) He’s beating Sylvia Trench. She asks for a further thousand, and he remarks that he admires her courage and gets her name. She asks his, and everything stops: time, hearts, the very concept of the universe. As Sean Connery lights a cigarette and murmurs the famous words, the game is over. We are smitten. This is pure, uncut sexuality. Cubby Broccoli’s wife, Dana, famously remarked that Connery ‘moved like a panther’, and Ian Fleming himself was so impressed that, in an act of retroactive continuity, he wrote in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service about Bond actually being a super-sexual Tyrannosaurus Scot.

Bond gets his message and leaves the table. Sylvia Trench seems sad that Bond is leaving. (You would be too – look at the state of him.) Bond asks if she’s good at any other games (he means sex), and she says she’s not bad at golf, amongst other things (which probably means sex as well). He gives her his number and heads out of the club with his winnings.

Bond waltzes into Moneypenny’s office and, for the very first time, flings his hat onto the hatstand. She laments that he never takes her anywhere dressed like that, and Bond says that if he did he’d be court-martialled for ‘misuse of government property’ (and he can’t go through that again – not after he got caught sitting on the photocopier at the Christmas party).

Bond gets the green light and heads in to see M. (Isn’t it fun that M has a soundproofed office? He could hold a small band rehearsal in there and no one would know a thing about it.)

Bond greets M with a ‘Good evening, sir’ and is grumpily corrected that it’s 3 a.m. Bernard Lee is perfectly cast in this role, which he played wonderfully for 17 years. A cantankerous, curmudgeonly old sod, deep-rooted within the walls of Whitehall, who on the one hand despises Bond’s work but on the other believes in him totally. Bond sees M as the father he never had; M sees Bond as the son he’s glad he never had.

M tells Bond he’s on a flight to Jamaica in three hours and then brings in Q – but not the Q we know and love; here he goes by the name ‘Major Boothroyd’. Q/Boothroyd takes Bond’s precious Beretta and swaps it for a Walther PPK, his weapon of choice for the next 50-plus years. It’s here that M mentions that he’s head of ‘MI7’ – a line that seems to have been changed in post-production, as his lips don’t quite match. While MI6 is never explicitly mentioned in the early Bond films, in later adventures it’s clearly established as the branch of government Bond works for (which makes this an interesting potential pub quiz question).

In beautiful Jamaica, Felix Leiter, played by Jack Lord (and wearing sunglasses just like your mum’s in old photos), watches over the airport like a hawk at a mouse farm, chain-smoking like there’s no tomorrow (which there probably wasn’t for sixties smokers). Bond wanders through security and is greeted by a driver claiming to have been sent by Government House to collect him. Bond, however, doesn’t quite trust him, and phones Government House to see if the driver is genuine. He’s not, and Bond looks highly smug that he knew the driver was lying, like when your dad guesses the killer at the start of Midsomer Murders.

The driver speeds dangerously along the seaside roads with wild abandon. Bond asks why he’s in such a hurry, and the driver points out that they’re being tailed (I was hoping he would use the excuse that he’d shat himself, like Sir Alex Ferguson did when he was caught speeding), and indeed they are – by Felix Leiter of the CIA. Bond directs the driver to take a turning to lose their tail, which works perfectly, and once they’ve stopped he draws his PPK and shoves it in the man’s back. He wants information, but unfortunately the driver opts for suicide instead.

This primordial Bond is less cavalier and more like an actual spy than later incarnations. We see him dusting talcum powder on his suitcase and plucking a hair from his head to place across the door of his hotel room, an act I’m sure Connery later saw as wilful self-abuse, what with so very few hairs being spare for such grandiose gestures.

At the Queen’s Club, Bond sits with the last people to see Strangways alive – Pleydell-Smith, Professor Dent and General Potter, the three members of the card game. No one has any real theories about what could have happened to poor old Strangways aside from Dent, who speculates that he probably eloped with his new secretary, as she was ‘rather nice’. Pleydell-Smith mentions that Strangways’ latest big obsession was fishing, and Potter adds that a chap called Quarrel is the most expensive to charter of all the fishermen, which we can assume means he also offers executive relief.

Bond takes a cab to the harbour, where Quarrel says he’ll tell Bond anything he wants to know in the back room of the bar, which sounds like a police sting if ever I heard one, and as Bond follows him in he’s immediately ambushed. However, his assailants haven’t factored in his unique judo-flip abilities, and within moments he has them on the floor at gunpoint. They’re ordered against the wall and Bond is about to back out when Felix Leiter appears, still wearing your mum’s sunglasses. It turns out that Quarrel is working with Felix and very much on the same team as Bond. A celebration may be in order.

There’s a vibrant sense of joie de vivre in this Jamaican bar at night. Bond, Quarrel and Felix discuss where the rocket disruption could be coming from (and they’re not talking about James’s pants). Bond asks if they’ve checked Crab Key, and Felix explains that they can’t as it belongs to a Chinese – cough – man called Dr. No. Quarrel tells them that Strangways recently slipped onto the island at night to collect samples of sand, rocks and water, which interests Bond a great deal. Presumably he’s wondering if the island has a thriving dogging scene.

With a receipt he found at Strangways’ office, Bond visits Professor Dent, card player and geologist. Dent explains that Strangways wanted him to examine some rocks to see if they were valuable. Sadly none of them were, and they were thrown away. Bond looks suspicious, as Dent’s cagey manner makes it sound like he’s actually eaten them. He asks if they came from Crab Key and Dent says definitely not, it’s geologically impossible, but again in such a way that essentially confirms they did. Bond thanks him for his time and walks away smiling.

Sufficiently spooked, Dent rushes out and gets a boat to Crab Key to face the mysterious Dr. No. He’s shown into a room where the mysterious No speaks to him over a tannoy and instructs him to kill Bond, giving him the perfect weapon with which to do it: a massive spider. Now, I am no uber-villain, but I’m pretty sure there are more effective ways to go about this. I’m just not sure a spider is up to the job (not unless it has a gun, sword or flamethrower to hand).

Bond arrives back at his hotel, with his own theme pumping along in the background. (It’s fun how often the Bond theme is used in this film. He stands up, the Bond theme plays. He walks to the toilet, Bond theme plays, which all makes one wonder what music is played while he has a wee.

Bond collects his key from reception and walks away while the receptionist takes a good long look at his arse. Back at his room, the precious hair he placed over the door is gone (definitely could have fallen off) and the talc on the suitcase has been disturbed. Bond doesn’t seem surprised at all. He fixes a drink and heads for bed.

The room is dark and quiet. Only the chirping of crickets and the mild breeze of the tropical night disturb the silence. Bond suddenly wakes up, looking perturbed, like he’s just remembered he didn’t pack his ‘Kiss Me Quick’ hat. However, the real reason for his horror isn’t as simple a matter as forgetting to bring the cheeky sexy headgear that always works with the ladies, it’s the spider crawling over him. And not just any spider – Dr. No’s spider. Bond stays very, very still and sweats a lot as he keeps track of the arachnid wandering up his arm. It gets closer and closer to his head (at one point seeming to float as if this was filmed on glass and put in afterwards). Thankfully, it’s such a shit spider that it walks off his shoulder onto the bed, and Bond is able to leap up, throw it to the floor and murder it with his shoe.

The next morning, Bond heads to Government House and asks Pleydell-Smith to get him all the information he can on Dr. No and Crab Key. Unfortunately, those are the very files that were stolen from Strangways’ house. Bond suspects that Pleydell-Smith’s secretary, Miss Taro, is listening at the door. He’s proven right as he catches her peeping through the keyhole. She pretends she’s looking for files, but he knows she’s lying, and to prove it he offers to spend the afternoon with her at his hotel. It was a different world in those days.

An exciting parcel has arrived from London: a Geiger counter, which of course measures radiation. The rocks that Strangways found make it go off like a dolphin orgy. Bond asks Quarrel how soon they can get to Crab Key, and Quarrel decides that this is a great time to tell Bond his bonkers story about a dragon, which Felix dismisses as native superstition, probably started by Dr. No himself. Nevertheless, they agree that it’s time to go check out the island.

At the hotel there’s a message from Miss Taro. She wants Bond to collect her from her apartment, so he heads out in his car, only to be ambushed by the three blind assassins in their hearse. However, they don’t take into account how good he is at driving (he’s basically The Stig), and they are sent off the road, exploding in a ball of fire. Bond is asked by a shocked road worker how it happened, and he replies, ‘I think they were on their way to a funeral’, which doesn’t answer the question at all.

Taro is very surprised to see him arrive alive but is under orders to keep him there and so offers some sexual intercourse, which in those days was like being given a newspaper to read while you wait. After the event, Bond calls a cab to take them out for dinner, except when it arrives it’s actually a car from Government House and he tells them to arrest her. Bond chuckles to himself about sending a woman to prison and then goes about preparing a trap for the assassin who is undoubtedly heading to her house to kill him.

Sure enough, a hand soon drifts through the hotel door brandishing a gun. After a moment’s pause it fires six bullets into the bed. The man holding the weapon then walks into the room to see if Bond is dead. It’s Dent. Before he can see for sure, the light comes on and he’s greeted by 007 pointing a pistol at him from a chair in the corner. Dent thinks it’s a great idea to try and shoot – but he’s forgotten that he emptied the gun into the bed (this is the same idiot that brought that spider). Bond pops two caps in Dent’s ass, which is definitely one of the coldest Bond kills in the entire franchise, as the second shot looks like it goes right up his anus.

As he arrives at the island with Quarrel, Bond announces they need to get some sleep – you know, as you do when arriving at the baddie’s lair – and wanders off to find a comfortable patch of beach. Quarrel necks something from a jug while looking around for giant monsters.

The next morning Bond is awoken by the sweet singing of Diana Coupland dubbed over the iconic vision of Ursula Andress emerging from the sea (always top of the pervert’s list of best Bond moments) with a handful of shells. She’s belting out the classic song ‘Underneath The Mango Tree’ as she checks over her aquatic finds. Bond decides that the best way to introduce himself to a lone, half-naked woman on a beach is to step out of the undergrowth and join in with her singing. She asks what the fuck he is doing there (this may be paraphrasing) and whether he’s also looking for shells, to which he pervily replies, ‘No, just looking.’ Nice one, James.

He reassures her that his intentions are honourable and asks her name. ‘Honey Ryder,’ she replies (in the voice of voice-over actress Nikki van der Zyl, who worked on ten Bond movies). Bond stifles a laugh. She tells him that she often comes to the island to get shells and points out that some of them are worth a lot of money. Bond humours her, probably well aware that they’re tat. Before he can tell her that she’s wasting her time, Quarrel comes running out of the trees and says he can hear a noise, and it’s not another mythical beast. Bond confirms that a high-powered boat is coming and tells them both to take cover.

The boat slowly floats past, the soldier on board checking for trespassers through his binoculars while shouting through a megaphone that if they come out they ‘won’t get hurt’. There’s no response to his threats, so the boat opens fire on the empty beach, which seems entirely normal. After the burst of gunfire, the megaphoned guard hilariously asks, ‘You coming out?’ then announces they’ll be back ‘with dogs’, which is how I end all of my correspondence now.

Honey tells Bond that she has also seen the dragon and he eye-rolls into next week. She asks how he knows dragons aren’t real by enquiring if he’s ever seen a ‘mongoose dance’. It’s at this point that Bond should tell her and Quarrel to go away and never come back, but as he clearly wants to have sex with one of them (I’ll let you decide which one), he lets this statement pass.

Back at Honey’s hiding place, and after a brief wash of the key areas, Honey tells Bond she thinks Dr. No killed her father, and that she’s lived all over the world, wherever there are shells. (Shells again. Christ.) Bond asks her where she went to school and Honey replies that she didn’t need to, as they owned an encyclopaedia. She started on ‘A’ when she was eight and now she’s reached ‘T’. This explains a great deal. She then tells a happy story about how she was sexually assaulted by a man who she then murdered, and how he took a week to die. Bond must be wondering how this simple mission has ended up with him trapped on an island with a pair of absolute lunatics.

Quarrel announces that something is coming, and Bond declares that he wants to see it. They wander through the trees and lagoons until they come to a dark, empty swamp. An object with bright lights tells them to stay where they are. It’s the dragon. It slowly approaches, fire blasting out of its face. Quarrel tells Bond that this is the dragon, to which Bond retorts that it’s a dragon that runs on diesel and to stop being a dopey arse. He devises a plan for Quarrel to grab the driver while he takes out the tyres. However, like all of the best-laid plans, this one ends with Quarrel being burned to death.

Bond and Ryder are captured and taken to Dr. No’s lair. Their radiation levels are checked, and they’re high. So the boys in Dr. No’s lab, dressed like the International League of Beekeepers, decide to cover them in a dubious-looking white substance which is sprayed from a hose. I’m guessing these guys have a lot of downtime as they seem to have filled an entire vat on their own. Bond and Ryder are ordered to remove their clothes. Bond seems very happy with this and tells them to ‘do the girl first’. They are put on a conveyer belt and showered in a scene that resembles a post-apocalyptic version of The Generation Game, or perhaps The Erotic Adventures of Valery Legasov, Chernobyl Investigator.

The rooms are adjoining, which obviously suits a pervert like Bond, and there is some lovely food and coffee laid on for them. Bond smugly warns Honey that the whole place could be bugged while knocking back a cup of joe that he doesn’t think for a moment could be drugged, and they both pass out. Nice work, James.

Joseph Wiseman is a bit problematic in the role of Chinese villain Dr. No (the only way this could be worse is if he were played by Benny Hill and referred to everyone as an ‘iriot’). He explains that he can’t shake hands as he has giant metal ones (presumably he lost his in a chip-pan fire), but he brings Bond a medium dry martini with lemon peel, shaken not stirred, which impresses him. He gives Honey a pint of wine. I guess she’s not important enough for him to bother finding out what she likes. If they listened to her for more than ten seconds they would know it’s probably shell juice.

Dr. No explains that he was the unwanted child of a German missionary and a Chinese girl from a good family, but rose to become treasurer of the most powerful criminal society in the world. He also says that he’s only keeping Bond alive because he’s the one man capable of matching him, which you’d think would be the best reason to have him killed. Bond asks him to set Honey free, as this is no place for a girl, so Dr. No gets the guards to take her back to her room as a sort of compromise.

Bond picks some low-hanging fruit by asking Dr. No if the toppling of American missiles compensates for having no hands. The doctor remains unmoved by the taunt, like a top tennis pro when someone calls them a wanker at Wimbledon. He reveals that the missiles are only the first part of the plan, and that he works for SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion), an organisation headed by the greatest criminal brains in the world (sort of like Dragon’s Den for baddies). He offered his services to the Americans but they refused, and now they will pay. He intends to shoot a radio beam at the next missile launch and disrupt it. This is his plan to take over the world: broadcast The Archers at a rocket.

Bond offers that world domination is the ‘same old dream’. Dr. No responds with a show of strength, crushing a gold statue with his robotic pincers, and then offers Bond a job with SPECTRE. He’s flattered but would mostly like to get revenge on the man who killed Strangways and Quarrel, and also save the world, so Dr. No calls him a ‘stupid policeman’.

After being beaten up, Bond wakes in a prison cell, slightly worse for wear. He attempts to peek through the air ducts but is immediately electrocuted. He uses his shoe to break the grate and is able to climb in and escape. It should be noted that a shoe is the best gadget in this film: one killed the spider, and another got him out of a prison cell. (Hope you’re taking notes, Q Branch.)

Bond sneaks into the control room where Dr. No is sitting in his chair, wearing a full body condom and looking out pensively at the nuclear pool reactor. They’re waiting for the Americans to launch the next missile so they can begin their broadcast. While they are all distracted, Bond creeps up to the controls and begins to covertly overload the reactor, which sounds as though it has the Bee Gees concealed within. The alarm sounds and Dr. No orders his men to abandon the area while he goes after Bond. They have a very quick fight over the radiation pool (at no point does the doctor think of crushing Bond’s balls with his giant robot hands, which would have ended it there and then). Sadly, those same powerful robot hands provide no purchase when Dr. No ends up in the radioactive water, and he slowly sinks to his death.

Bond rescues Honey, who has inexplicably lost her trousers, and they sprint out of the facility before it explodes, getting onto a boat for some much-needed sexual intercourse. Their engine dies, but Felix arrives with his troops and offers to give them a tow home. As their boat begins its journey, Honey and Bond once again begin to snuggle up suggestively, and Bond lets go of the rope, causing them to drift away from Felix and presumably begin their next bout of frenzied erotic activity. Better than beachcombing, surely, though you can never be sure with Honey.

TWO

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

1963

IT’S DARK. THE chirrup of crickets and the occasional nocturnal hoot are the only sounds. Then, out of the darkness, appears James Bond. He wanders into the light and slowly pads, panther-like, through the garden of a country estate, pausing to check if he’s being followed. He notices no one, but we see the feet and, eventually, the chiselled face of blond, beautiful and stern Donald ‘Red’ Grant (Robert Shaw), a professional assassin with a taste for peroxide, leather gloves and death. Grant tracks his quarry like a seasoned predator and eventually emerges from the darkness with a garrote that he pulls from his watch. After the briefest of struggles, James Bond is dead.

Floodlights burst into life and the darkness is banished. As guards emerge from the country house, Grant repacks his wire back into his watch as a man calmly approaches and congratulates him on his time of 1 minute and 52 seconds (as though he’s on The Crystal Maze). This is his trainer, Morzeny (Walter Gotell, who went on to play General Gogol for many years in the Bond franchise). Morzeny reaches down and removes the mask from the corpse. It wasn’t James Bond at all. If there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that Red Grant is the numero-uno killer of lookalikes.

At this point one might question why the mask, costume and actual murder were necessary. You can just about justify the tux, and the mask at a push, but the murder seems a bit OTT. Who was this man? Why did he agree to this homicidal role play? The answers never come, for this is SPECTRE Island, a mysterious place inhabited entirely by the world’s deadliest killers (and some poor stooges), all working in pursuit of the impossible dream: to kill James Bond.

The credits arrive like a seedy, after-dark bikini lightshow live from an underground car park, the text projected onto belly dancers’ arms, legs and breasts. The ‘From Russia With Love’ song is here, but as an instrumental version. Finally, the reassuring presence of John Barry bursts through the organs and tambourines and fires out his bombastic explosion of the Bond theme. This is Barry’s first full score of a Bond film, and it’s a beauty.

We find ourselves at a chess tournament in Venice, and the sex is already turned up to a sweltering 200%. Kronsteen (like Prince, he doesn’t have a first name) is a chess grandmaster while also being SPECTRE’s top organiser – activities one supposes go very comfortably hand in hand. He’s playing some specky idiot who thinks he can beat him, while in the background a man is echoing their moves on a giant wall-mounted chessboard. Kronsteen is brought a glass of water with a doily stuck to the bottom, which he looks at suspiciously. On the doily is a note telling Kronsteen that he’s needed at once by SPECTRE, so he shifts up a gear and wipes the floor with the guy challenging him. In many ways he’s like Tiger Woods, Muhammad Ali or Jocky Wilson – a true sportsman full of natural charm and raw sexual energy.

He leaves the beautiful Syd Cain-designed set (Ken Adam was busy working on Dr. Strangelove and changing the way the entire world would see a war room for ever) and attends a meeting on a yacht with Rosa Klebb (a SMERSH defector) and a man referred to as Number One, who is stroking a cat. The attraction to jump ship from SMERSH to SPECTRE is a no-brainer for me. SMERSH were the Soviet counter-intelligence agency, and therefore were probably low on bonuses and world travel, the company car was likely to be a Lada, the uniform would be grey slacks and furry hats, and they would never have had any discos. Whereas SPECTRE were a worldwide organisation with whopping budgets (imagine the cost of all those underground lairs), great travel allowances, quality benefits, dental plans, sexy trousers and state-of-the-art discotheques with strobe lighting and smoke machines.

We never see Number One’s face, which means he’s either very scary, or very mysterious. They watch a tank of Siamese fighting fish attack each other while Number One hammily explains SPECTRE’s plan to set East and West against one another until they are too weak to stop SPECTRE from, presumably, taking global power.

Kronsteen declares that he is going to steal the Russian’s new Lektor decoding machine, and will fool the British into taking it for him. He reassures them both that his plan is foolproof, and as an added sweetener, the British will undoubtedly send James Bond to carry out the mission – thus SPECTRE will be able to get revenge on the man who killed Dr. No. Number One is delighted, and tells Kronsteen that Bond must die a humiliating death, presumably with a hoover up the jacksie or something, and then feeds a piece of Siamese fighting fish to the cat, which has had more screen time in this scene than anyone else.

Klebb calls in Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi), a cipher clerk at the Russian consulate in Istanbul, for an interview. She begins to go through Romanova’s file, which includes details of her having slept with three men to date. Romanova takes slight issue with this line of questioning, but Klebb pushes on like she’s a researcher for Take Me Out. She tells Romanova that she’s been selected for a mission to disseminate false information to the enemy, which these days, of course, would mean she’d simply have to tweet about how Donald Trump is the best president ever while misspelling every other word and going on and on about ‘liberals’. Klebb tells her the mission will be a ‘labour of love’, which suggests that Romanova’s sexual liaisons are about to increase to four, and follows this up by declaring that if Romanova refuses the mission, she’ll be shot. What a lovely plot line this is.

Bond slides into Moneypenny’s office and gracefully throws his hat onto the stand. He’s about to turn around and boast about it when he’s stopped in his tracks by a very unimpressed-looking M standing behind the door, looking every inch like a man having to explain to the organist at a funeral that ‘The Birdie Song’ is not acceptable as the deceased was killed by an eagle. He tells Bond that a Russian cipher clerk, Tatiana Romanova, has fallen in love with him via a photo, to which Bond decrees that she must be ‘mental’ and decides that it’s some sort of trap. M agrees, saying that the bait is a cipher machine – a brand new Lektor, which the CIA and British Intelligence have been after for years. Romanova has told the station chief in Istanbul that she wishes to defect on one condition: that Bond go over there and bring her, and the machine, back with him. Bond doesn’t seem very keen until M shows him a photo, whereupon he becomes 200% invested in this mission.

M sends for the ‘equipment officer’ and in walks Q – yes, our Q. Presumably he killed that charlatan from Dr. No and assumed his identity, lives in his house, sleeps with his wife, wears his skin on weekends. He brings Bond a suitcase which contains a machine gun, a can of spray gas, some coins and a sniper rifle (for when you’ve got a top business meeting at three, but a spree killing at three forty-five). We get some unfortunate close-ups of Q’s hands here, and they look like the kind of hands an over-exuberant child would make out of Plasticine. They’re so off-putting you almost miss the explanation about how the booby-trapped briefcase works.

In Istanbul, Bond is picked up by a driver, and after a brief exchange of passwords he’s whisked away to meet Ali Kerim Bey, the station head, who spends most of his time on screen talking about all his kids who work for him, like a Turkish Donald Trump. Red Grant watches on as a mysterious man with a moustache follows in another car. The driver explains it’s a Bulgarian working for the Russians and they always follow each other, which is a very friendly, or possibly just passive-aggressive, arrangement.

Ali tells Bond that something smells, and before Bond can check his shoe he explains that he thinks this whole mission is a waste of time, and that Bond should just go home (roll credits). Bond explains that if there’s a chance of getting a Lektor, it’s worth it, and plus he may get to have sex with a lady. Ali begrudgingly accepts this, and before he asks if he can watch, he tells him that Romanova said she will make her own arrangements to contact him, so he will just have to wait while offering him access to his many magazines.

As Ali’s car takes Bond away from the meeting, the same car from earlier follows once again, but this time it’s driven by Red Grant, with the previous driver beaten and tied up in the back. He dumps the car and the body and takes a car with Klebb away from the scene. Klebb remarks that the Russians will blame the British, and it will hopefully start a war. She probably also slows down for car crashes.

Ali is about to have sex with a lady in his office when there’s a large explosion, and no, he isn’t that good, but rather it was an attempt by someone to kill him. He tells Bond that luckily he was ‘relaxing’ on his sofa when it went off, which I suppose is reasonably accurate. He’s confused, though, as it must have been the Russians, but he doesn’t understand why they would break the truce. Bond offers that his presence may have something to do with it, so Ali takes him into an underground tunnel below the Russian consulate, where he has a periscope that he uses to spy on them, which seems entirely normal and not perverted in any way. While they take turns spying, Romanova enters the room and Bond ogles her legs via periscope like some sort of underwater strip-club owner.

Ali decides the best idea would be to hide out at a gypsy camp until things die down, which just happens to be jam-packed full of women – two of whom are about to fight over the hand of a man they both love. As Ali is a friend of the family, he and Bond will be allowed to stay and watch, and Bond must be thinking that he’s struck pornographic gold. Behind the scenes, however, Russian agent Krilencu, with a gang of Bulgarians, moves in on the camp and readies an attack.

Now it’s time for the main event: the half-naked lady-wrestle. ‘No matter what happens now, say and do nothing,’ Ali tells Bond (so strictly one for him to think back to later), however, just as it’s about to get interesting, from an anthropological perspective, shots ring out and bodies begin to drop from rooftops. Bond draws his weapon and returns fire. He’s about to be set upon from behind by a mad bastard with a knife when two shots ring out from a sniper; 007 looks up but sees no one. It was Red Grant, protecting the asset from afar.

Krilencu and the Bulgarians eventually retreat, and the camp burns. Despite this, the lead gypsy thanks Bond and proclaims that he is now his son. In return, Bond asks him to stop the ritual lady fights, and the gypsy laughs, essentially calling him a big girl’s blouse. Instead, he can decide the winner, and the women are brought to his tent as gifts. Bond says it will take him some time, delighted that he can take his pure anthropological studies to a more practical level.

Bond returns to his hotel room to run a much-needed bath, but finds Tatiana Romanova in his bed, like some sort of gift from Sex-Santa. She tells him he looks just like his photograph (which is never the case – ask anyone on Tinder) and Bond replies that she’s the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen (and he’s seen a few). She accepts the praise, but then claims that her mouth is too big, which leads to a very strange, almost fetishistic close-up of it. ‘It’s just the right size – for me, that is,’ he says as they kiss. He asks her if she has the Lektor and she tells him it’s at the consulate. As they commence with the sensual lovemaking, we see that, behind a mirror, Klebb and an associate are not only watching but filming, which could have been awkward were it not for the fact that Bond is definitely a vanilla, missionary-sex man.

The next day Romanova heads to Hagia Sophia, a beautifully picturesque museum, and fine example of Byzantine architecture, to drop off the consulate floor plans in the agreed spot. Bond observes and notices another interested party – the Bulgarian with the moustache, who looks a bit like Alfred Molina’s porn-stuntdouble. The Bulgarian moves in to steal the plans, but Grant takes him out, and not to the Dorchester. Bond reaches the spot and finds the dead Bulgarian. Thinking nothing of it (presumably he finds mysteriously murdered Bulgarians all the time), he grabs the plans and heads back to Ali.

They compare Romanova’s plans with the blueprints and they match up perfectly. Ali warns him that it all sounds too easy, and to think with his brain, not his penis – sage words from the man with 897 children. Bond, however, is confident that he knows what he’s doing, and why shouldn’t he be? He’s somehow still alive.

While taking the sights on the Bosphorus Ferry, Bond pretends to take pictures of Romanova, but in actual fact the camera is a recording device and he’s asking her the specifics of the Lektor – size, weight, special features and so on, but she’s much more interested in him, and whether they will be together when this is all over. He promises that once they have the Lektor, they will commence the lovemaking ‘day and night’, like some sort of sexual London Underground.

In M’s office, the gang of specialists gather round his tape recorder to listen to the technical details of the machine. Everyone is gripped, until one vital moment when Romanova asks James if she’s as exciting as the Western women, whereupon he begins to describe a time when he and M were in Tokyo and had an ‘interesting experience with some Tokyo girls’. The mind absolutely boggles about what M and Bond could have got up to with a group of Tokyo girls, but M turns off the tape as quick as a flash. While everyone speculates, M, in an effort to distract from the many mental images swimming around the room like fat dolphins, instructs Moneypenny to send a cable to Bond: ‘merchandise appears genuine, go ahead with deal.’

In the tunnels under the consulate, Ali is waiting to detonate a bomb. The bomb goes off and the room rocks into dust. Bond grabs the Lektor and heads into the tunnels with Romanova to meet up with Ali and race to the train station. As they board she spots Russian security entering the train, while Red Grant is also a secret passenger. Ali shows them to their compartment and hands them their new passports, Tatiana is very excited about going to England (wait until she finds out about the food), and Bond tells her that as they are posing as newly-weds, they have a two-day honeymoon to enjoy until then. To complete the creepy-Humbert Humbert vibe, he gives her a very nice suitcase of dresses to wear and watches on with a wily smile as she excitedly picks them out and holds them up.

Everything seems to be going well, but there is still the matter of the Russian security guy to sort out, so Bond and Ali storm their compartment and tie him down at gunpoint, which is how we say hello in England. Ali tells James he’ll take care of the rest, and he’ll meet him at 6 p.m. in the restaurant car. As Bond departs he walks past Red Grant, who is going the other way slyly holding a gun.

As Bond and Romanova ready themselves, a porter rushes in to tell them there has been a terrible accident with Ali. Bond heads off to check, telling Romanova to keep the door locked while he’s gone. He reaches the room and finds Ali and the Russian security man dead. He returns to find Tatiana in the compartment and begins to grill her for information about why Ali was murdered, but rather than a ‘grilling’, it’s more of a ‘flame-throwering’. She tells him she knows nothing, so he naturally calls her a liar and punches her in the face – a moment that has always seemed wholly unnecessary, shocking and difficult to watch. I’d prefer that the hero of my espionage film wasn’t the worst person in a Lars von Trier film.

When the train reaches the next station, Bond meets with one of Ali’s many sons and tells him, in the most matter-of-fact way, that his dad is dead. Rather than offering his condolences or a hug, Bond instructs him to send a request to M in London for someone from Station Y to meet him in Zagreb. He then hands over some of Ali’s personal items and boards the train without a backward look.

When the train reaches Zagreb, Grant intercepts the man from Section Y and kills him before assuming his identity and heading to meet Bond on the platform. He tells him his name is Captain Nash and that his orders were to make contact with Bond on the train. Always the smooth operator, 007 compliments Grant on his body, a comment he seems deeply flattered by, saying that he likes to keep in shape. Anyone hoping the film will take a deeply homoerotic turn here (perhaps with a game of volleyball, or a nude wrestle by the fire) will be disappointed.

In the restaurant car later, Bond orders the grilled sole for himself and Romanova. Grant asks for the same, with a glass of red wine to go with it. When it arrives he knocks over Romanova’s wine glass, and when Bond calls for a waiter, he refills it. After awkward conversation and dinner they all head back to Bond’s compartment and Romanova passes out on the bed.

‘What was it? The stuff you put in her drink,’ Bond says as he locks the door. ‘Chloral hydrate – quick but mild,’ replies Grant, before pistol-whipping him. Bond says that the red wine with fish was a giveaway, essentially calling Grant out as nouveau-riche scum. Grant calls him ‘old man’ again, and Bond takes exception, as he’s said it about 400 times since meeting 20 minutes ago. ‘Is that what you chaps in SMERSH call each other?’ he grunts in disdain. Grant turns his nose up at the very idea of being involved with SMERSH, and it clicks for Bond: SPECTRE. They’ve been playing the British and Russians against each other.

Grant confesses to all the murders, as well as saving Bond at the gypsy camp, and says he gets a kick out of seeing Bond be so stupid (this is nothing, he should see him dressed as a monkey in Octopussy). He shows him a roll of film – Bond and Romanova’s sex tape, as well as a letter supposedly from Romanova, trying to blackmail him. Grant says the British press will love it, and he’s right, as it will undoubtedly contain boobs.

Bond asks for a last cigarette and offers Grant 50 gold sovereigns from his suitcase (which is about right for the price of fags these days). Grant opens it and falls for the old exploding-gas-canister-in-the-suitcase trick. Bond leaps to his feet and so begins one of the greatest close-quarters combat scenes in Bond history. In an age where fighting in films was very much depicted as drunken scuffling, Bond vs Red Grant is one of the finest early examples of two mad-for-it hard bastards trying to kill each other with their bare hands. They swipe, punch, push, huff and grunt, all under a dim blue light. It’s very much the Space Mountain of fight scenes. Bond eventually strangles Grant with his own wire, but sadly doesn’t take the opportunity to crack a good joke like ‘nice death you’ve garotte there’ or ‘what a choker’. Instead, he wakes up Romanova and they escape the train and steal a truck that has been left as part of Grant’s escape route.

On the way to the Dalmatian coast, where presumably the spotty dogs swim in the bay, they are attacked by a helicopter which drops grenades on them and tries to run Bond over as he attempts to draw them away on foot. Thanks to his rifle and some classic henchman buffoonery, Bond shoots the grenade dropper just after he’s pulled the pin; the grenade gets lost under his seat and the helicopter explodes.

Bond and Romanova reach the coast where they find a boat waiting for them. Bond is now sporting a very natty captain’s hat, as it’s maritime law that you can only drive a boat if you have one. He pushes the pilot into the water while lamenting it’s ‘just not your day, is it?’ (and it really isn’t as the pilot is about five miles from shore), and then announces to Romanova that they’re heading to Venice and have plenty of fuel, so they should be there by the morning.

Meanwhile, in SPECTRE HQ, Number One is stroking his pussy (sorry, but he is) and telling Klebb and Kronsteen that Grant has been found dead and therefore the plan has failed. Kronsteen looks very sheepish, like his parents have just checked their last phone bill, and he tries to blame Klebb and her people, but Number One isn’t having any of it, and tells them that they need to kill Bond and recover the Lektor, as he has agreed a price with Russia for its return. He then has Morzeny kill Kronsteen by kicking him in the balls with a shoe-knife covered in venom.

In Venice, Bond and Romanova relax on the balcony of their hotel room, soaking in the sun, presumably sitting in silence because they have run out of small talk, therefore perfecting the cover of being married. The phone rings, and 007 steps away to answer it and asks for a porter to come and get their luggage. As the door slowly opens we see Rosa Klebb, dressed as a maid and looking a bit like the woman from the end of Don’t Look Now in her day-job. She pulls a gun on Bond and tries to steal the Lektor, but ends up pinned to the wall via a chair while flailing and kicking out her blade-shoe like some sort of can-can dancer who’s had her drink spiked with powerful psychotropic drugs. Romanova picks up a gun and shoots her dead, and as she slowly slides and hams her way down the wall to the floor, Bond turns to Romanova and makes a joke about how ‘she’s had her kicks’, again working that deep cover about being married very well, as she doesn’t laugh.

Matt Monro’s beautiful song, ‘From Russia With Love’, begins to play as the couple float through Venice on a gondola. Romanova hands the wedding ring back to Bond, as it’s government property. They kiss, but she tells him to behave himself as they’re being filmed. Bond looks up and sees a couple of tourists filming the river. ‘Oh, not again,’ he says, and takes their sex tape out of his jacket pocket and begins to unfurl it. As he and Romanova embrace, he tosses the film into the water and waves it goodbye, then proceeds to initiate sex on a boat in broad daylight. That’s our hero.

THREE

GOLDFINGER

1964

IF DR. NO was the trial run and From Russia with Love the dress rehearsal, Goldfinger is the finished article. This is James Bond as he was always intended; the inimitable 007 has arrived.

We open in an industrial complex in the dark. Guards patrol ominous-looking towers and domes as we drift over to the docks. It’s quiet . . . perhaps too quiet. A seagull is out for an evening swim in the calm waters – but it’s not a real seagull! It’s a fake, ingeniously placed on the head of a scuba-geared James Bond. He climbs out of the water and moves swiftly to avoid detection, soon finding a concealed door in a vast pillar. Inside a top-secret area full of red barrels marked ‘NITRO’, he unsheaths a sort of explosive link sausage, which he trails over the barrels before setting a timer for the detonator. He escapes back to the docks, where he removes the wetsuit to reveal a swish white tuxedo, plus a red carnation which goes into his lapel. Oof, nice touch.

Inside a nearby bar, Bond smoothly checks the time by holding his cigarette lighter to his watch and enjoys the chaos as the bomb goes off nearby. A man at the bar congratulates him about Mr Ramirez and his friends now being out of business. ‘At least he won’t be using heroin-flavoured bananas to finance revolutions,’ Bond replies. (Quite right, they sound revolting.) There’s a plane leaving for Miami in an hour, but first, Bond says, he has ‘some unfinished business to attend to’. (No guesses what that means.)

Bonita is a dancer, and Bond finds her in her dressing room, taking a bath. She steps out of the tub, but as they meet in a passionate embrace one of Ramirez’s men looms into view, holding a giant cosh. Bond catches sight of the man’s reflection in the deep pool of Bonita’s eyes and does what any gentleman would: thrusts her into the path of the cosh, rendering her unconscious. The assailant is flipped into the corner and a rather bizarre fist fight begins. Both punches and chairs are thrown, with a brief pause to extend and bend the cosh-man’s leg for no particular reason, before cosh-man is eventually thrown into the bath. Quick as a flash, Bond whips an electric heater (perilously close to the bath in the first place) straight into the water. Cosh-man breathes his last as smoke billows from his dead body. ‘Shocking,’ remarks Bond as he slips back into his tuxedo jacket. ‘Positively shocking.’ Say what you like about JB (I mean, yes, he’s just used a woman as a human shield) but that pun was straight out of the top drawer.

Miami Beach. Bond is enjoying a well-earned break. His old pal Felix Leiter (who was so affected by the events of Dr. No that he’s become a new actor, Cec Linder) finds him being massaged by ‘Dink’ (a nickname she presumably received after being lightly hit by a car). Bond introduces everyone and then dismisses Dink in the name of ‘man talk’, which sounds like a YouTube show created as a sad response to Loose Women. To add to her humiliation, he slaps her on the arse like he’s encouraging a horse to leave his kitchen. Bond then puts on a staggeringly awful terrycloth romper. Sartorially, it’s about as flattering as a man walking around in a T-shirt and no pants.

Felix tells Bond he’s no longer on holiday, and that he has a message from London. They want him to keep an eye on a man called Auric Goldfinger. ‘Sounds like a French nail varnish,’ Bond astutely observes, although we know he’s really thinking it sounds more like a sex act for millionaires. Felix explains that Goldfinger is reputable, is British but doesn’t sound like it (no shit, Felix) and owns one of the finest stud farms in the States. Bond asks why the CIA aren’t looking into him, and Felix says that as far as they’re concerned, he’s clean. Bond asks where he can find him, and Felix points dramatically to the stairs by the pool.

Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) strides down looking like a sweaty Winnie the Pooh, but infused with self-confidence and sass. He makes his way to his card game, sporting a hearing aid. Felix tells us Goldfinger’s been taking his quarry, Mr Simmons, to the cleaners for a week. Bond quickly works out what’s happening: Goldfinger isn’t deaf, he’s receiving tips about Simmons’ cards through an earpiece. Bond goes up to the room he suspects the accomplice is working from and grabs a maid (literally) to unlock the door. Inside he finds Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton) observing the game through binoculars and relaying the information to Goldfinger. Bond switches off the radio and introduces himself in the traditional way, while John Barry paints the air with his magic. Jill says that Goldfinger cheats because he likes to win, and she helps because he pays her. James asks very subtly if that’s all he pays her for, i.e. is she having sex with him, and he’s very happy to hear that she isn’t. He then takes over the radio and tells Goldfinger that he has to start losing or he’ll inform the police. Goldfinger is so angry he breaks a pencil, and Bond turns to Jill to enquire about some making of the love.

We cut to Bond’s room, post-lovin’, as he goes to the fridge to get some more champagne. As he retrieves the new bottle, he’s knocked out cold by the terrifying Oddjob (Harold Sakata), Goldfinger’s bodyguard and enforcer. Bond wakes later to one of the most iconic pop-culture images of the 20th century: Jill painted head-to-toe in gold, as a not so subtle message to Bond regarding the stunt he pulled earlier. One wonders what would have happened had Bond woken up 30 minutes earlier. Would he have seen Oddjob standing over Jill, applying the second coat of gold while whistling and smoking a roll-up? Is that why he’s called ‘Oddjob’?

Back in London, Bond explains to M that Jill died of ‘skin suffocation’ (not a real thing) from the paint, and he knows it was Goldfinger. M warns him that this isn’t a personal vendetta, and if he can’t do the job, 008 will. Bond, clearly incensed at the thought of how smug 008 would be at the Christmas party if this were to happen, insists that he wants to take the mission. M tells him to come back to his office at seven, in black tie, for a chat about gold bullion. Later, at that evening’s dinner, Colonel Smithers from the Bank of England (Richard Vernon) tells Bond that there’s been a lot of gold smuggling recently and Goldfinger is a prime suspect. Bond says he will need to meet Goldfinger, and asks if there is any bait he can take with him. Smithers says he can borrow some Nazi gold which has handily been recovered from the bottom of a lake.

The next day, Bond goes to see Q for a brief tour of the latest underwhelming gadgets they’ve made down in their bunker. There’s a parking meter that pumps out gas, a bulletproof vest worn by a scientist in a flasher’s mac, and then, finally, something decent: the Aston Martin DB5. Q points out that the DB5 has bulletproof glass and revolving number plates – ‘naturally’ – as well as a transmitting device called a ‘homer’. He shows off the machine gun and the buttons for oil slicks and smokescreens, and then something he’s particularly proud of: a red button under the lid of the gear stick that must never be pushed, as it shoots out an ejector seat. Bond asks if he’s joking, in such a way that suggests Q’s been downing undiluted meths again, but Q shoots back that he never jokes about his work.

Goldfinger struts into his golf club in Buckinghamshire and asks his usual companion for a game, but is told that he will be playing with an old member who has the same handicap. His name is James Bond. As the two men walk outside they’re greeted by the sight of Oddjob carrying Goldfinger’s clubs. Goldfinger explains that Oddjob is a mute, and not a very good caddy, which makes you wonder why he doesn’t ask another henchman to carry his clubs, or even just use an actual caddy. The game begins and Bond dramatically thuds the Nazi gold onto the green, causing Goldfinger to miss his shot. He’s able to identify it by sight: ‘A 1940 smelt from the Weigenhaler foundry at Essen,’ he says (well, Michael Collins does; he dubbed Gert Fröbe, as Fröbe couldn’t speak English very well). Bond says he can procure more from the same source, and Goldfinger suggests raising the stakes of their game: the bar of gold if he wins, and if he loses, he’ll pay Bond the £5,000 it’s worth. The only problem is that Goldfinger has absolutely no intention of playing fairly.

Bond catches on to his cheating and at one point switches Goldfinger’s ball. When Goldfinger sinks his last shot, he proudly announces he’s won, only for Bond to tell him that he’s using the wrong ball, and going by strict golf rules, that means he loses the hole and the match. Goldfinger stomps off in a huff. When Bond catches up with him in the car park, he surreptitiously plants a tracking device in the boot of his car, before Goldfinger tells him in no uncertain terms to stop messing in his affairs. To show that he’s being very, very serious, he gets Oddjob to throw his hat at a statue, slicing its head off. Goldfinger and Oddjob head off, with Bond’s DB5 tracking them all the way, via a white dot on a map that endlessly beeps and would drive anyone to madness.

Bond follows Goldfinger to Geneva. The Swiss Alps tower in the background as Goldfinger’s Rolls-Royce Phantom III cruises along the mountain roads. Meanwhile, Bond is quite clearly being driven bananas by Q’s insanity-inducing satnav. (If I were 007, I’d be lodging a formal complaint as soon as I returned to London.) Suddenly, a white Ford Mustang accelerates up to the back of Bond’s car, beeping and signalling for him to let it pass. It’s a woman driving, so he does the decent thing and lets her. Practising restraint, Bond tells himself, ‘Discipline, 007,’ and thus successfully manages to not have sex with her.

Bond stops at a bend overlooking the valley and watches Goldfinger buy some fruit from a roadside seller further down. However, he isn’t the only observer: the camera zooms out to reveal the woman from the Ford Mustang concealed higher up the slope and pointing a rifle at Goldfinger. She fires and misses by absolute miles, nearly hitting Bond instead. She jumps back into the Mustang and drives away at speed, just as Bond tears around the corner. He activates a spike which spins out of the DB5 and into the Mustang, shredding the tyres and bodywork. The woman crashes into a ditch and Bond pulls over to play the concerned citizen (in much the same way the Zodiac Killer might). She introduces herself as Tilly Soames. He spots her rifle case, but she claims it’s for her ice skates. Once they reach a garage, she asks Bond to leave her there, as she’s perfectly capable of looking after herself. Bond, for once in his life, acquiesces.

Bond turns the ultra-loud radar on again and traces Goldfinger to ‘Auric Enterprises’. (It shouldn’t really have taken this much spy work to track him down.) He takes up position in the trees overlooking the compound and settles down with a pair of binoculars. As night falls, he dresses in black and makes his way down the hill. Entering the compound (which in reality is the backlot of Pinewood Studios, now known as Goldfinger Avenue), he stays in the shadows and sees Goldfinger’s impressive Rolls-Royce being broken into pieces by his men. It turns out that he’s smuggling gold in the bodywork of his car. Goldfinger explains all this to a Chinese associate, Mr Ling (Burt Kwouk), and mentions ‘Operation Grand Slam’.

Bond has seen enough and scuttles back up the hill. Just as he gets comfortable, however, he hears noises coming from the bushes. It’s Tilly again, also dressed in black, and carrying her rifle. As Bond grabs her, the barrel of her rifle sets off a tripwire that sounds an alarm. Tilly wants to kill Goldfinger because he killed her sister, and Bond realises her sister was Jill, the golden girl from earlier. They make a break for Bond’s car as a group of Goldfinger’s men appear in the woods with machine guns. A car chase begins down a wooded road, and Bond gets to show off some of the DB5’s gadgets, such as the smoke and oil, which leads to the small crash of one pursuer and the fiery death of another. They reach a blockade, and Bond tells Tilly to make a break for it while he lays down covering fire. Sadly, Oddjob has arrived with a host of guards and murders her with his hat of death. That’s two Mastersons he’s killed now, as though he has some sort of awful grudge against them. Also, let’s remember that if James Bond hadn’t decided to fuck about with Goldfinger and seduce Jill, both she and her sister would still be alive and well.

Oddjob orders his men to remove Tilly’s body and take Bond away, but he can only communicate via the sound ‘ahh-ahh’, which makes him sound like a seagull ready to mate. Bond is told to take an armed guard in his car and follow the convoy back to the compound. It’s during this drive that the words of Q flash through his mind, and he pushes the red button on the gear stick, sending the guard shooting out of the roof and starting another car chase. This one ultimately ends in Bond crashing into a wall, which renders the whole scene a little pointless.

When Bond wakes, he finds that he’s been tied to a cutting table. This is the moment that has defined Bond in the minds of many for decades: the laser-up-the-crotch scene. Feast your eyes on Ken Adam’s beautiful set, which is wonderfully spacious, with warm light reflecting off the surfaces and stylish stairs leading to the laser lab. Goldfinger reveals that he knows Bond is 007 (he really is a crap spy, isn’t he?) and tells Bond he has a big laser with which he’d like to slice him in half. To demonstrate, he burns a line into the cutting table, stopping just short of Bond’s family jewels. Bond utters the now immortal line of ‘Do you expect me to talk?’ to which we all know the response: ‘No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!’

Bond decides to go for broke. He says that he and his organisation know all about Operation Grand Slam, and convinces Goldfinger that if anything were to happen to him it would be game over. The laser is switched off right at the last second (presumably just as the last of Bond’s pubic hairs is singed away). Goldfinger tells Bond that he’s worth more to him alive than dead and has him tranquillised. (Which does rather beg the question of why the bondage laser torture table was set up in the first place.)

Bond wakes, with stubble, on a plane. Looking at the interior, you might assume this is Trump’s Air Force One, with gold everything – pillows, phones, clocks, lamps and wallpaper. Bond’s vision is off, but an image begins to come into view. It’s a woman, who tells him her name is Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman). ‘I musht be dreaming,’ he murmurs. Pussy informs him that they’re heading to Baltimore, where he is to be Mr Goldfinger’s guest, and reveals that she’s his personal pilot. Bond once again essentially asks if she’s shagging him, which she quite rightly takes offence to, informing him that she’s a damn good pilot. She also tells Bond not to bother with the charm, as she’s ‘immune’ (a reference to the fact that, in Ian Fleming’s book, she’s a lesbian – something that isn’t otherwise explored in the film).

Bond is given his luggage by the flight attendant, Mei-Lei (Mai Ling), and goes to clean himself up in a separate compartment. Pussy tells Mei-Lei to keep an eye on him, which she does through different peepholes – one in the centre of a clock, one behind a decorative disc on the wall – both of which he spots and then obstructs, first with his jacket, then his suitcase and finally by squirting shaving foam directly onto a two-way mirror. When he’s confident he can’t be seen, he extracts his homing beacon and turns it on before getting himself sex-ready by shaving, slicking his hair, donning an immaculate three-piece suit and probably dousing himself in five litres of Old Spice.

Felix calls M to tell him that Bond’s beacon has come on, and it indicates that he’s arrived in Baltimore on a private jet registered to Goldfinger. M asks Felix to keep an eye on him from a distance, because Bond is ‘evidently well on top at the moment’, only for the scene to cut to a plane landing. This must have disappointed M, as a line like that should always be followed by sex, not an airport. We witness Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus make a pass overhead as Oddjob arrives to collect Bond. The planes come in to land and the female pilots all exit and head towards Pussy, accompanied by a muted trumpet, like the intro to a soft porn film. They tell Pussy that the dress rehearsal went like a dream – coincidentally, the kind of dream Bond has all the time.

Bond is taken to Goldfinger’s stud farm and shoved in a cell. Meanwhile, Goldfinger has assembled a group of criminal leaders for a gangster convention. They’ve each brought him the materials he needs to complete Operation Grand Slam, but aren’t happy they’re all in the same room – another set incredibly well designed by Ken Adam, with angled ceilings piercing the floor, stone walls and a giant pool table. Goldfinger owes them all $1 million, so he offers them a deal. He can either give them the one million now in gold bullion, or ten million each when his bank opens in the morning. When one of the gangsters points out that banks don’t open on Sundays, Goldfinger tells them his bank will, and reveals his plan via the pool table, which turns into a control desk. He turns out the lights and lowers a giant map from the ceiling. He says he intends to rob the gold depository at Fort Knox, and they all laugh. Then Goldfinger opens the floor and, like a train-set enthusiast’s fantasy, up pops a model of Fort Knox.

Bond manages to escape from his cell by overpowering the world’s stupidest guard, who is so baffled by Bond miming going down in an elevator that he opens the door to see where he went. Bond manages to get inside the model of Fort Knox and peek out of the tiny windows to find out what’s going on, like Gulliver spying on a Lilliputian Neighbourhood Watch meeting. Goldfinger plans to use the Flying Circus to deploy ‘Delta 9 gas’ on Fort Knox, which will knock out all of the 41,000 guards stationed there and allow them to steal fifteen billion dollars’ worth of gold bullion. Bond makes notes as Solo, one of the gangsters, announces that he wants to take his one million and leave. Goldfinger says he respects Solo’s wishes and removes him. As they leave, the room is sealed and filled with gas, killing the remaining gangsters immediately.

Bond’s legs are swept out from under him by Pussy and he’s taken out into the compound at gunpoint, where they see Solo just about to leave. Bond sneakily pops his tracking beacon and a note about Operation Grand Slam into the gangster’s pocket. Felix and his partner use the beacon to follow Oddjob’s car across town, and we’re treated to a beautiful slice of early sixties Americana, with bright white buildings, cheerful diners, car lots full of classic motors and giant signs advertising things like Joe’s Drive-In. Oddjob takes Solo to the junkyard and shoots him before having the car (and Solo’s body) crushed by a compactor. Quite why Goldfinger bothered telling the hoods anything about his plans when he was going to kill them all anyway remains a complete mystery. Maybe he just wanted to show off his tiny model of Fort Knox to someone able to say more than ‘ahh-ahh’.

Pussy and Goldfinger sit in the sun slurping mint juleps and discussing what Pussy will do with her share of the money. Will she retire to London? Buy a speedboat? Change her name by deed poll? No, she says, she’ll go and live in the Bahamas, and essentially intimates that if anyone ever comes near her she’ll kill them. In fairness, you’d probably hate everyone too if your name was Pussy Galore.

Goldfinger is informed that two men are standing at the gate looking into the farm with binoculars. Who would be stupid enough to go and stand right up against the fence of a villain’s farm and look at it through binoculars? Why, the CIA of course. Goldfinger suggests bringing Bond out from his cell so that Felix and his buddy can see him. Over more mint juleps, which Felix presumably looks on thirstily at, Bond conversationally observes that moving all the gold is going to be a logistical nightmare. Goldfinger, clearly itching to get the miniature Fort Knox out again, retorts: ‘Who said anything about moving it?’ Bond knows that Mr Ling is an expert in nuclear fission and soon figures out that the Chinese have given Goldfinger a bomb. Auric prefers to think of it as an ‘atomic device’, explaining that it’s ‘small, but particularly dirty’. It will render the entire gold supply of the United States radioactive for over 50 years. Bond remarks that it’s an inspired deal: the Chinese get economic chaos in the West and the value of Auric’s gold will increase many times over.

Pussy emerges from the house, dressed to turn Bond on. Goldfinger asks Pussy to entertain Mr Bond, and ominously mentions that he’ll ‘join them both later’ (which conjures the worst kind of nightmare). Pussy tells Bond it’s about time they got to know each other and mentions that she’s utterly defenceless, so he takes her into a barn and tries to seduce her. He gets a judo flip for his trouble (and lands holding his hairpiece in a very concerned way). They then have a roll in the hay followed by a deeply uncomfortable moment as he forces himself on her. At last she relents and, grimacing like she’s kissing a horny monkey for scientific purposes, they get down to things. It is a moment that has not aged well.

The next morning, Pussy’s Flying Circus is set to commence ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’, which sadly isn’t the destruction of the patriarchy but instead involves them flying out to Fort Knox with the Delta 9 gas canisters. The gas deploys and soldiers around the base begin to drop to the ground. The assault begins as Goldfinger’s men, wearing gas masks, drive into the base in army trucks, passing vehicles full of slumped soldiers including, sadly, Felix and his partner. Bond watches on helplessly from the back of a truck, handcuffed to Oddjob. They all storm inside and use the laser that nearly burned off Bond’s balls to open the vault, then load the atomic bomb as Goldfinger arrives via helicopter with Pussy.

Meanwhile, Felix and all the soldiers begin to open their eyes and stand up, as (plot twist!) they were merely pretending to be unconscious. They open fire on Goldfinger’s army. Inside Fort Knox, Bond is handcuffed to the bomb and sent into the deepest part of the depository to die in a flaming ball of atomic fire. Above ground, a firefight breaks out and Goldfinger locks Oddjob inside the vault with Bond before quickly changing into a US Army uniform. A very clever disguise, were it not for the fact that he’s carrying a large gold gun. He begins to shoot everyone around him, including some of his own men (RIP Mr Ling), and then legs it.

Oddjob reaches Bond just as he frees himself from the bomb trolley. They attempt a fight, but Bond is out-muscled immediately and Oddjob is a terrible shot with his hat. Instead of hitting Bond, he severs the electrical cable behind him. Bond snatches up the hat, and Oddjob stands uneasy as Bond draws back his arm, looking worried as it’s released. He shouldn’t have been – Bond totally misses and the hat gets wedged in the bars of the vault. As Oddjob moves to retrieve the bowler, Bond leaps across the floor and points the loose electrical cable at the bars, sending a deadly charge that kills Oddjob (after one final penguin-like honk).

Bond turns his attention to the bomb, which is still counting down with less than a minute to go. It’s all wires, lights and complicated shit – and Bond has no idea what to do. Just as it looks like the world will end, Felix’s atomic specialist dives into view and pushes a switch that stops it at ‘007’ seconds. ‘What kept you?’ Bond asks. ‘Three more ticks and Mr Goldfinger would have hit the jackpot.’ This line makes no sense until you realise that they changed the time from ‘003’ to ‘007’ for comedy purposes, and then decided to leave the line in anyway, because, come on, who’ll notice? The answer: pedants like me. Felix tells Bond they didn’t catch Goldfinger, but Pussy called Washington to tell them the whole plan and switched the gas in the canisters. Quite why, we’ll never know. We’re probably supposed to assume it’s thanks to the magic of Bond’s penis.

Bond is whisked to a waiting US plane to be taken to the White House for dinner with the President. Once aboard, he makes himself comfortable and removes his seatbelt. However, before he can start making inappropriate moves on the flight attendant, Goldfinger emerges from behind the curtains, holding a gun. He announces they’re going to Cuba, but before he can explain further, Bond goes for the gun and a fight breaks out. After a brief scuffle, the gun goes off and takes out a window, sending Goldfinger fizzing out like a balloon. There is a brief ‘comedy’ moment when it looks like he might be too fat to be sucked out, but then with a horrible frippp he’s gone.

The drop in cabin pressure causes the plane to fly out of control. Bond finds Pussy at the controls, wrestling to right it. Felix and his men watch from airport control as the plane drops like a stone on their radar. It’s heading straight for the sea – and certain death. At the last second, a second blip pops up on the radar as the plane crashes into the water.

A chopper sweeps over an area of beautiful greenery, conducting a search. Felix is sitting next to the pilot, a worried expression on his face. Pussy stands up to wave to the helicopter, but Bond is having none of it. ‘This is no time to be rescued,’ he tells her, pulling them both under the parachute for some awkward pre-rescue sex while Felix is presumably forced to watch from the air. Why does it always have to end like this, James? No wonder Felix never looks the same.

FOUR

THUNDERBALL

1965

WE OPEN WITH the camera drawing back from a coffin with the letters ‘JB’ monogrammed ominously on a plaque affixed to its side – lying coldly in state in a grandiose church. A priest is waving that thing with the smoke (no idea what it is called) around, and a grieving woman stands next to the box looking mournful behind a black veil. Could this be it? Could James Bond actually be dead? Did he finally succumb to all those awful STDs? That’s what the filmmakers want you to think, the little rascals.

However, Bond (who is alive and well, though not necessarily clear of the STDs) is watching on from a balcony above the ceremony. His (badly dubbed) female companion, Madame LaPorte, notes that the coffin bears his initials (she would be great on University Challenge), and although Bond is happy it’s not him, he wishes he’d been responsible for putting the body in the box as the corpse is Jacques Bouvar, a SPECTRE agent who was responsible for the murder of two of Bond’s MI6 colleagues. Bond and LaPorte observe Bouvar’s widow exit the ceremony and open the car door for herself. The mourners file out in a symphony of disturbed gravel underfoot and Bond basically says ‘shag you later’ to LaPorte, while also making his exit.

The black funeral car arrives back a grandiose château and the widow Bouvar makes her way into her lavish home, obviously intending to mourn in peace and quiet, away from the harsh gaze of the outside world. She draws the giant ornate door shut and locks herself in the study. However, she is not alone. Sitting in an armchair by the fire is Bond, who rises to his feet and offers his sincere condolences, just before he thumps her in the face.

‘My dear Colonel Bouvar, I don’t think you should have opened that car door by yourself.’

Yes, Jacques Bouvar is (like Bond’s chauvinism) alive and well, and attended his own funeral in drag in order to cap off the perfect faked death. If only John ‘Canoe Man’ Darwin had thought to do the same, instead of posing in a photo with a Panamanian estate agent, he too might have got away with it. This is also a stark warning to all women out there that if you have the temerity to open your own car door, there is a risk of James Bond punching you in the face.

Bouvar and Bond begin a furniture fight, with chairs, clocks, tables, rugs and cupboards becoming the weapons of choice. Bond overpowers Bouvar and throttles him with a poker. He briefly pauses to throw flowers on the corpse, before making his escape via JETPACK. Yes, you read that correctly. James Bond escapes via jetpack, a move that seems to be a desperate ploy for attention, typical of the big man-child.

The problem with the jetpack plan is that it is far more complicated than, say, shooting the three men chasing him and walking out the front door. He instead spends about five minutes putting the jetpack on, then five minutes flying a distance of about fifteen yards, then a further five minutes putting the pack into the boot of his waiting DB5. By which time the men in pursuit have caught up with him and are shooting guns in his direction. Bond reacts to this by getting into the car, putting up a blast-shield, and squirting water at them. Luckily for Bond, these villains seem to have come straight from Oz as the water totally incapacitates them – presumably leading to a funeral attended solely by flying monkeys – while Bond makes his escape at high speed.

Cue the opening titles, which are absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. An aquatic-themed, water-drenched spectacle, with naked scuba divers, and even-nakeder harpoon-wielders taking aim at each other. Tom Jones beautifully growls his way through Barry’s sumptuous and seedy theme, which sounds like it’s bleeding out of the doors of a Soho peepshow. We cycle through deep reds, warm blues and make our way towards the surface of the action.

A luxury white car drives up a Parisian street, the Eiffel Tower looms large in the background and the car comes to a stop at the side of the road. The driver emerges from within, and a comedy French policeman announces, ‘Hey, no parkeeeeng zhere,’ but as the driver swiftly turns his head, he reveals his identity. It’s Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi), a silver-haired, gruff-looking slab of granite. Don’t let the eye-patch fool you, he may have only 50 per cent of his vision, and therefore will never truly be able to enjoy a 3D IMAX experience, but he has 20/20 vision when it comes to crime, corruption, extortion and evil. The policeman salutes and offers his apologies as Largo withdraws his attaché case from the car and calmly enters the building opposite. He accesses a secret doorway with his pocket make-up case, and walks into a SPECTRE meeting. Largo is Number Two, and Number One, our mysterious host (who is hidden by a barrier behind a screen), reveals that Number Six, Colonel Jaques Bouvar, is dead and that his services will be missed. We go around the room hearing about how much money the various evil schemes have raised (including a fun satirical reference to the Great Train Robbery). However, when we get to Number Eleven, we hear that the collections between he and Number Nine are down due to competition from Latin America. Number One is suspicious that Number Eleven is not telling the truth, and may perhaps have unaccounted funds. He reveals that he knows that one of them is guilty of embezzlement, and he has decided on the ‘appropriate action’.

According to Forbes, the appropriate action to take when suspecting an employee of embezzling funds is to ‘gather the facts’, take ‘protective action’, ‘wait to decide on punitive actions’, and ‘learn from mistakes and make changes’. Forbes also mentions that compassion should play a role in deciding upon the best course of action. ‘When these flaws present themselves, it’s best to handle them with grace, forgiveness and expediency rather than roil in negative emotions of anger and retribution.’ Number One has clearly never read Forbes because he presses a button and electrocutes Number Nine to death. Largo looks on nonchalantly and basks briefly in the harsh blue glow of the execution as Number Nine’s body is taken below in a sinking, smoking chair, presumably to an executive airpoty lounge-style room full of dead businessmen.

Next item on the agenda is for Largo to present his dastardly extortion plan. Largo walks the catwalk in the middle of the room and reveals that this season they will demand an off-the-shoulder ransom raising $280 million from NATO, and that SPECTRE agent Count Lippe, who is, like, so hot right now, is at a health farm called Shrublands (which sounds like a pubic wig company) in the south of England, conveniently near a NATO airbase.

Lippe (Guy Doleman) wanders out of the steam room in a blue fluffy dressing gown like something from Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. He wipes himself down with a towel and murmurs, ‘Oh, Pat, I’ll see you when I’ve had a shower.’ ‘Pat’ is Patricia Fearing (Molly Peters), the physiotherapist/ resident sex object at the health farm, who is currently busy loosening off James Bond’s back/giving him an erection. Bond notices immediately that Lippe has a Tong tattoo and doesn’t hide the fact very well. Lippe attempts to cover it with his watch as he wanders off, but it’s too late, Bond never forgets a Tong tattoo, and he’s straight on the phone to Moneypenny to try to verify it – only for her to remind him he’s off duty and it will have to wait. Bond says that next time he sees her, he’ll put her across his knee, to which she replies, ‘On yoghurt and lemon juice? I can hardly wait,’ which sounds both weird and disgusting – perhaps she’s decided this is the only way to stop him pestering her. During Moneypenny’s insane rambling, Bond notices that Count Lippe has gone out, so he hangs up the phone and heads to Lippe’s room.

How long has Count Lippe been at this health farm? Well, long enough to have his name etched on a brass plate on his door, that’s how long. Bond lets himself into his room and has a snoop around. It’s not long before he notices somebody is coming, so he ducks behind the door that’s about to open. A figure tentatively walks in wearing pyjamas, with bandages covering his face, like the Invisible Man at a sleepover. He’s about to come in when the ring of a telephone stops him in his tracks. He turns on his heels and walks away, shutting the door behind him, leaving Bond free to look around Lippe’s room – but he finds nothing and leaves a short time later . . . observed by bandage man.

Patricia Fearing is looking over Bond’s X-rays when he saunters in wearing a dressing gown and begins to feel her up. She shrugs him off and checks his injuries picked up in the earlier fight. As she’s inspecting his bruised ribs, he grabs her and begins forcibly kissing her, re-enacting the worst moments from Goldfinger. Patricia puts him on a ‘motorised traction table’ to help stretch his spine, which appears to be a machine that helps Bond have sex with a table. Pat lays him down and straps him in, announcing she’ll be back in a while to check on him. However, a short time into Bond’s horrifying sex-simulator ride, Count Lippe’s hand reaches out to the controls of the machine and sets it to go full blast, giving us an unsettling image of Bond dry-humping the table at turbo speed. Bond shouts for help, but soon passes out (presumably from horrendous chafing).

Pat shuts the machine down and wakes him up. She suggests he spends a few minutes in the steam room to recover as he gingerly gets to his feet. Bond mentions that he’ll get his own back for this, and Pat worries he’ll tell her boss, which will get her fired. Rather than doing what any other man would do and clarifying that he meant getting revenge on Lippe, Bond uses her fear to drag her into the steam room and have sex with her. It has to be noted at this stage that James Bond doesn’t seem the most progressive of men, but it was a different era, blah blah.

Later that evening outside an old country pub, Lippe is in a phone box dialling a number. The call goes through to a hotel room within the pub. Major Francois Derval, a pilot from the nearby NATO airbase, is necking with Fiona Volpe (Luciana Paluzzi), a red-haired SPECTRE agent. They are about to get to more kissing and cuddling when the phone rings to inform Derval that a car is waiting for him. There’s a knock at the door, he answers it and is greeted by a mirror image of himself, who then gasses him to death. It would appear that the mysteriously bandaged man from Shrublands was in fact Angelo Palazzi, who has undergone extensive plastic surgery to look exactly like Major Derval. I’m assuming it wasn’t easier to just get someone who looked a bit like Derval, rather than go to all this trouble?

Oh, OK.

Lippe is with Palazzi, and as he begins to take care of the corpse, Volpe begins handing out equipment to Palazzi: a special gas mask, a small canister of deadly gas and an envelope stuffed with £100,000. Palazzi tells her the money is not enough, and he wants £250,000 for the two years he’s spent preparing for the role, and all that plastic surgery. Lippe raises a gun towards him, but Volpe agrees to his terms, and says he’ll accept the £100,00 as a down payment. As Angelo leaves, Volpe and Lippe begin to dress Derval’s dead body in pyjamas and bandages in order to take him back to Shrublands, where they will presumably announce he died while dry-humping a table.

Back at Shrublands, Bond is being a pervert and massaging Pat with a mink glove, turning her into a pile of purring, sexual jelly. They hear a Vulcan jet pass by overhead (flown by Palazzi), and Bond tells Pat he’ll close the window to keep the noise down (if you know what I mean). As he approaches he sees an ambulance pulling up at the building and Lippe running over to open it. A gurney is carried out, covered in a red blanket, and this arouses Bond’ s suspicions, so he goes to investigate.

Inside a dark room Bond finds Derval, wrapped in bandages, under the blanket, and as he’s about to phone it in, a knife drifts through the open window to kill him, so he smashes the knife out of the hand with a telephone and pulls the would-be killer through the glass of the window. He collapses immediately. Bond doesn’t seem to give two shits that he’s just been attacked again and just leaves the room and hits the fire alarm.

Meanwhile, up in the Vulcan, Palazzi gasses the entire crew with the canister Volpe gave him, and once they are all dead, he takes over the controls and flies the plane in a steep dive to make it look like it’s about to crash. When he gets below 300 feet, NATO can no longer track him on their radar and he flies the plane (and its two nuclear warheads) to the Bahamas, where he is met by a Largo and his boat, the wonderfully named Disco Volante, which sounds like a Croydon nightclub. Palazzi impressively lands the plane on the water (thanks to Lago’s underwater lights that create a rough landing strip for him), and we then watch it sink to the ocean floor. Palazzi releases the cockpit hatch but then struggles to free himself from his seatbelt. After all the things he’s managed to do that day, this is remarkably inept. He tries many combinations of buckles and straps, but he cannot get out of his seat. Luckily for him, Largo approaches in his scuba gear. Palazzi points at the restraints, and Largo nods. He pulls out his knife, and uses it to cut Angelo’s air-supply pipe, and he finds out the hard way that it doesn’t do to haggle with SPECTRE. Palazzi drowns in his seat, and Largo takes a small suitcase (which we later learn contains bomb fuses) from the cockpit while his men retrieve the nuclear weapons and cover the Vulcan with a giant camouflage net. When Largo gets back onboard his ship we are treated to the sight of his men all wearing M.Y. Disco Volante T-shirts, which make them look like henchmen from Batman in the sixties.

Number One informs Largo that he’s done well, but that Count Lippe has to go. His choice of Palazzi was a poor one, and could have jeopardised the entire operation. He says he will notify the ‘execution branch’ to take care of it, which just goes to show that even SPECTRE isn’t safe from unnecessary bureaucracy.

Bond is at last leaving Shrublands (there really has been an extraordinary amount of time spent at this bloody health farm) and as he drives away he is pursued by Lippe. The DB5 is cruising along a vast stretch of open road when Bond notices Lippe draw up close behind him. Lippe pulls a gun and begins to shoot. However, before Bond can even think about how to deal with this, a mysterious motorbike appears behind Lippe’s car and fires a missile into it, causing it to explode in a ditch. It’s Fiona Volpe, who’s obviously part of the execution branch, or at the very least working on secondment. (Fun sidenote: there’s a lovely video of comedy writer Dennis Norden taking his godson to see this sequence being filmed called ‘A Child’s Guide to Blowing Up a Motorcar’. It’s well worth watching, and is available on YouTube.)

Bond heads to MI6 where every 00 agent in Europe has been rushed in for a meeting with M and the Home Secretary, who has received a secret tape at 10 Downing Street that morning. It’s from Number One, who announces that SPECTRE have the nuclear weapons, and if they don’t get £100 million within seven days, they will destroy a major city in England or the United States. If they agree, they have to arrange for Big Ben to strike seven times at six p.m. the next day, and for Tony Blackburn to play ‘If You Leave Me Now’ 15 times, rather than the usual 20. M tells all the agents to open their dossiers – code name: ‘Thunderball’ – and adds that they have very little to go on. Bond, however, knows better, as the first picture he sees is that of Derval, a face he has seen before at Shrublands.

M tells Bond that he’s being assigned to Canada and that he will report to Group Captain Pritchard, who is present at the meeting. Bond has other ideas, and insists that he be assigned to Nassau. M asks if this is due to his ‘enthusiasm for water sports’, which is another fun fact about Bond we didn’t know. He tells M that he knows the man in the picture, and he’s seen his dead body (not in a Sixth Sense way). Pritchard tells M that’s impossible as Derval was seen boarding the Vulcan the night before. M fiercely interjects and says, ‘If 007 says he saw Derval last night at Shrublands and he was dead, that’s enough for me to initiate enquiries.’ Which is a lovely moment of showing just how paternal M is towards Bond. There is a woman with Derval in the photograph: his sister Domino, who Bond discovers from the folder lives in Nassau. Bond tells M that she will be worth looking into/having sex with. M tells him he has four days, and to get a move on.

When we first see Domino (Claudine Auger), she’s catching a lift with a sea turtle. Yes, really. Shoals of tropical fish pass by in the background as Domino kicks her flippered feet and takes in the wonder of the sea bed. There’s coral, seaweed and those sort of funny-looking underwater twig things (I won’t blind you with science). Bond swims down to the floor as well, in tiny blue shorts and stops at a rock to watch her, like some sort of maritime peeping Tom. She releases the turtle (not a euphemism) and swims down to look at a starfish (not a euphemism), but cannot swim up as her foot has become stuck in a rock. Luckily for her, she’s being observed by a pervert, who swims in to rescue her, and they both head to the surface.

Bond introduces himself and tells Domino he’s been admiring ‘her form’. He then goes on to say, ‘Most girls just paddle around, you swim like a man,’ which is a very brave opening gambit, but shows that he’s grown over the course of the film.

Domino is dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl, who also dubbed Ursula Andress and Eunice Gayson (Sylvia Trench) in Dr. No, and the resemblance to Honey Ryder’s voice is – obviously – almost identical. You do have to wonder why they got so very ‘dub happy’ in those days. Even Molly Peters (Pat Fearing from Shrublands) is dubbed by Barbara Jefford, for some reason.

Bond gets Domino back to her boat, and swims back to Paula (Martine Beswick), his CIA contact. He tells her to contact London and let them know he’s made contact with Domino. They pretend that the motor has broken on their boat, and Bond asks Domino for a lift, which she says will be no problem, as Bond once again behaves like a serial killer.

They take lunch by the pool, and she tires of his questions, so as a sweetener he offers her some of his ‘conch chowder’, which sounds like an under-the-counter film about horny sailors. They are being watched by a man, not too subtly, and Domino remarks that he works for her guardian, as he likes to know where she is. Bond asks if they can have dinner some time, and she says no, and heads back to her guardian’s yacht.

It’s the evening and a tuxedo’d Bond steps off a boat and into a high-class casino. He requests £500 in chips and makes his way to the table. Opposite him is Domino and her guardian, Emilio Largo, who is playing the card game with the shoe and the boat paddle from Dr. No. Bond takes a seat and makes a couple of SPECTRE references, before introducing himself. Largo ups the stakes and the game really gets going. Bond wins fairly quickly and Largo doesn’t like it at all, so Bond offers to take Domino for a drink, which Largo accepts as he wants to win back his money.

Bond asks her more questions, and she tells him her brother is living in England, and that he’s a wonderful man – for God’s sake don’t tell her that you looked into the face of her dead brother, or you’ll ruin your chances. They begin to dance, and she likes the way Bond holds her, which is obviously music to his ears. Largo emerges and tells her they are leaving, but invites Bond to lunch at his house, to show that he isn’t such a bad loser after all.

Bond, Felix (who in this film is played by an actor called Rik Van Nutter – a name that sounds as credible as his performance) and Paula head to their HQ in Nassau, to be greeted by Q coming out of a cupboard, looking like the worst kind of sex tourist. He’s brought some gadgets for Bond to aid him. He shows off his equipment, while his pink hand-full-of-crab-sticks distract entirely from any message he could possibly be aiming to deliver. He gives him an underwater camera (which Bond mocks slightly, outraging Q deeply), a distress beacon that he has to swallow, special underwater breathing apparatus, a flare gun and a Geiger counter – not his best work, but somehow I suspect they will all get used.

Bond, Felix and Pinder (their man in Nassau) head out to the Disco Volante at night. Bond dives underneath to see if he can find the bombs. He’s wearing a bright red wetsuit and a bright blue mask, which shows just what a crap spy he can be sometimes. Naturally, he’s spotted almost immediately by a Largo scuba guard who, I might add, is sensibly dressed in an all-black wetsuit. Take note, James. The guard fires a spear gun at Bond from about three feet away and somehow misses. An onboard alarm goes off and Largo has the boat’s underwater lights turned on so everyone can watch Bond and the scuba guard fight – although it looks more like a pissed old couple trying to tango for the first time while on holiday in Spain. Bond eventually cuts the guard’s oxygen tube (the writers obviously really liked this as a killing technique) and in the next moment the guard has just disappeared and we watch Bond taking photos of the underside of the boat. Largo has his henchmen drop grenades into the water and Bond scarpers, leaving behind his mask and oxygen tanks to fake his death.

Bond develops the pictures he took and finds that the Volante has an underwater hatch, which suggests that the plane is underwater and that was how the weapons were smuggled out without anyone seeing. Bond and Felix head out on Felix’s chopper to look for the plane. They fly over Largo’s mansion and take a look, and it’s at this point I feel compelled to offer a quick tip to Bond. It’s not really spying when you fly a helicopter over someone’s house in broad daylight and look at them with binoculars while they are also looking back at you.

With the plane hidden beneath the camouflage netting, Bond and Felix’s hunt is fruitless. They return to land so that Bond can keep his lunch date at Largo’s house and he kicks off proceedings by leering at Domino as she emerges from the pool, then mentions that Largo’s shotgun looks more fitting for a woman. Classic chauvinistic Bond. Largo introduces him to Vargas, who looks like Andy de la Tour in the grip of an awful Bostik addiction and tells him that Vargas ‘doesn’t drink, smoke or make love,’ then asks, ‘What do you do, Vargas?’ thus inspiring ‘Goodie Two Shoes’ by Adam Ant. Largo says that every man has a passion, and his is fishing. It’s generally a really bizarre conversation. He asks Bond what his passion is, and he once again leers at Domino. You may be trying to get under the bad guy’s skin, James, but this is just creepy behaviour.

After Largo shows off his swimming pool full of sharks, he asks Bond if he would mind taking Domino to the Junkanoo that evening, as he’s too busy. Bond accepts while dribbling profusely.

Later, Bond arranges with Pinder to have a power cut at Largo’s mansion, so he can sneak in and have a look around. When he gets inside he finds that Paula has been snatched by Largo’s men, but killed herself with a suicide capsule rather than talking. The alarm is raised in the compound and Bond and a minion fight and fall into the shark pool. A guard is about to shoot, but Largo says he has a better idea. He shuts the lid, and releases the sharks. I’m pretty sure shooting him dead is the better idea, but you be you, Largo. Due to the stress of being underwater with sharks, Bond’s physical appearance completely changes to that of a stuntman, a common occurrence in extreme circumstances of anxiety. Bond stabs the minion, utilises Q’s breathing apparatus and is able to swim past the sharks as they make a beeline for the bleeding corpse.

He arrives back at his hotel room to find Volpe in the adjoining suite taking a bath. She asks him to hand her something to put on, and he offers her a pair of shoes, which is exactly what any well-practised pervert would do. She tells him that she’s just been moved down from the floor above that afternoon, which he finds very suspicious, especially once he spies the SPECTRE ring. She tells him he should get out of those wet clothes, and you know what that means. After the smoke has cleared, they’re in bed chatting when Bond mentions he’s due at the Junkanoo to escort Domino, so they get dressed up to attend in style. As Bond opens the door to leave he finds Largo’s henchmen are waiting to strike, and that Volpe has drawn a gun on him. She’s surprised to see that Bond is armed, which she hadn’t noticed before – and he enjoys telling her that he had the gun under the pillow the whole time. Shocked that he knew she was a plant, she asks, ‘When did you find out?’, obviously not realising that wearing a ring with a massive SPECTRE logo on it would be a bit of a giveaway. He tells her, ‘What I did this evening was for King and Country,’ which she’s unimpressed with – presumably thinking that King and Country might have wanted her to enjoy it a bit more. She hits him back with some lovely sass, which clearly turns him on – like a horny teenager, he’s constantly on the verge of arousal – and they head out to the Junkanoo by car.

Bond manages to escape with the help of a drunk offering highly flammable alcohol to everyone in the car. He kicks the bottle out of the man’s hand, spilling its contents all over the thugs in the front seats, then forces Volpe’s hand (which is about to light a cigarette) forward, which intriguingly makes the alcohol explode like a fire cracker. What the fuck was in that bottle? Bond rolls out of the car and the thugs take a shot at him as he runs away, hitting him in the calf. Bond doesn’t break stride (as any athlete will be able to tell you, having something shred a massive hole through a calf will make zero difference to your ability to run at full speed) but he begins to bleed red emulsion, and they’re able to follow the trails (and take a bit of it to B&Q so they can match that colour to do the spare room). He runs into a bar named the Kiss Kiss Club, where the main entertainment is a woman shaking her boobs while occasionally standing in an ashtray. It’s not long before he’s found, so he grabs a random woman and starts dancing with her. Volpe asks to cut in and tells him it’s pointless trying to escape, like when you try to unsubscribe from Groupon emails. A gun peers out from behind a pair of curtains and points at Bond – the third hand to just appear from out of shot and attack Bond in this film. He looks for an escape, but there doesn’t seem to be one, so he moves Volpe into the path of the bullet, and she’s killed immediately. Bond sits her in a chair by a table telling the locals, ‘Mind if my friend sits this one out? She’s just dead,’ which is the kind of joke Ted Bundy would be proud of.

The next day Bond and Felix are in the chopper again looking for the Vulcan. Felix points out that they can’t look in the area Bond is checking through the binoculars as it’s the ‘Golden Grotto’ (which sounds like the service Donald Trump may or may not have ordered in his Moscow suite) and full of sharks. This intrigues Bond and he tells Felix to take them lower, so he can use a high-tech bucket to spot the plane. He dives down and finds the bodies are still there – but the bombs are missing. He returns to Felix and tells him they’ll need to check the Disco Volante. Felix asks how he’ll get that information out of Largo, and Bond mentions they won’t have to, examining the dog-tags that he retrieved from Palazzi’s dead body (and hiding the £20 he took from his wallet).

Domino and Bond meet again while scuba diving and have full-blown underwater super-sex, which must require a special under-the-counter Q gadget. He brings her ashore and tells her that her brother is dead, and that Largo did it. To rub it in a bit more, he shows her her brother’s things. I’m no sex expert, but I’m pretty sure that family death is not the best post-sex conversation. He then goes full-Geldof and asks for her help to find the missing missiles, and tells her it will save hundreds of thousands of lives. She agrees, and he gives her the Geiger counter and a briefing on how to find the bombs. During his lecture, Domino notices that they are being watched by Vargas, who is sneaking around in the trees behind them like Paul Burrell whenever Diana’s name is mentioned. Bond turns quickly and fires a harpoon into his guts, nailing him to a tree. ‘I think he got the point,’ he says coldly. I’m hoping he then goes away and calls Vargas’ family to explain what he did and what he said.

Domino says she needs to get back to Largo, but asks James to promise her that he’ll kill him for her for everything he’s done. He doesn’t exactly say yes, but seals the deal with a smooch, which is as good as a contract in Bond’s world. She then tells him about a secret set of steps by the sea that no one is allowed to go near, so Bond swims out to investigate and finds Largo and his men getting into their wetsuits. He knocks one out with a comedy slap-punch, and takes his place. They swim through the hatch in the hull into the Disco Volante and Bond swans around below deck with his mask on trying to act casual, while Largo tells one of his minions that the target for the missiles is Miami Beach.

Largo and his team ( avec Bond) dive to a secret cave and retrieve the missiles, loading them onto a submarine that looks like a giant version of the clownfish Nemo, but just as Bond is about to congratulate himself on how excellent he is at this spying lark, Largo recognises him. While Largo escapes with the missiles, Bond and some goons swim around for a long period of time, occasionally fighting, in what feels like a lifetime under the sea.

This is where the film begins to suffer from Star Trek: The Motion Picture syndrome. Meaning a film has a piece of tech that it loves so much that it spends hours showing it to you. In Star Trek it was the shot of the Enterprise docking, which lasted about 53 hours; in Thunderball it’s the underwater footage, which must have been a real innovation at the time, but outstay their welcome within about five minutes. Which is a shame, as they take up the entire third act. There’s no doubt that this is a key reason why many people dislike this film, and you can sort of understand why, as most of the time it’s difficult to tell who’s who and what’s happening.

Back in the fresh air (thank God), Domino begins her search of the Disco Volante with the Geiger counter, but immediately walks into Largo, who quickly discovers her plan and the gadget Bond gave her. He locks her in a room, ties her up and then threatens to torture her with a cigar and some ice cubes, aka a night in with Michael Winner. However, before he can begin his weirdness, he is told that the missiles are ready to be activated, so he leaves Domino tied on the bed. Bond, meanwhile, is being rescued by Felix as he’s stuck in a cave. He explains what’s been going on and tells Felix to radio in that SPECTRE’s target is Miami Beach.

It’s not long before Felix’s call is answered and a whole platoon of US Coast Guard men parachute in next to the Disco Volante, just in time to start another bewildering underwater battle that’s like watching Blue Planet from the inside of a washing machine. There are harpoons, knives and the occasional punch in the face, until eventually all the baddies, like the audience, surrender. Largo, however, races back to the Volante, as one bomb is still onboard, with Bond following close behind.

Largo jettisons the back of the boat and races out of the shell as a hydrofoil, escaping at high speed – leaving loads of his loyal men behind as he does so, the prick. Bond manages to climb onboard and makes it into the cockpit. A fight breaks out, and just at that moment a Largo goon hilariously appears in the cockpit with a tray of champagne and a glass. I am guessing it was his birthday, and he was determined to celebrate it, no matter what, even if they were being chased by the US Navy. As a special gift, Bond kicks him in the face, sending him spiralling down the stairs. Some birthday.

As Bond struggles with Largo, the accelerator is pushed to maximum, and the boat, judging by the back projection, begins to travel at around 14,000,000mph. Largo gets the better of Bond and slowly rises to his feet, gun in hand to finish the job. He’s about to pull the trigger when he’s dramatically shot in the back with a harpoon. He slumps to the floor, and standing behind him is Domino, who had been released from her bedroom prison by Largo’s nuclear physicist, Kutze, who’s seen the error of his ways and also defused the bomb.

‘I’m glad I killed him,’ Domino says as she watches Largo breathe his last. Kutze arrives in the cockpit and Bond asks who he is. Domino says she doesn’t know – way to build his self-esteem, guys, without him you’d both be dead; at least learn his bloody name. The boat is stuck on a collision course for some rocks, so Bond, Domino and Kutze jump for it as the boat crashes and explodes into tiny pieces.

After the explosion, a plane flies overhead and skyhooks them to safety, but in a way that looks like it would kill them both instantly. Kutze is left behind, presumably to drown (he mentions he can’t swim) or be eaten by sharks. He’s the real hero here, and he gets fuck all by way of thanks. Bond and Domino smile smugly to one another and the credits begin to roll, no doubt moments before Bond initiates mid-air sex.

FIVE

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE

1967

JUPITER 16, A NASA space capsule, is floating above Earth, waiting for authorisation to ‘go for fourth orbit’, which I assume to be some sort of sordid astronaut thing. Permission is granted, and an astronaut emerges out of the capsule, confidently holding a TV aerial and announcing that ‘everything looks OK’, which is the first thing they teach you not to say in astronaut training. It’s just asking for trouble. Suddenly, the news comes over the space radio that Hawaii have an ‘unidentified flying object’ on their radar, and it’s heading straight towards then. Before you can say ‘Ann Summers’, a giant space sex toy drifts into view, opens its nose and begins to swallow Jupiter 16. Sadly, it cuts the tether to which our space-walking astronaut was attached, and he is left to drift helplessly through the vacuum of space.

In a hastily arranged meeting inside a golf ball, the US accuse the Russians. The Soviet Government denies all involvement in the capsule kidnapping (cap-napping?). The US announce that in 20 days they will be launching another capsule and any interference with this one will be regarded as an act of war. After all, as George W. Bush once wisely said, ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.’

The very calm representative for the UK (Robin Bailey) intervenes in this heated discussion and announces that the Brits don’t think it was the Soviet Union; in fact, their tracking station in Singapore detected faint echoes of the craft coming down in the Sea of Japan. This is where search efforts should be concentrated, and there’s really no need for war, chaps, help yourself to a scone. The world can rest easy, as the plucky Brits have a man in Hong Kong right now, working the case (he means having sex).

We join James Bond, post-coitus, in bed with Ling. After he weirdly compliments her on how she tastes different to ‘all other girls’ and belts out some truly awful pillow talk about Peking duck and caviar, his sexy companion has had enough. She quickly shuts him up in a Murphy bed – just before two machine gun-wielding bad guys burst in through the door and fill the upturned mattress full of lead. The Hong Kong authorities arrive to survey the scene and examine the bullet-riddled bed. Out flops a lifeless James Bond. The attending police officers seem to be chairmen of the 007 Having Sex Fan Club and are struggling to console themselves. ‘At least he died on the job,’ says the first. ‘He’d have wanted it this way,’ the other agrees. We zoom in on a patch of blood just under Bond’s midriff. He must be dead – I mean properly dead.

The credits in this Bond instalment are phenomenal. Maurice Binder excels himself with mountains and sunsets, lava and seascapes, bewitching word placement and beautiful Japanese-inspired imagery. John Barry’s haunting ballad combines with Nancy Sinatra’s voice in euphonious splendour. The fact that this song was an eleventh-hour ‘take two’ makes it all the more incredible. John Barry had already written, scored and recorded a theme with Julie Rogers, but the producers felt it lacked the necessary oomph, so Barry went away and tried again. The end result is one of the greatest Bond themes ever recorded.

Aboard the hms Tenby, a funeral is taking place. A man with binoculars watches from the bay as a body is dropped into the sea. Next to him is a newspaper with a headline detailing Bond’s death. So that’s that then. Bond is definitely, absolutely 100% dead. A body wrapped in papier-mâché drops to the seabed and is collected by two scuba divers almost immediately. Inside their submarine, the senior officer slices it open to reveal James Bond, dressed in full naval uniform and with breathing apparatus in his mouth. He sits up and suavely asks permission to step aboard.

M wants Bond to find out who’s behind the cap-napping before it escalates into a full-scale war. He’s to meet with their man Henderson in Tokyo. On his way out, Bond reminds Moneypenny that he received a first in ‘Oriental Languages’ from Cambridge – a humblebrag that leaves even Moneypenny shrugging, and she actually loves him. She tells him that the password for his contact is ‘I love you’ and asks him to repeat it. Forever determined to string her along but never deliver the goods, he fobs her off while continuing to flirt outrageously for the rest of the scene – a quintessential dick move of his.

Tokyo. Towers of glass and neon, bustling crowds, men on bicycles and lines of honking cars. Bond emerges from the pack and walks into a venue hosting a sumo-wrestling match. He’s being followed by a Japanese spy who is talking into her handbag in that very unique way spies do (either that or she is mentally ill). Bond takes his seat and is joined by a mysterious Japanese woman. He turns to her and says ‘I love you’ and she tells him she has a car outside. (Dogging in those days was very sophisticated.) They drive out to a house in the suburbs where Bond meets Dikko Henderson (Charles Grey), a one-legged British operative who has been in Japan for 28 years. Henderson pours them both a drink and tells Bond that his most vital contact will be an agent named Tanaka, head of the Japanese Secret Service, whose identity is the most closely guarded secret in Japan. Henderson smugly boasts that only Tanaka’s closest friends get to call him ‘Tiger’, in such a way that suggests the two have been to their fair share of car-key parties. Bond spots that the vodka in his drink is Russian, and Dikko tells him he gets it from the doorman at the Russian embassy, ‘among certain other things,’ he adds in a feline purr.

Henderson thinks London’s theory about the missile being fired from Japan is right, but he doesn’t know how or where, or even who is behind it. He reassures Bond that it’s not Russia or Japan, but he believes it must be a major foreign power. He’s about to expand on this as he takes a walk to the paper wall, but he suddenly stops and stands motionless, as if he’s seen the vice squad approaching over the horizon. However, on this occasion, it’s simply that he’s been stabbed dead through the paper wall behind him.

Bond leaps up and pulls Henderson away, revealing the great big knife in his back. He throws Dikko to the bed (it’s what he would have wanted), jumps through the paper and murders the killer on the grass outside. He sees a car waiting nearby, so he swaps outfits with the assailant, who luckily is the exact same clothes and shoe size as him. Another stroke of luck for Bond is that the killer was also wearing a medical mask and hat, which 007 uses to conceal his face as he walks back to the car, clutching his guts and moaning as he climbs in the back seat. This works despite the fact that Bond isn’t bleeding, so perhaps the getaway driver simply assumes the assassin shat himself on the job.

They arrive at Osato Chemical & Engineering, and the driver retrieves Bond from the back seat and carries him over his shoulder as they take the elevator to the top floor. As he lays the motionless body down on a sofa, Bond reveals himself. The driver is understandably livid that he’s carried Bond all this way for nothing, and throws him across the room. They then have a big tussle that is scored by an excessive use of sound effects. There has never been anyone in the world with shoes as loud as the shoes in this film. The fight scene sounds like a pair of Clydesdales doing Riverdance (right after you’ve had your ears syringed).

Interestingly, the man whom Bond is fighting is played by Peter Maivia (aka the Flying Hawaiian), the grandfather of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.

Bond hits him a few times with a sofa, like some sort of manic DFS salesman trying to really force that big sale, and then finishes the job with a big hard statue. He cracks the safe (with a little help from Q Branch), but he isn’t able to do anything about the very loud alarm he sets off in doing so (didn’t think about that, did you, Q?). Outside, he jumps into the sports car of the female Japanese agent from the sumo match. She tells him she’s taking him to a place of safety. Bond is surprisingly comfortable with this arrangement given that the last time she took him anywhere Dikko Henderson was murdered.

She drives him to a lock-up, gets out and runs away down a corridor inside. Bond pursues her until a giant trapdoor opens beneath him that sends him down a chute to a secret room where Tiger Tanaka (dubbed by Robert Rietti, in the same voice he used for Largo from Thunderball, which is a tad distracting at first), welcomes Bond to Japan. Bond asks him to prove he’s pleased to see him, to which Tanaka replies, ‘I love you.’ Confidence boosted, Bond hands over the paperwork he grabbed from the safe and asks if it can be analysed as soon as possible. The only information that jumps out is that it mentions liquid oxygen, which is a component of rocket fuel. Tanaka takes Bond to his private underground train, and they examine a photograph Bond found among the paperwork in the safe. It’s a picture of a ship, and it comes with a highly detailed microdot which says that the photo was taken by an American tourist who was liquidated as a precaution. Tanaka says he will get to work on identifying the coastline in the picture. Bond asks if he can also set up a meeting between him and Mr Osato (owner of Osato Chemicals & Engineering), as he may be involved in this.

They train takes them to Tiger’s house and they emerge in the living room a short time later dressed in kimonos. Four young women in their underwear congregate around them to remove the robes, and then they put Bond in a bath to soap him down. Tanaka tells him that in Japan men come first (which Bond probably always does anyway) and then watches the whole watery event like he’s really down to swing. He tells him the girls are fascinated by his body hair, to which James enigmatically replies that ‘bird never make nest in bare tree’.

Tanaka asks Bond who he thinks could be behind such an audacious crime as the cap-napping, and Bond has only one suspect: SPECTRE. Tanaka seems very happy with that, and asks Bond which girl he would like to massage him. When Bond selects the girl next to him, Tiger celebrates the decision and declares her as being very ‘sexyful’. This feels like an opportune moment to note that this screenplay was written by Roald Dahl, and ‘sexyful’ sounds like a word the BFG would use to describe pornography. As 007 is being massaged, Aki, the agent with the sports car, comes in and takes over, and then they go to bed, so that Bond can practise his ‘oriental languages’.

Mr Osato (Teru Shimada) arrives via helicopter with his secretary, Helga Brandt (Karin Dor), to meet ‘Mr Fisher’ (Bond), the supposed new managing director of Empire Chemicals. He asks what happened to Williamson (the man Bond is pretending to have replaced), and Bond nearly gives the game away before quickly saying that Williamson died by falling into a pulveriser at the works. This is the best spy MI6 have? Really? After some small talk, Osato and Bond say goodbye. As the best spy in the world strides confidently out of the office, Osato turns to Brandt and tells her to kill him.

Outside, he’s immediately caught up in a drive-by shooting attempt. Luckily for him, Aki arrives in her sports car and they speed away from the gunmen, who begin a high-speed pursuit. Aki phones Tanaka to put in a request for ‘the usual reception’, which, it turns out, is a giant magnet. A helicopter uses it to grab hold of the gunmen’s car, then whisks it away and drops it in the sea.

Tiger pops up on an in-car TV and tells Bond that the ship they saw in the photo, the Ning-Po, is docked in Kobe, and that if he hurries he will catch it. Before leaving, Bond asks Tanaka to contact M and tell him to send ‘Little Nellie’, and request that her father accompany her.

There’s an ambush at the docks. Bond tells Aki to run and is then chased over the rooftops in a stunningly filmed aerial shot that shows every punch, kick and jump. He gets away by jumping onto two perfectly placed stacks of boxes, and is about to have the last laugh when he’s knocked out by a hiding henchman.

Bond wakes up on the Ning-Po, tied to a chair across from Helga Brandt. She asks why he was snooping around at the docks, and he replies that he likes ships and used to be a sailor. She doesn’t believe him, and after showing him her collection of scalpels, she kisses him. He tells her he’s a spy (the industrial type, not government) and asks her to help him in exchange for half the proceeds he can claim from having stolen a chemical formula for making monosodium glutamate (I know, wtf?) from Osato, which is worth $300,000. She says she can’t as Osato would kill her, so he uses her scalpel to cut off her dress, which seems fine. They then embrace in scenes of a sexual nature. Other than the presumed magic of Bond’s penis, her decision to switch allegiance (like Pussy Galore in Goldfinger) is never explained.

A plane takes off from a runway and nearly flies into the camera. It’s a small two-man plane and it’s climbing to a good altitude. Inside, Helga Brandt sorts her lipstick while Bond sits in the back. He tells her that she’ll need protection as ‘they’ (presumably Osato’s men) will be coming after her. He says that she’ll need the best man to guard her. She asks who that is and he says it’s him. At this point Helga has had enough, so she locks Bond in his seat with a wooden plank that springs out from the side of his chair and parachutes out of the plane. But she forgets that he studied Oriental Languages at Cambridge, which came with a discounted night course in judo chops. He thrusts his arm through the wooden plank and leaps into the front seat, crash-landing on a handy nearby runway.

Back at Tanaka’s place there’s good news. They have identified the coastline from the photograph. It’s an island called Matsu. Bond says he wants to take a look and asks if Little Nellie has arrived. She has, and her father is there too. The disappointment is palpable in Tanaka HQ when it turns out that Nellie is just four suitcases full of plane parts and her father is Q.

Q’s men set about building the mini-plane while Tanaka looks on like the last lad at the disco. He tells Bond it’s a toy and that he should take one of his real helicopters. Q essentially tells him to fuck off, and then gives a quick debrief of Nellie’s gear, weapons and camera. Bond heads off into the sky like a militant mosquito but sees nothing of note – apart from a giant volcano. He contacts Tanaka to confirm there’s nothing there, but as soon as he sends the message, he’s flanked by four helicopters which begin to fire at him. Luckily, 007 has a mini-helicopter which is packed full of explosives and firebombs, so he makes very light work of the attackers. After all, it’s not size that matters, but how you use it.

The Russians launch a rocket into space but it’s quickly swallowed by the unidentified spacecraft, which then rotates and flies back down to earth, landing in the now open and hollowed-out volcano. Inside the crater, the workers are playing a giant version of the claw machines you see at funfairs (except this one isn’t designed to defraud children of their pocket money). It pulls out the Russian capsule, and the occupants are transferred to a cell.

Ken Adam’s million-dollar volcano is absolutely breathtaking. A mammoth feat of set design and construction, this behemoth contained a heliport (with genuine helicopter), a small fleet of Mini Mokes, a functional elevator, miles of sprawling walkways and a working monorail. It required every light available at Pinewood to make it workable for the camera, and it laid the foundations for the permanent 007 stage that would follow ten years later. Ken Adam was a genius who always thought big, and producer Cubby Broccoli shared the same vision for the grandiose. The remarkable thing was that his best work was still to come.

There is one man giving the orders as the workers remove the capsule. He’s sitting in a chair, stroking a cat. We can’t see his face, but his voice cuts through all the business. He retires to his quarters and feeds his piranhas (which is a new euphemism to add to the list), then confers with a couple of representatives from China, who had agreed to pay him to start a war between Russia and the United States. He asks for $100 million in gold – much more than previously agreed. One of the Chinese representatives suggests that this is extortion. I mean, the clue is literally in the name ‘SPECTRE’, but here we are. The Chinese stomp away to think it over, and our mystery cat-lover summons Osato and Brandt to his office to talk about Bond. Osato addresses him as ‘Number One’, and explains that the man who has been bothering them is James Bond. They need to kill him at once. Number One tells them to go, but as Brandt is crossing the bridge over the piranha pond, Number One presses a pedal under his desk and the bridge drops Brandt to her doom. In under 30 seconds, her body has been stripped to the bone. Osato, duly warned of the price of failure, scuttles off.

Bond is helicoptered to meet with Tanaka and train with his crack team of ninjas. Bond (resplendent in pink shirt, slacks and open-toed sandals) doesn’t seem to know what ninjas are, and Tanaka has to explain that ninjutsu is the art of ‘concealment and surprise’, two traits that Bond has never, ever bothered with (he usually relies on blunder and luck). Tanaka tells him the entire mission depends on him ‘becoming a Japanese’ and training hard to become a ninja. He will also need to get married, to establish a deep cover, but the only problem is that his wife-to-be is a girl from the island whom Tanaka describes as having a ‘face like a pig’. You can see Bond wondering whether it might be better to just step back and let this war between Russia and America play out.

He’s taken to a special operating theatre run by women in their underwear, where he is given a wig, special eye fittings and a full body wax – all of the utmost importance if he wants to resemble a genuine Japanese man with a Scottish accent.

After the complicated procedure is complete, Bond returns to Aki and turns Japanese all over again, if you know what I mean. While they sleep it off, a visitor clambers on top of their hut and dangles a string into Bond’s sleeping face. He then begins to drip poison down the line, but misses and kills Aki, whom Bond will now write about in his Women Whose Deaths I Have Caused journal.

During the next day’s training montage, Tanaka tells Bond that when they travel to the island he will be a ‘poor Japanese worker with a humble Japanese wife [with a face like a pig] at his side’. It’s Bond’s wedding day, and he looks like a man who has to drink a yard of dog piss. A woman ascends the stairs and looks up at him. She’s beautiful, and Bond suddenly begins to smile – as if Aki didn’t die JUST HOURS AGO. They are married in a traditional ceremony, and Bond’s mood seems to be pensive, mixed with bored. Certainly a day to treasure for this young lady.

When Bond and his new wife, Kissy, sit down for dinner, she announces that she will be sleeping in a different bed, as this is a pretend marriage. Bond (of course) tells her that they must keep up appearances – they’re supposed to be on their honeymoon. She reminds him that this is purely business, so he pushes away the oysters she made for him, like a child having a tantrum after being served Brussels sprouts.

That night, Tanaka wakes Bond to tell him that the Americans have changed their schedule and their next rocket will launch at midnight, Japan time. Tanaka says that his men have found nothing on any of the nearby islands – everything is normal – but Kissy interrupts to say that she heard that a girl took a fishing boat into a big cave the day before and when her boat floated out again she was dead.

Kissy takes Bond to the cave the next morning. They enter by boat and all seems normal until Bond spots some gas in the air, so they swim back out. He surmises that the gas is to keep visitors out and that the tunnel leads all the way to a nearby volcano, so they head up the hill towards it. As they reach a high point, Kissy asks to rest, and he takes this as an opportunity to kiss her. (Meanwhile, Aki’s funeral is attended by many grieving friends and family members who all miss her. Probably.)

As the newlyweds’ tongues meet, they spot a helicopter overhead, which then descends into the volcano. Bond and Kissy climb up to investigate and realise that the lake at the bottom of the crater is, in fact, metal. We then cut to the Americans launching their latest rocket, which feels ahead of schedule as the sun has only just gone down in Japan.

Bond is walking around on the fake crater lake when it starts to open, revealing a hidden base beneath and the space dildo. He tells Kissy to go back to Tanaka and get every man he’s got up there. Bond puts on his ninja balaclava and some suckers on his knees and gloves (lucky he remembered to pack them when he set out for a row that morning) and climbs under the lid of the base as it closes. We are then treated to John Barry’s ‘Capsule In Space’, a stunning ostinato with a brooding rhythm that ratchets up the tension with each beat.

Having smuggled himself aboard the monorail, Bond sneaks into the prions cell where the captured US astronauts are being held and helps them escape. They knock out a load of goons and take their uniforms before finding a room where a reserve SPECTRE astronaut is killing time in case he’s needed. They knock him out and Bond, like Mr Benn, has yet another costume change, getting into the astronaut’s space suit and heading for the dildo. As he’s about to enter, however, Number One smells a rat and orders the astronaut to be stopped and brought to him. As they remove his helmet, they realise it’s James Bond, and Osato looks a bit embarrassed. He can probably already feel the teeth of the piranhas. Number One leans forward to introduce himself, and we at last see his face. It’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld, played with glee by Donald Pleasence. (Fun fact: the part was originally set to be played by Jan Werich, a Czech actor, but he was recast for looking too much like Santa and not enough like a creepy bald bastard.)

Blofeld tells Bond he heard he’d been assassinated in Hong Kong, and Bond coolly replies, ‘Yes, this is my second life.’ ‘You only live twice, Mr Bond,’ says a deadpan Blofeld, but disappointingly, rather than breaking into song, he tells Bond that in a few hours there will be a massive war and a new superpower will rise from the ashes. Blofeld’s cap-napper, Bird One, which is covered in Russian writing to make the Americans angry, is ready for launch. The crater lid opens and the cap-napper heads off to space.

Tanaka’s ninjas arrive, ready to pounce, but unfortunately can’t get in the closed crater. They are spotted by Blofeld’s cameras and immediately fired upon by machine guns and mortars. They just seem to stand there and get shot, which doesn’t seem particularly ninja-like. Bond asks if he can have a cigarette, as he loves to smoke while watching people die, and Blofeld agrees. But what Blofeld doesn’t know is that Tanaka gave Bond special cigarettes that can fire out bullets. Bond kills one of the technicians, runs to the controls and opens the lid of the crater. Tanaka and his remaining ninjas abseil down and begin to shoot. The ninjas suddenly seem to catch ‘grenade fever’ and begin hurling them into every single nook and cranny within the base. Blofeld, meanwhile, has closed the shutters on the control room and is boasting about how they are now ‘impregnable’ and nothing can prevent the cap-napper from doing its thing – apart from the explosion button he mentioned a few minutes ago within earshot of Bond.

Back in the base, it’s a stunt spectacular, with explosions, gunshots, men falling off high surfaces and ninjas springing high into the air during every explosion. Blofeld tries to take Bond through a secret tunnel but Tanaka buries a throwing star into his wrist, causing him to drop the gun and escape on his monorail. Bond heads back towards the control room and the button is pushed with just five seconds to spare. The world is saved.

Blofeld, however, isn’t taking this diversion lying down and he pulls the self-destruct lever on the base, causing everyone to run for their lives as the volcano begins imploding, exploding, collapsing and erupting. Luckily for everyone swimming away from the carnage, some dinghies are dropped by passing planes, and Bond and Kissy climb aboard to watch the island melt before their eyes. As dawn breaks, they smooch and talk about having a honeymoon, but Kissy offers a note of caution about how neither the British nor the Japanese Secret Services will let him stay. Bond laughs indulgently, only for a submarine to emerge from beneath them before he can get any action. Sod’s law.

SIX

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE

1969

IN 1967, SEAN Connery walked away from the role of James Bond. Whether it was because he’d grown bored of playing 007 or because salary negotiations had turned sour, he was gone and his absence left the franchise teetering on the brink. Could Bond continue without Connery? Yes, he bloody well could.

John Wayne, Paul Newman and Warren Beatty were among the many names rumoured to be stepping into Connery’s shoes (shoesh, if you will) – but in the end Broccoli and Saltzman went for a complete unknown – George Lazenby – who fell into the role of Bond almost by accident. A model with no acting experience, he was one of over 400 hopefuls to audition for the part (including a then 22-year-old Timothy Dalton, who would eventually land the role 18 years later), but Broccoli and Saltzman were won over by Lazenby’s looks and physicality, and were particularly impressed when he reportedly broke a stuntman’s nose during a screen-test fight.

Born in New South Wales, Australia, Lazenby is the only non-Brit to play Bond and the only man to appear in just one film. The main weapon in his arsenal was irresistible charisma, which served him well every step of his life – from errant schoolboy to cocky car salesman, to model, to actor, to businessman. He had buckets of the stuff and he knew exactly how to use it. For many years, his brief stint as 007 was little more than a punchline, until the people laughing into their sleeves actually stopped to watch and realised that not only is he pretty good (for a non-actor), but that the film itself is a mature, emotional character piece. There are no volcanos full of ninjas, no mini-planes, no henchmen painting women gold. We can detect the foundations of the eighties action boom, a hard edge buried under the surface, as well as the beating heart of the more well-rounded Bond we see in the 21st century. Special mention should also go to Peter R. Hunt, as this was his directorial debut. As an editor on previous Bond films, he had pioneered a fast-paced style, which carried over into his direction and suited the franchise down to the ground.

We open with M in his office, being briefed by an excited Q about ‘radioactive lint’, which can be placed in the pockets of adversaries in order to trace them. M looks at his top inventor like he’s been sniffing glue and says he’s more worried about finding 007, as there’s trouble brewing regarding Operation Bedlam.

In Portugal, Bond is out for a drive in his beautiful Aston Martin DBS when he’s overtaken by a woman driving erratically with her top down (to clarify, I mean the top of the car, but you never can tell with these films). We get the occasional tease of our new man – a close-up of the eyes here, a zoom in on the mouth there – but nothing conclusive. Further down the road, he notices that the woman’s car has been abandoned by the beach. He spots her marching along, looking sad, and being the gentleman that he is, takes a long, slow look at her entire body through his telescope.

She steps out of her shoes and into the wild sea. The water glints in the light of the early morning sun. She is striding fully clothed into the surf, evidently about to kill herself. Bond has seen enough and drives down to rescue her. He drags her out and slaps her into lucidity. ‘Good morning. My name’s Bond, James Bond,’ he says, with a mild Australian drawl. (His accent in the film is a bit like a moth trapped in a bedroom: coming and going, bumping into things, but mostly harmless.) But before he gets a chance to take her name, a gun is shoved behind his head and a knife is placed over her throat. The girl is taken away and Bond is forced to lie down, presumably to await execution – but he soon kicks his way free and forces the gunman into the water, where a dizzying game of punch and flip begins, with Bond quickly coming out on top. After he’s made light work of the two assailants, he watches the woman run back to her car and drive off. He then utters the immortal line, ‘This never happened to the other fella,’ momentarily breaking the fourth wall as he does so. You’ll find a lot of people out there that despise this moment, but not me. There are scenes in this film which pay tribute to Sean Connery’s Bond, but this is a small moment that lets you know everything has changed. Sure, it’s clumsy, but it always raises a smile (even though it sadly helps fuel those dreadful ‘Bond is just a code name’ theories).

John Barry’s Bond theme sledgehammers the ground open in the opening credits and then slowly introduces bass notes that ooze like lava, tempered with cool brass stabs and high-rising trumpets. Maurice Binder evokes cool Britannia with clock faces, hourglasses and cocktail glasses against royal blues and deep blacks. The only disappointment is the inclusion of a ‘previously on James Bond’ slideshow; but in their defence, it must have been a terrifying leap into the unknown, with a great deal at stake (which also goes to explain why Lazenby’s face was missing from many early posters for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service).

At his hotel, Bond walks down the plush stairs to the casino and takes his seat at the cards table. After a short while, who should arrive to play a hand but the woman from the beach, Contessa Teresa di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg). She loses and tells the croupier she can’t pay. It’s all very British and embarrassing until Bond covers for her and makes up a story that they agreed to be partners for the evening. She thanks him by giving him her room key (as you do) and telling him to call her Tracy. But when Bond slinks along to her room later, he is immediately attacked by a very large man. You’d think 007 would be at least slightly wary after his previous encounter with Tracy, but all’s well that ends well, and after another brief match of flip and punch, the large man is thrown through a cabinet and knocked unconscious.

He asks Tracy who the man was and slaps her for further information, which is as jarring as a jar labelled ‘really not cool’ falling on your head from a top cupboard. She’s not interested in his opinions and is merely there for a ‘business transaction’. Apparently, he should think of her as the woman he’s ‘just bought’. Bond tries to figure out why she’s being so odd and if she’s in any trouble, but she won’t talk, so he decides to go ahead and treat this as a business transaction as instructed, which it turns out is very much like making love to a beautiful woman.

In the morning he wakes up on the balcony bed (probably covered in mosquito bites) and orders breakfast for two, only to find Tracy has gone. He heads down to reception with his golf clubs, but he’s intercepted by armed men (come on, Bond, get your wits about you), one of whom is the large man from the night before. They take him to bad-guy HQ, where they walk past a dwarf sweeping the floor while whistling the Goldfinger song, an odd meta-reference. Bond and the three heavies pause at a door, and while they’re waiting for it to open, he beats them all up, accompanied by psychedelic sound effects that reverberate weirdly after every action.

Inside the room, Marc-Ange Draco (David de Keyser) is sitting behind a desk. He apologises for the circumstances of their meeting and fixes our spy a drink. Bond knows all about Draco, the head of Unione Corse, one of Europe’s biggest crime syndicates. What he doesn’t know is that Draco is also Tracy’s father. Turns out Tracy’s a bit of a wild child, mostly to spite him. She was married to a count (it was Dracula), who died in an accident with one of his mistresses. Draco says that he knows everything Bond did for his daughter, to which Bond says, ‘Everything?’ in a way that suggests he’s done some very naughty things with her. Draco essentially asks Bond to seduce and marry Tracy, as she’s a bit depressed and he thinks it will really cheer her up. He tells him that she needs a man to dominate her, to make love to her and to take the bins out. If he succeeds, he’ll give him £1 million. Bond says that married life isn’t for him and he doesn’t need a million pounds. Instead, he asks where he can find Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE. Draco says that he doesn’t know, but that if he did, he wouldn’t tell Her Majesty’s Secret Service – but he might tell his son-in-law. Crafty beggar. Bond says he’ll think about Draco’s proposal, and at no point wonders how Tracy might feel about this. This is a love story we can certainly all get behind.

Back at MI6, Bond flings his hat on the stand, sexually assaults Moneypenny and goes in to see M. His cavalier attitude is lost on his boss, who tells him that, after two years of unsuccessfully trying to get Blofeld, he’s being taken off Operation Bedlam (which sort of sounds like a soft-play centre anyway). A very angry Bond walks out of M’s office and interrupts Moneypenny’s attempt at banter, asking her to take a memo. He’s resigning from Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He goes to his office and begins to pack in a cloud of rage. As he picks up props from previous films, the appropriate pieces of music hum in the background, and the scene accidentally becomes an advert for one of those best-of albums you have to special order. Thankfully, despite hurt feelings and a fair amount of stubbornness all round, Bond and M kiss and make up and the whole resignation incident is forgotten.

Tracy, dressed like a toreador’s widow, is on her way to her father’s birthday party, driving through the streets of Portugal in her Mercury Cougar, smiling and waving at random locals. Her father is over the moon to see her and tells her he wants her to meet someone. Who could it be? Why, it’s James Bond, pervert for hire. Tracy tells her dad they’ve already met and storms off, but Draco tells 007 he’s definitely in there (which should really be ringing alarm bells). Draco tells Bond that there may be a connection between Blofeld and a lawyer with offices in Bern, Switzerland, who may be worth investigating. Bond catches up to Tracy, who is crying by this point, and tells her that they should be lovers. This does not usually work as a wooing technique, but on this occasion we are treated to a montage of Tracy and Bond serenely courting. They ride horses, take long walks and frolic by ponds as Louis Armstrong sings the exquisite ‘We Have All The Time In The World’.

Draco already seems sick to the back teeth of the lovebirds, who are acting like two teenagers who have just discovered Lynx Africa, perfume and tongues. He probably wishes he could just pay them both off and go home, but they’re in Switzerland to look into the lawyer, Gebrüder Gumbold. Bond sneaks into Gumbold’s office, darts out to the balcony and nods to a builder who sends a package up to him via crane – an elaborate safe-cracking machine. Back in the car, Draco is offering Tracy a note of caution about the blossoming romance (mate, make up your mind), and Tracy lets slip that she’s in love. Draco is delighted: what started as a hollow exercise to cheer up his moody daughter has blossomed into true love. Meanwhile, in Gumbold’s office, Bond is reading a porn mag (the February 1969 edition of Playboy) and grinning like a colossal pervert.

Safe cracked, Bond learns that Blofeld has been communicating with Sir Hilary Bray of the London College of Arms. He photocopies the relevant paperwork and returns the machine to the builder, leaving just as Gumbold returns from his lunch break (ensuring he’s taken the porn mag with him, of course, and revealing the cleavage of Playboy Bunny Lorrie Menconi to the camera as he does so, which for 1969 is very naughty).

Next, we get our first real look at M’s country pad, Quarterdeck, a Regency manor house nestled in Windsor Forest. Bond walks into a room of butterflies and tries to impress his boss with his knowledge of Lepidoptera, which only seems to annoy him. Changing the subject, he explains that he’s uncovered a letter from Blofeld to Sir Hilary in which he assumes the title of ‘Count Balthazar de Bleuchamp’. M points out that Bond has been taken off Operation Bedlam, but the strictures of this pen-pusher mean nothing to 007; he’s already made contact with Bray, purportedly in order to research his family tree.

Sir Hilary presents Bond with his family tree, which mentions ‘Sir Thomas Bond, Baronet of Peckham’, which sounds like he bought it from Del Boy and Rodney in the Nag’s Head over a lunchtime pint. The crest itself is an argent on a chevron sable, with three bezants and a wonderful motto that is later requisitioned as a film title: ‘The World is Not Enough’. Bond is to impersonate Bray in an upcoming meeting with Blofeld. The genealogist has arranged to ‘lose himself’ among the churches of Brittany, where he will be indulging in some ‘brass rubbings’ (make of that what you will).

Bond is met at the station in Switzerland by Irma Bunt (Ilse Steppat), Blofeld’s personal secretary, and her assistant, Grunther (Yuri Borienko – the man whose nose Lazenby broke in his audition), who is wearing a jacket with the Olympic rings emblazoned on it. Presumably he won medals in the henchman decathlon which includes disciplines such as silent looming, incompetent high-speed pursuit, inaccurate marksmanship and high-pitched death screaming. Bond’s voice is now a perfect impression of Sir Hilary Bray – and that’s because it’s not an impression at all. George Baker dubbed Lazenby for the majority of the Sir Hilary scenes, a decision that has never felt right and can be quite off-putting. Bond asks Bunt if she’s from a naval family, as bunt is ‘a nautical term, you see, meaning the baggy or swollen parts of a sail’. (Ah, that famous 007 charm – telling a woman she’s a big fat bag.) They travel by helicopter to Blofeld’s lair, Piz Gloria, a construction of concrete and glass that sits on the icy peak of the Schilthorn. (The Schilthorn is a real mountain; the ‘lair’ was actually filmed in the restaurant there.) Bunt tells Bond that the ‘Bleuchamp Institute’ is a clinic for curing allergies, and not just some allergies – ALL ALLERGIES. The count is carrying out very important work indeed.

Later, in full Highland dress, Bond reports to dinner. (His Scottish ancestry is a lovely piece of retroactive continuity which Fleming included in the On Her Majesty’s Secret Service novel because he loved Connery so much.) He is immediately greeted by twelve beautiful young women (one of them Joanna Lumley). Their appearance is accompanied by a cheeky saxophone suite (because of course it is). They are all fascinated by him, as if he’s some sort of magic creature, and ask him to explain what a genealogist is. I guess they don’t get out much. Over dinner, they tell him about all the types of food they previously couldn’t eat due to allergies and how they are now magically cured. In return, Bond explains what the College of Arms is in the most boring way imaginable. However, these poor, isolated women seem to be incredibly excited by this anti-banter. One of them, Ruby, reaches under the table and surreptitiously writes her room number on Bond’s thigh. He confesses to some slight stiffness coming on just as Gunther appears to announce that the count would like to see him – which is horrific timing for a man wearing a kilt. But Bond is a pro and impressively uses his sporran as an erection shield as he leaves the table.

Bond is taken to the laboratory just as the count (né Blofeld) enters in a dazzle of purple light, like he’s about to do Stars in Their Eyes. The count, played here by a perfect Telly Savalas, welcomes ‘Sir Hilary’ and then begins to establish his genetic credentials, pointing out that he doesn’t have earlobes, which is a congenital distinction of the Bleuchamp family, in an effort to prove to Sir Hilary that he is the rightful claimant to the title of count. Amazingly, Blofeld seems to have forgotten his tête-à-tête with Bond in the Japanese volcano in You Only Live Twice that cost him $100 million in extortion money and resulted in a throwing star getting lodged in his wrist. But I suppose he’s a busy man. Blofeld says that he will have all the paperwork backing up his claim sent to Bond’s room for him to examine at his leisure.

Back in his room, Bond checks his thigh and finds that Ruby is in room number eight. Unfortunately, he’s been locked in, but he constructs a high-tech escape device (with an eraser and a stick) and makes his way into Ruby’s darkened room. She sits up in bed and is very happy to see ‘Sir Hilary’. He tells her he doesn’t usually like girls, but she’s ‘not usual’. He then asks her to call him ‘Hilly’. Amazingly, this all works, and isn’t at all creepy or weird.

Post-coitus, Bond begins to grill Ruby about how she got to the clinic, but they are interrupted by ‘the cure’, which is a combination of a light show and the baritone voice of the count, which peals through the speakers and the hypnotism begins. Ruby goes into a trance so Bond gets dressed and goes back to his room. He’s about to go to bed when another woman appears out of nowhere, so he recycles his ‘you’re not usual’ line and tells her to call him Hilly. Hey, if it ain’t broke.

The next morning the women are all curling (no, not their hair) and giggling. Bond joins them and quips that his stiffness has gone for the time being. Bond’s friend Campbell, who helped him at the building site earlier, tries to climb up the mountain and is captured by the count’s men. Bond watches on as he is told to leave immediately. The women are told that curling is over, and it’s now massage time, so Bond books in three of them for 8, 9 and 10 p.m. that evening. (It would seem that the only tree growing on this genealogy trip is his.) That evening he sneaks back into Ruby’s room and follows the sound of playful giggles, only to find a very stern-looking Bunt in the bed. Before he can shrug and get on with it, he’s clobbered over the head and knocked out cold.

He wakes under a Christmas tree to the count wishing a Merry Christmas to 007. The jig is up: he slipped on a fact about the location of the Bleuchamp tombs and he’s been shagging all the patients, something that is frowned upon in most academic circles. Blofeld reveals he’s developed a ‘virus omega’ which causes infertility in plants and animals. If his demands are not met, he’ll proceed with wiping out cereals and livestock all over the world. Bond counters that he’ll have problems dispensing the poison, but Blofeld boasts of his ‘Angels of Death’. He’s been training the girls at the clinic, and many others like them. Bond is taken to the engine room of the cable car and locked inside. The giant cogs begin to whir as Bond looks around for a way out. To step in any direction would be certain death (like when you go for a wee at 3 a.m. at your in-laws’ house). Bond eventually rips out the pockets of his trousers and uses them as rudimentary gloves to protect his hands as he begins to make his way along the cable.

Meanwhile, Bunt drugs the Angels of Death so that they can be instructed via hypnotism about the next step of the mission. Bond climbs back inside the building and watches as the women are awoken from their hypnosis and open some nice presents from the count (maybe to say sorry). They have each received a make-up set, but they must never use the perfume, as it’s full of poison. Each compact contains a radio which will transmit instructions at 10 p.m. every night.

Bond knocks out a guard and finds himself a cool pair of Bono glasses, a lovely blue suit and a set of skis. He shoots down the hill and is immediately spotted. The chase begins. He decides that the best place to hide in the village is a shed full of bells, and after fighting off another couple of henchmen (which sounds like a fight in, well, a bell factory), he steals a jacket and mingles with the crowd outside. After being terrified by a laughing man in a polar-bear suit, he takes a seat by the ice and watches the skaters go by, trying to think of a plan. Meanwhile, Bunt and her men have arrived. However, a friendly pair of skates stops right in front of him. It’s Tracy! He tells her he’s being chased, so they run to her car and she drives them away, with Bond obviously showing Bunt’s men his face as he leaves, because he’s very stupid. They are soon caught in a horrible blizzard and seek shelter in a barn. Luckily it’s a very warm barn, and no one seems to mind about them borrowing it for the evening. As they lie down in the hay, Tracy asks James what exactly went on in Piz Gloria. He opaquely replies, ‘Her Majesty’s Secret Service’, which must be code for ‘I shagged loads of women while pretending to be an amiable genealogist’. Regardless, he says that he loves her. Then they literally roll in the hay.

In the morning, Blofeld and his men break into the barn like teens bursting into a bedroom at a party. But Bond and Tracy have skied away. It’s not long before another ski chase begins, the highlight of which is Bond’s witty rejoinder that ‘he had lots of guts’ after a henchman falls into a snow-thresher, spraying his blood and organs all over the snow. Rather than having second thoughts about marrying this crazy fucking psychopath, Tracy smiles along and laughs. Blofeld quickly realises that his men are no match for Tracy’s skiing and Bond’s homicidal tendencies, and instead decides the best way to bring this all to an end is to start an avalanche with an exploding Thermos, which does the trick. Blofeld’s men (minus those sacrificed as collateral damage in the avalanche plan) grab Tracy and head back to Piz Gloria.

Bond gazes out of M’s window and watches a flashback of his own rescue from the snow (superimposed for our benefit on the window pane, like a grim cine film from a really crap holiday). M is speaking to the United Nations on the ‘red scrambler’, which sounds like a type of egg pan. Having learned of Blofed’s wicked plan, the UN have decided to buy him off with a full amnesty for all his past crimes and official recognition of his title (he really is bloody obsessed with being a legit count). Bond, distinctly displeased by this news, wants to go to Piz Gloria to save Tracy and destroy everything before the UN deal can be put in place. M tells him Operation Bedlam is dead, and that his private life is a fucking nightmare, essentially.

Back at Piz Gloria, Blofeld is in celebratory mood. He offers Tracy champagne and tells her to stop being so high and mighty, as her dad is one of the biggest criminals in Europe. He offers her anything her heart desires, but she’s not interested. Before he can segue from bribery to threats, he’s notified that helicopters are approaching. It’s Draco, Bond and a load of Draco’s men, but obviously they don’t say that. Instead, Draco cleverly tells Blofeld’s radio operators that they are a ‘Red Cross helicopter flight, carrying Red Cross medical supplies to Italy’. Tracy recognises her father’s voice and cracks a smile.

Tracy asks Blofeld to tell her more about his proposition in order to stall for time while the choppers approach. They go upstairs to the Alpine Room and she begins to recite some James Elroy Flecker poetry to class up the joint – ‘Thy dawn, O Master of the World, thy dawn’ – a move that totally bewitches old Ernst. But the spell is broken when Draco’s helicopters land on the roof. Blofeld makes a run for it while Tracy fights off her captors with broken bottles and fingernails.

Bond breaks into the lab and begins a firefight with Blofeld which spills out into the snow as Draco’s men wire up a load of bombs with a timer set for five minutes. When this is done, Draco returns to his helicopter to find Tracy attempting to go after James. He tries to reassure her that he’ll be fine on his own, but she won’t listen, so he does what any decent parent would do and thumps her in the face, knocking her out. ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child,’ he says, as he loads her unconscious body into the chopper. Yes. Beginning to understand why she has serious issues with him now.

Bond and Blofeld jump clear of the exploding compound and take their fight to the bobsleigh run. Thus begins a chase conducted via sped-up camera and back projection. Blofeld thinks he’s got the best of Bond (album coming soon) with a grenade, but 007 jumps into his sled instead. After some close combat and helmet chafing, Bond manages to fling Blofeld into the air, and a branch snares him via the neck. Bond is really pleased with this and quips, ‘He’s branched off,’ to absolutely no one. He escapes the runaway sled, lands in the snow and is greeted by a St Bernard, which he orders to get him some brandy: ‘Five-star Hennessy, of course.’ (Even in desperate situations, one’s standards must never slip.)

In Portugal, wedding bells ring out as Mr and Mrs James Bond are announced. M, Q and Moneypenny (who is wearing a hat that looks like my nan’s couch has exploded) applaud as they cut the cake. After clapping the loudest, Q tells Bond that they haven’t seen eye to eye over the years, but if there’s ever anything he needs, he only has to ask. Bond says that this time he has all the gadgets and he knows how to use them, which suggests that Tracy is in for a honeymoon sponsored by Duracell. Shortly after driving off, the newlyweds pull over so James can strip the car of flowers. He and Tracy chat about the future and joke about how much they love each other. There is no way anything can go wrong.

A silver Mercedes glides down the hill behind them. In the driver’s seat: a neck brace-wearing Blofeld. In the back: a machine gun-totinh Irma Bunt. She goes for a drive-by but misses Bond. He leaps back into the Aston Martin, cursing Blofeld and suggesting they give chase, but there is no reply from the passenger seat. He turns around slowly to see a single bullet hole in Tracy’s forehead and a trail of blood running down her nose. She falls into his lap just as a policeman pulls up on a motorbike.

‘We’ll be going on soon,’ whispers Bond, stroking her hair. ‘There’s no hurry, you see? We have all the time in the world . . .’

There’s dust in my eyes.

SEVEN

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

1971

HAVING COVETED THE role of Bond for years, George Lazenby seemingly fell out of love with the character midway through filming On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He’d signed an astonishing eight-movie deal with Eon, but (influenced by his agent) he believed that the Bond franchise was on its way out. It was the late sixties and counterculture was king. Easy Rider was the future, not stuffy spies in suits. And so, in a move he would later regret, he walked away.

What were Eon to do now? Like the British Government in a time of SPECTRE-induced crisis, they called on the one man they knew could save the day. With the help of a record-breaking fee of £1.25 million, Sean Connery was persuaded to reprise his iconic role. Throughout the film it’s clear that Connery is just there for the pay cheque. He shuffles through the motions, wig forever on the verge of slipping, looking knackered and out of shape – and yet, for all that, it somehow works. Diamonds Are Forever is weird and flabby, with a plot that is often impenetrable, but it is also bizarrely entertaining.

Following the gun barrel sequence, we open on a Japanese studio where a man is thrown through a paper wall and then kicked in time with the question: ‘Where is he?’ Bond is after the man who murdered his wife at the dénouement of the previous film: Ernst Stavro Blofeld. His search takes him to Cairo, where a goon in a fez takes a similar beating and tells Bond to ‘Ask Marie!’ Bond finds Marie sunbathing by a pool and proceeds to throttle her with her bra. He’ll do anything – and use any item of clothing – to find his nemesis.

We cut to a lab where a surgeon is talking through the difficulties of ‘plastic transformation’. In walks Blofeld – in this film, played by Charles Gray, which is a massive mindfuck as Gray had already appeared as MI6 agent Dikko Henderson in You Only Live Twice. Quite why Broccoli and Saltzman cast him as Blofeld is a mystery, but this pretty much sums up Diamonds Are Forever in a nutshell. (The original plot was to have Gert Fröbe return as Auric Goldfinger’s twin brother, hell-bent on getting revenge against Bond, using a laser mounted on a supertanker. Oh, what might have been . . .)

Meanwhile, in the film that did get made, Blofeld demands that the operation to change his face be carried out that night. Having been told the location of the lab by Marie, Bond sneaks in disguised as a surgeon and begins to look around. A man in a mud bath opens his eyes and slowly draws a pistol from under the surface. Bond spots this just in time, performs a super-sexy forward roll and flicks a switch that dunks more mud on the man in the bath, somehow killing him. Bond hoses the mud off the man’s face and discovers, to his disappointment, that it’s not Blofeld. He doesn’t have to wait too long, however, as the man himself appears with two armed guards and asks Bond if he’s ‘making mud pies’, which is a bit weak. (‘I must be driving you mud!’ anyone? No? OK.)

In the first example of the endless exposition that Blofeld offers pretty much every time he’s on camera, he explains that the man in the bath would have been his doppelgänger in a few days. As one of his henchmen reaches inside 007’s jacket to take his gun, his hand is caught in a ‘pocket mousetrap’ (surely one of Q’s panicked 3 a.m. inventions), which allows Bond to take out both guards with minimum fuss and throw Blofeld directly into a lava pool (a standard feature in most laboratories). Just as Bond’s about to leave and undoubtedly celebrate his successful revenge mission by treating himself to a new wig, the silence is broken by the wailing of Blofeld’s cat, and we segue into a lovely credit sequence where Maurice Binder plays with bright lightning, cats, long lady legs, sexy shapes and shimmering diamonds, while Shirley Bassey roars about how jewellery is better than men (and she probably has a point).

M is telling Bond about the diamond-smuggling problem in South Africa, where 80 per cent of the world’s diamonds originate. Bond wonders why MI6 would waste their time with a case like that, to which M replies that the PM wants them working on it, and now that Blofeld’s dead, it’s time Bond got on with some work (sounds like M gave Bond a fortnight off to murder his nemesis, which was decent of him). They meet with Sir Donald Munger (Laurence Naismith), the chairman of the powerful Diamond Syndicate. Sir Donald begins to outline the ‘airtight’ security measures in place in South Africa’s diamond mines, while we see a montage of Dr Tynan (Henry Rowland), a dentist, removing a smuggled diamond from the mouth of a mine worker and paying him for his trouble.

Two figures are considering a scorpion as it crawls across a pile of desert rocks. ‘Mother nature’s finest killer, Mr Wint,’ observes Mr Kidd. Mr Wint puts on a large glove and picks up the scorpion as a motorbike approaches, driven by Dr Tynan. Tynan asks where the usual pick-up man is, and is informed that he couldn’t make it (because Wint and Kidd have killed him). Tynan hands over a bag of smuggled diamonds and is about to leave when Mr Kidd grabs his face, begins moaning in pain and complains that he hasn’t had his wisdom teeth out yet (he was robbed of an Oscar). As Tynan takes a look, Wint slips the scorpion down the back of his shirt, killing him immediately.

A helicopter lands and they pass the pilot a case, saying it’s from Dr Tynan. The helicopter flies off, but explodes in mid-air. ‘If God had wanted man to fly,’ says Mr Kidd. ‘He would have given him wings,’ finishes Mr Wint. They pick up the diamonds and walk away, hand in hand, into the dawn. You’d struggle to find a pair of actors having more fun with their roles than Bruce Glover (father of Crispin) as Wint and Putter Smith (a jazz bassist) as Kidd. John Barry has given them a jaunty saxophone tune to accompany their odd behaviour, and every time they’re on screen the film improves tenfold.

Sir Donald, meanwhile, is telling Bond and M that he suspects stolen South African diamonds are being stockpiled. If someone dumps them on the market, prices will plummet. The Diamond Syndicate are also vulnerable to blackmail to stop this happening. It’s vital that they learn who the stockpilers are. Bond says he’s always rather fancied a trip to South Africa, but M shoots him down, telling him he’s actually being sent to Holland to impersonate a professional smuggler by the name of Peter Franks. (You can practically see Bond mentally spending his MI6 allowance in the red-light district.)

In Amsterdam, Bond arrives at the apartment of Tiffany Case (Jill St John) and announces himself as Peter Franks. She tells him to make himself at home, so he fixes a drink and asks if she’s married, which is obviously very normal, and enquires about her name. She’s called Tiffany because she was born there, while her mother was looking for a wedding ring (just like her brother, Asda Frozen Aisle). She takes his glass under the pretence of getting him some ice, when actually she wants to test his fingerprints to confirm his identity. Fortunately, Bond is ahead of the game: Q has given him some nifty stick-on fingerprints which match Franks’. Fooled, Tiffany tells Bond that she needs him to move 50,000 carats of diamonds, and that he’ll be paid 50 grand to do it.

Back in his hotel room, Bond learns that the real Peter Franks (kidnapped by MI6 to allow Bond to impersonate him) has escaped (great work, MI6) and may be on the way to Amsterdam. Bond waits outside Tiffany’s building, and when Franks turns up he hides in plain sight by performing an exceptional mime – turning around and pretending to snog someone by running his arms up and down his own back. Franks, ignoring the man snogging an invisible woman, goes into Tiffany’s building. Bond follows and pretends to be Dutch (and we learn why Sean Connery famously doesn’t do accents). They get into the small glass lift and Bond moves to carry out a sneaky judo chop on Franks but accidentally puts his arm through the glass. They then begin a beautifully staged close-quarters battle, as tense as it is creative, which eventually ends with Franks being sprayed with a fire extinguisher and thrown down the stairs.

Tiffany witnesses the finale and searches Franks’ dead body, unaware that Bond swapped wallets with the corpse. She pulls out 007’s card for the Playboy Club and Casino and exclaims, ‘YOU’VE JUST KILLED JAMES BOND!’ (the secret agent the entire world seems to know about). Tiffany says that they need to move the diamonds (hidden in a chandelier in her apartment) quickly, before the police arrive.

Bond comes up with the idea of using the dead body to transport the diamonds. They take a plane to LAX, where Bond is asked to go to customs. Waiting there is Felix Leiter (this time, it’s Norman Burton, the fourth actor to play the CIA man in the franchise). He frisks the body in the coffin and then asks Bond where the diamonds are. He replies, ‘Alimentary, Dr Leiter,’ which suggests that Bond and Tiffany spent several hours the night before slowly feeding the stones up the dead man’s arse.

Bond and the body are collected at the airport by some tough guys from a funeral home called Slumber Inc., which is clearly a criminal front. The body is cremated and Bond is presented with an urn packed full of diamonds and Peter Franks’ dust. He delivers the urn to a cubbyhole where, as arranged by Tiffany, an envelope of cash has been left for him. Just as he pockets this, he’s bashed over the head by Mr Wint and dragged away by Mr Kidd, while another man (who we learn later is called Shady Tree; played by Leonard Barr) collects the urn.

Bond wakes up inside a coffin. It’s about to get very hot, and not in a sexy way. Smoke pours in at his feet, sweat forms at his brow, his toupée begins to melt and the music builds to a dramatic crescendo. Before he’s chargrilled, the coffin lid flies open and Bond’s greeted by an irate Shady Tree, who furiously announces that the diamonds are fake. Bond retorts that the money they gave him must also be fake, otherwise they wouldn’t have left it in his jacket to burn with him. He’s going to check into the Hotel Tropicana (where I believe drinks are free) and will await the real money before handing over the real diamonds.

Bond takes a relaxing bath in his hotel room and is flicking through a magazine (it’s for the articles, honestly) when he finds an advert for Shady Tree and his Acorns, who are performing in the Lincoln Lounge at the Whyte House. Diamond smuggler by day, stand-up comedian by night . . . why not?

Willard Whyte’s Whyte House stands resplendent on the Las Vegas strip. Inside the Lincoln Lounge, Shady and his Acorns are doing their act, which seems to consist of Shady doing basic Christmas cracker jokes while two women stand next to him looking disappointed. After he finishes his act, Wint and Kidd arrive backstage and murder him, which feels fair after his performance.

Bond is at a craps table throwing cash around when he attracts the attention of a lady.

‘Hi! I’m Plenty.’

‘But of course you are.’

‘Plenty O’Toole.’

‘Named after your father, perhaps?’

Now, I know that Bond is referring to the fact that Plenty (Lana Wood) has a large bosom, but in this line he seems to be wondering if her father also had a massive penis. Does that qualify as sexy detective work?

Bond wins 50,000 bucks and gives five of it to Plenty for bringing him luck. She asks if he fancies a drink, so they slope back to his hotel room and begin to engage in some hot snogging action, coupled with some expert dress unzipping. However, before take-off can occur, Bond realises his hotel room is full of Slumber Inc. goons pointing guns at him. ‘I’m afraid you’ve caught me with more than my hands up,’ admits Bond, suggesting the script had a once-over from a porno screenwriter. As Plenty is dragged out by three burly men she asks if it’s a ‘perverts’ convention’, which seems a redundant question with Bond in the room. She’s hurled out the bedroom window and lands, several floors down, in the swimming pool.

The goons then confuse Bond by leaving the room. With his gun drawn, he investigates the rest of his suite and finds Tiffany waiting for him in bed. She wants to know where the diamonds are so she can inform her superiors. We’re then treated to a shot of a 1971 Sean Connery walking across the room in the nude – and it’s not the pretty sight it once was. After some sex, Tiffany proposes a deal: they split the diamonds 50/50. Since Bond is being watched it makes more sense if she gets them. Bond agrees and tells her she’ll need to go to the circus, by which he means the Circus Circus casino.

Tiffany walks through Circus Circus, trapeze artists swinging above rows of fruit machines, while Bond, Felix and a couple of CIA guys observe her from a viewing gantry and undercover CIA officers prowl the floor. One of the agents is disguised as a croupier and he flips a card to Tiffany that tells her to ‘try the water balloons’. She does as instructed and wins a huge stuffed toy despite missing the target, which drives a kid next to her apoplectic with rage. The toy, of course, is also stuffed with the diamonds. There’s then a mind-bendingly odd scene when a woman turns into a gorilla and escapes from her cage, and Tiffany uses the distraction to give the army of useless CIA agents the slip.

She arrives at her sun-drenched Las Vegas home to find Bond chilling on a sun lounger. She’s about to lay into him about why her black wig is in the pool (she changes her hair constantly throughout the film), but it quickly transpires that the wig is actually Plenty O’Toole, tied to a weight and drowned. Bond nonchalantly explains that Wint and Kidd are killing each link in the diamond-smuggling chain, so that the buyer can never be traced, and Plenty was obviously mistaken for Tiffany. Bond asks who her next connection is and demands to know where she’s hidden the diamond-stuffed toy.

A porter at the airport takes the toy out of a locker, places it inside a suitcase and hands it to a man in a green van, which Bond and Tiffany follow in her car. The driver is Bert Saxby, Willard Whyte’s right-hand man. Tiffany explains that Whyte, a reclusive billionaire industrialist, lives in the penthouse of the Whyte House and hasn’t set foot outside in three years. Saxby swaps cars with another man, and as the van is about to depart, Bond sneaks into the back and hides as it drives through the desert to the industrial complex of W Tectronics.

The van descends in a lift to a restricted area five levels below ground. The new driver parks and disappears with the suitcase containing the toy. Bond fools a scientist – ‘Klaus Hergersheimer from G Section’ – into giving him a spare security pass and then explores the complex, passing himself off as Hergersheimer. He accesses a lab where he finds the driver working on a complex-looking machine, huge piles of diamonds laid out on lab tables next to him. Bond walks in under the pretence that he’s there to ‘check the radiation shields’ and introduces himself to the driver, who is named Professor Doctor Metz (Joseph Fürst). Metz gets a call from Willard Whyte, who informs him that he has ‘quite enough for completion’, which may or may not be related to the diamonds. Bond notices a cassette tape of military marching music laid out next to the diamonds, and then tells Metz that he’s seen everything he needs to and leaves. Moments after his exit, however, the real Hergersheimer arrives to check the radiation shields. Metz, realising that Bond is an imposter, raises the alarm.

The twisting weirdness of this film rises to a new level as we shift to a set designed to look like the surface of the moon, where two men in spacesuits are re-enacting the 1969 landings. Bond skulks behind some moon rocks and watches the astronaut piss about in slow motion like a couple of pissheads trying to get in the door without making any noise at two in the morning. (Why this is happening is never explained.)

Security guards suddenly run in and spot him, so Bond acts fast. He jumps into a moon buggy, bursts out of the facility and speeds off into the rough desert terrain, while some hapless guards give chase on motorised tricycles with giant wheels. Bond exits the moon buggy and lets it drive away by itself, then attacks a guard and steals his trike. The sight of a mildly out-of-shape Connery on a three-wheeled ATC with fat tyres is less like something from an action movie and more like a bloke who’s had one too many on holiday with the lads.

Bond and Tiffany drive back to the Las Vegas Strip in Tiffany’s car. She starts freaking out that they’ve overstepped the mark by stealing from Willard Whyte, but Bond reassures her that his friend Felix can fix anything (except, apparently, looking the same for more than one film). The police are looking for Bond, and a thrilling chase ensues, which climaxes with Bond sneaking the car through a tiny alley on two wheels. Hilariously, the filmmakers forgot which side was supposed to be in the air when they filmed the car’s exit from the alley, so in post-production they had to insert a close-up scene of Bond and Tiffany swaying unconvincingly in their seats as the car magically swaps position to the other two wheels. Movie. Magic.

Bond and Tiffany are in the bridal suite of the Whyte House hotel, lying naked on a waterbed full of fish (oh, what those poor things must have seen). Tiffany asks what will happen to her, and he jokes that she’ll probably go to prison, but in a way that sounds like he isn’t joking at all. He then tells her that he’s ‘popping upstairs’ and he’ll be back in a moment. He goes out of the window and climbs up to the penthouse by using some complicated equipment which was conveniently stashed in his tux, including a gun that fires bolts into the building for him to swing from.

When he eventually makes it to the penthouse, Willard Whyte’s Southern twang sounds over some speakers in welcome. Bond moves further into the suite, where he sees a man seated at a desk. As the chair revolves, Bond is greeted by the face of his nemesis, Blofeld – and then by another Blofeld, descending the stairs. The Blofeld sitting in the chair receives a call on his telephone, so he turns on a tape recorder and picks up the receiver. The recorder alters his voice perfectly to that of Willard Whyte. Bond assumes they’ve killed Whyte, but the Blofelds (which, by the way, sounds like an amazing sitcom) explain that he is being kept in storage as an insurance policy. Should anyone discover what they’re up to, they have a hostage they can use as leverage. They nonchalantly add that Bond shouldn’t get any ideas about murdering either of them – so, of course, Bond murders one of them by shooting him in the head with his abseiling gun. The remaining Blofeld seems a bit put out and produces a pistol, explaining that he won’t reveal his plan as he’s very sleepy (of all the reasons . . .), but adds that Bond can leave without any harm coming to him. Bond goes into an elevator and is immediately gassed into unconsciousness like an amateur. As the lift opens in the garage, Wint and Kidd are there to receive him. They pick up his slumbering body and put him in the boot of their car, sadly dropping Wint’s favourite bottle of aftershave as they do so, which smashes as Bond lies on it. They drive into the desert and dump Bond’s body in a pipe on a construction site. Having demonstrated their ruthless efficiency as assassins on every previous occasion we’ve seen them, they are extraordinarily lax here. No scorpions, no bombs, no bullets; they just drop his body in the pipe and skip back to their car.

The next day, the pipe is lifted by a crane, placed in the ground and buried. Bond wakes up a short time later and seems more concerned by the smell of Wint’s aftershave than the fact that he’s been buried alive. A weird machine comes down the tunnel, fizzing with electric sparks like a malfunctioning prop from a Star Wars outtake. Bond fuses it, and when two workmen come to fix it, he escapes. Blofeld, Wint and Kidd have had about a hundred opportunities to kill him with great ease and have fluffed it each time. They deserve what’s coming to them.

Back at the Whyte House, Blofeld’s phone rings; he carries out his usual precautions and answers as Whyte. The voice on the other end belongs to Bert Saxby – but it’s actually Bond speaking through an exciting Q gadget. ‘Saxby’ tells Blofeld that he’s just seen Bond in the casino and is concerned the place is crawling with CIA agents, so he wants to move Willard Whyte. Blofeld dismisses this and says that Whyte is perfectly safe in his summer house. Felix whispers to Bond that the house is about ten miles outside town. At this point it may be worth asking Felix why, if he knows where Whyte’s summer house is, he’s never thought to look there. While everyone congratulates one another on being equally awful at their jobs, Blofeld says that Whyte has outgrown his usefulness and instructs Saxby to kill him.

Bond arrives at the summer house, where he is greeted by the scantily clad, back-flipping, ball-kicking Bambi (Lola Larson) and Thumper (Trina Parks). They give Bond an aerobic beating and then chuck him into a swimming pool. They dive in to finish him off, but he quickly overpowers them and tries to drown them. Felix arrives with his men and they find Whyte (Jimmy Dean) in a basement flat – just as he’s coming out of the toilet, which is about as unglamorous a rescue scenario as it gets.

Back at the Whyte House casino, Q is playing every one-armed bandit in the place and cleaning up. Tiffany seems incredibly impressed by his luck, and Q shows her an electromagnetic RPM controller that he’s using to rip off the casino – sticking it to the man indeed. However, before she can get too excited, she notices a woman walking out of the casino carrying Blofeld’s cat and quickly follows. Outside, Tiffany is pushed inside a limousine by the driver and is greeted by one of the sexiest moments in Bond history: Charles Gray, as Blofeld, in drag. He looks like Mrs Slocombe but with acres more sex appeal.

Bond and Whyte head to the lab at W Tectronics to find that Metz’s contraption has gone. Whyte asks Bond to draw it for him, and he produces a sketch that Whyte identifies as a satellite. However, this is not just a satellite, this is an M&S . . . No, wait, it’s a diamond-powered satellite. Whyte calls his rocket control centre and discovers that the satellite has already lifted off – and at that precise moment the technicians lose control of it. We watch the satellite unfurl its diamond mane and begin to shoot lasers at nuclear weapons in China, Russia and the United States, causing many people to glow and burst into flames.

Whyte gets off the phone with his government contacts in Washington and tells Bond that Blofeld is holding an international auction, and whichever country bids the highest will be allowed to keep their nuclear weapons while the others will be destroyed by the satellite. At last, the semblance of a (mad but vaguely coherent) plot! Bond looks at a map of Whyte’s business empire and begins to check off the possible locations where Blofeld could be holed up. When he mentions Baja, California, Whyte sits up. ‘Baja?’ he asks, as if Bond has just suggested he have sex with his sister. It turns out that Whyte doesn’t own anything in Baja, so that must be where Blofeld is.

On an oil rig in the middle of the ocean, Blofeld is chilling out with his cat, listening to the global news reports about his dastardly actions on the radio (and waiting for the football scores), when a guard appears and informs him that a plane is approaching. Blofeld tells a man sitting at a desk to activate a ‘stage one alert’, which he does by repeating these words over the PA system. Of all the people on this oil platform, this guy has the easiest gig. Blofeld’s men dash onto the platform as the plane drops a package, which looks like a giant Christmas ornament, into the water. It rolls over to the rig and Bond pops his head out. Blofeld tells his men to search him ‘from his toenails to the last follicle on his head’ (which shouldn’t take too long once they remove the hairpiece). Before he’s taken away, Bond notices Tiffany sunbathing and reading a magazine, which seems about right – we haven’t seen a half-naked female for about nine minutes.

In Blofeld’s office Bond is treated to ‘The British Grenadiers’ from Blofeld’s cassette of ‘World’s Greatest Marches’. ‘You’re absolutely right,’ says Blofeld, finally explaining what the fuck has been going on in this film, ‘you guessed correctly that that box [the one Bond saw in Metz’s lab] contained the master satellite control tape, and you came aboard presumably hoping to substitute this [the marching band music tape] for the real thing.’ Bond concedes that Blofeld is holding all the aces as Tiffany swans in and drapes herself across a couch. Blofeld is enjoying his triumph, but as Bond follows him out the room, Tiffany springs to her feet and swipes the fake tape, which she then slips to Bond.

Bond wanders over to a tape slot in the wall and asks if this is the one that controls the satellite. Blofeld, the complete moron, gleefully confirms it is. Bond, like an annoying child, pushes a button that sends the tape shooting out onto the floor. Blofeld orders him to put it back in. Bond reaches down and, via some nice sleight of hand, manages to swap the tapes. He’s escorted outside and pauses to tie his shoelaces, cheekily releasing a red weather balloon as he does so (thus summoning Pennywise the dancing clown to haunt Blofeld’s dreams for ever). Tiffany comes running out to tell Bond that she switched the tapes, but this means she’s just put the real tape back in, so Bond calls her a ‘stupid twit’, and everything is starting to feel a bit slapstick. There are many redundant scenes in this film and the tape swap is one of them. As we’re about to see, the whole episode ultimately has zero impact on the ‘plot’.

Up in the sky, Willard Whyte and Felix are in a chopper at the head of a swarm of armed helicopters. Upon seeing the balloon, they order an attack on the rig. Blofeld does what any sensible despot would do and orders his receptionist to ‘activate defences’, which he does by repeating this in a very slow voice. The ‘defences’ turn out to be heavy machine-gun turrets, but the CIA choppers aren’t put off and begin raining down fire. Metz tells Blofeld to surrender – they’re minutes away from the deadline and there’s no sign of anyone accepting the deal. The CIA are making Swiss cheese of the oil rig and things are looking bleak.

Bond sees Blofeld getting into his Bathosub, which looks very much like a flying saucer built for an episode of Sesame Street. The sub requires lifting via a crane in order to get it into the water, so once Blofeld is all strapped up inside, Bond takes over the controls of the crane and swings Blofeld around like he’s a bag of dog shit on the end of a fishing rod. ‘One minute and counting,’ comes the voice over the PA, just before Bond flings Blofeld’s toy submarine into the control room, causing the entire rig to explode. Bond and Tiffany jump clear as the rig burns.

Bond and Tiffany are lying on sun loungers on the deck of a cruise ship heading back to the UK. She wants to ask an important question, but is interrupted by a pair of room service staff bringing them a tray of dinner: it’s Wint and Kidd, looking like seventies radio DJs on the run for assorted sex crimes. They’ve cleverly concealed a bomb inside a gateau – presented as ‘bombe surprise’ – but Bond catches a whiff of Wint’s rank aftershave and realises they’re the ones who buried him in the pipe in the desert. Kidd, who obviously gave Wint the aftershave for Christmas, loses his shit when Bond slags it off and comes at him with a pair of flaming kebabs, while Wint throttles Bond with a necklace. Bond throws brandy all over Kidd, who goes up in flames, then judo flips Wint, gives him a wedgie and throws him overboard with the bomb, whereupon he immediately explodes.

Tiffany races to Bond’s side and playfully asks the question she was about to pose earlier, about how they’re going to get the diamonds down from the satellite. He looks at her, knowing that she’s probably going to go to jail as soon as they arrive in UK, and gives her a coy smile – hoping the smell of burning flesh and the sight of blood and bone and guts settling on the water below won’t put her off wanting to have sex with him. Shirley Bassey begins to belt out her theme again as the credits roll. And with that, Connery bids farewell to the (official) Bond franchise. It’s time for a new incarnation to spring into action – flares, luscious hair and baritone voice at the ready.

EIGHT

LIVE AND LET DIE

1973

ROGER MOORE SAVED James Bond. There can be no doubt about that. After the attempt to replace Connery with Lazenby for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and the panic of bringing Sean back for Diamonds Are Forever, the future looked worrying for the man with the golden pun. Could the franchise really continue without Sean? They tried to lure him back once more with an offer of $5.5 million, but he turned them down. It was time to move on.

Cubby Broccoli had several names in mind, among them Burt Reynolds, Adam West, Jeremy Brett, Julian Glover and William Gaunt. United Artists wanted an American box-office draw to take the walk through the gun barrel, but Cubby was insistent that Bond should be a man from Blighty. Michael Billington was the front-runner until the last moment (he would later come back to play the murdered lover of XXX in the opening sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me), but then Roger Moore tried out for the role. Rog had been the Saint, Ivanhoe and Beau Maverick, and there was an initial pang of worry that he was too well-known to play Bond, but this disappeared once he started work – although he was told to get a haircut and lose a bit of weight. Moore was a wizard of brilliance and brought a totally different dimension of fun to the character, while simultaneously bringing the Connery-esque cool that was essential to the DNA of the part.

We open Live and Let Die at a convention of the United Nations in New York where Dawes, the UK delegate (and secret British agent) is murdered by a harsh burst of prog-synth coming through his translation headphones.

In New Orleans Hamilton (another British agent) is scoping out a restaurant called Fillet of Soul when a jazz funeral goes by – a miserable affair that drudges along at a very slow tempo (the kind of thing Morrissey dreams of). Hamilton is joined by another onlooker. ‘Whose funeral is it?’ asks Hamilton out of mild curiosity (actor Robert Dix is dubbed here by Shane Rimmer, fact fans). ‘Yours,’ says the onlooker, and stabs Hamilton to death, which causes the dreary funeral procession to suddenly burst into an orgasm of happiness and joy – the sort of euphoria you would expect if the news broke that Nigel Farage had fallen into a lava pit.

Over on the island of San Monique, Baines (yes, you guessed it, another British agent) is tied to a pole as the centrepiece of a VOODOO RITUAL. He’s doused liberally in blood and murdered via poisonous snake bite (and a long descending cello note). All in all, not a very good day for the British Secret Service.

The opening titles arrive and they’re bloody great – Maurice Binder at his very best, utilising incredible lighting, haunting voodoo imagery, and quality seventies furniture. Paul McCartney’s theme is a genuine work of art. It seduces, excites, frightens and mesmerises, all within three minutes and twelve seconds. For my money, it’s the best Bond theme by a million miles.

There’s a knock at the door of Bond’s flat. It’s late and he’s in bed with Miss Caruso, an Italian secret agent played by Madeline Smith. He’s instantly shook (as the kids of today would say) by the sight of M standing on his doorstep, looking disapprovingly back at him – the very last person you want to turn up at your door when you’re in bed with an Italian agent (apart from Mussolini).

M tells Bond he needs to pack as three agents have been killed in the last 24 hours, and goes on to list their names. Bond expresses mild grief regarding Baines’ death as they shared the same bootmaker. M is about to wander into the bedroom, presumably to check for pornography, when Bond gestures towards the kitchen to show him his cappuccino machine, which was a piece of dazzling tech at the time. M is distinctly unimpressed by it, however, and tells Bond that he’ll need to find out who’s been whacking off these agents, and there are few who know more about whacking off than James Bond (badoom-chee).

Moneypenny walks into the flat and hands Bond his ticket to New York and a newly repaired wristwatch from Q. M gripes that it’s a waste of tax-payer’s money having Q fix timepieces, so Bond proves him wrong by activating the powerful magnet inside the watch and sucking M’s teaspoon from one side of the room to the other, which scares the living shit out of M. Bond tells him the magnet is so powerful it can divert the path of a bullet and M threatens to test the theory if Bond doesn’t give him his spoon back. I love how much he’s clearly had enough of Bond’s relentless badinage.

M tells Bond that Baines was working on a small island in the Caribbean called San Monique, while Dawes was in New York keeping an eye on San Monique’s prime minister, Dr Kananga. He tells Bond he will need to investigate the mysterious Kananga and that the CIA will assist with surveillance.

‘A man comes,’ Solitaire (Jane Seymour) says, as she lays down some tarot cards over a superimposed visual of Bond’s plane landing in New York, obviously guessing that 007 has joined the mile-high club. Solitaire’s tarot-reading powers tell us that the man ‘comes over water’, which is a good trick if you can do it. She mentions that he will as ‘oppose’ and bring ‘violence and destruction’. The girl is good at this.

Bond is met at the airport by his CIA contact, who looks like he’s been hired from Rent-A-Murderer. They’re barely out of the airport when one of Kananga’s men, Whisper (Earl Jolly Brown, who looks like Barry White’s stuntman), draws up in a car alongside Bond and uses his wing mirror to fire a deadly dart into the driver’s neck, killing him instantly. The dead man’s foot floors the accelerator and the car begins to speed wildly through the New York traffic, until Bond gets to the wheel and eventually brings it to a standstill by driving into a parked van.

Bond goes to meet Felix (David Hedison, yet another actor to play the CIA agent; unlike most of his predecessors, however, he gets to reprise the role – albeit sixteen years later – in Licence to Kill) who is watching with his surveillance team as Kananga (Yaphet Kotto) and his entourage enter the San Monique embassy. Using bugs in Kananga’s office, they all listen in as he dictates a strongly worded letter to the Secretary-General at the Pan-Island Unity Conference, which is presumably a global saucepan convention. After the opening sentences, Kananga switches on a tape machine that takes over reciting his speech while he and his gang leave through a secret door. All I can think of at this point is that there’s a lost scene where we see Kananga at a desk making an hour-long speech into a tape recorder.

Felix tells Bond the ‘pimp-mobile’ that killed his driver is registered to a nearby shop called Oh Cult Voodoo, which is the sort of shop that sells wind-chimes, painted skulls, goblets, dreamcatchers and novelty draft-excluders. While Bond is perusing the shop, Whisper comes in for a moment before disappearing into the back behind a curtain. Bond follows and comes out into a car park where he finds the white pimp-mobile. As it drives off, he flags down a taxi and follows, while the shopkeeper phones to let someone know Bond’s leaving. As the taxi pulls away, another man in a car talks into a radio and says that he’ll tail Bond.

Meanwhile, in the cab, Bond says to the driver, ‘Just keep on the tail of that jukebox and there’s an extra twenty in it for you,’ a collection of words that in isolation seem fine, but when pouring out of Roger Moore’s mouth seem somehow hilarious. The driver (Arnold Williams), who is black, makes a joke about how he’d drive to a Ku Klux Klan cook-out for $20, or CPAC as I believe it is better known. He seems to think this is a great joke, and turns to Bond for reassurance, but Bond looks back at him like he’s just offered him a shit to smoke. Each time they drive past an area of town, a guy picks up a walkie-talkie to notify someone that a ‘honky’ is heading to Harlem.

They eventually arrive at the Fillet of Soul restaurant, where the pimp-mobile is parked outside. Bond pays the driver and heads inside, orders a bourbon and water, and as the barman brings his drink to his booth seat, the booth rotates, taking him into a back room where he finds a man pointing a gun at him. He’s told to relax and that ‘Mr Big’ will be there in a moment.

Bond stands up and checks out his new surroundings. He meets Solitaire at a table where she’s dealing her crazy future cards and then another of the henchmen, Tee-Hee (Julius Harris), emerges to frisk Bond. He has a metal arm with a claw for a hand, and presumably got the name because he laughs like someone from the Beano. Tee-Hee asks Solitaire if Bond is armed, and she flips a card and nods, suggesting that there could be an excellent spin-off film here where Tee-Hee and Solitaire make a fortune betting on horses. Tee-Hee finds Bond’s gun and crushes it with his claw before wandering away to leave Bond to flirt with Solitaire. ‘Fascinating,’ he says, as he examines her cards and subconsciously plots a way to sleep with her. He asks if he’s in the deck and she asks him to pick a card. As he turns it over it’s revealed to be ‘The Fool’, which Solitaire finds very funny.

A door slides open and in walks Mr Big, who looks like he’s just been dug up. Interestingly, Mr Big’s make-up was an early Rick Baker work; Baker went on to win seven Oscars for best make-up from a record of eleven nominations, yet he probably wishes he could scrub Mr Big from his CV.

Bond tries to introduce himself but Big interrupts, barking that names are for tombstones and that his men should take him outside and waste him. I’ve had job interviews like that. Bond turns to Solitaire and asks if the cards say anything about his future and she tells him the reading is over. He picks up a card anyway and flips it to show her. It’s ‘The Lovers’ and, in a classic sex pest move, he asks if it could be them. Solitaire looks visibly shaken by this and watches on as Bond is taken away. As a side note, I have always enjoyed that all of Solitaire’s cards have a visible ‘007’ on the back of them, a small hidden joke by the production designers, that once you see it you can’t unsee, very much like Sean’s half-naked body in Diamonds Are Forever.

Out in the alleyway, Bond is taken to a spot among some rubble where the goons plan to execute him, but they’re unaware of Bond’s judo cat-like instincts, and he hits one with a fire escape ladder and kicks the other in the stomach, which somehow leads to them both instantly dying. Harold Strutter, the man we saw tailing Bond’s taxi earlier, picks him up and explains that he works for Felix. He tells Bond that Mr Big is a notorious gangster; Bond asks what a man like Kananga would want with an American gangster, to which Strutter replies, ‘The questions is, what would Mr Big want with a two-bit island diplomat?’ Curiouser and curiouser. They get into Strutter’s car and Felix radios in to tell Bond that Kananga’s flying off to San Monique in a private plane and he’s got Bond booked on the next available flight.

At a hotel on San Monique, Baron Samedi (Geoffrey Holder) emerges from behind a tree laughing maniacally, his face painted half white. He bounds around the tables dressed in a white frock coat and top hat while everyone has their drinks and food, like some sort of hellish Butlins after-dinner experience.

Bond arrives at the front desk to check in, only to be told that his wife has checked in already. He pretends all is well, despite having no idea what the man is talking about, and heads to his room. He walks past the Baron, who is still acting like he has a fleet of bees in his pants, and arrives at his private bungalow to meet ‘Mrs Bond’ – but she’s not there, so he decides to have a bath and get spruced up before she arrives. As he turns off his bath, a deadly snake is slowly – and I mean slowly – fed in via an air duct. Bond gets in the bath and begins to shave, none the wiser that death is very, very, very slowly slithering nearby.

Whisper walks into the suite with a bottle of champagne Bond ordered earlier. He tries to get Bond’s attention, but he finds it difficult as he constantly sounds like he’s doing the cinnamon challenge. Eventually Bond hears him and leaves the bathroom to collect his booze. The snake appears behind Bond as he’s lighting his cigar before continuing his beauty regime (which obviously works as Roger is 45 years old here and looks INCREDIBLE). He shakes a can of deodorant and is about to spray it when he sees his slippery guest in the mirror. Quick as a flash, he turns and combines the cigar with the deodorant can, making a deadly flamethrower – and a dead snake. I hope he put all of this in his TripAdvisor review.

He’s just getting over the shock of the snake when the bungalow door begins to open and a hand appears with a gun. Bond stabs his lit cigar into the hand and flips the invader onto the bed. It’s a woman. ‘Mrs Bond, I presume,’ says James as he turns on the light. It’s Rosie Carver (Gloria Hendry), another CIA agent sent by Felix, and her wig has fallen off during the flip (used to happen to Sean all the time). She explains that she had the gun because the waiter who brought the champagne doesn’t work for the hotel. Bond says that he wants her to show him the spot where Baines was killed, then suggests that they get some sleep in a way that suggests they’re not going to sleep for one minute.

The following morning Bond and Rosie go to the harbour, with Bond sporting one of the worst outfits he’s ever, ever worn: a double-denim pant-suit with tight white vest and clompy shoes. There are many fine-looking boats touting for business, but Bond settles on the shittest-looking one with a man sleeping in a chair on the deck. He kicks him awake, explaining to Rosie that the captain is Quarrel Jr, the son of his pal from Dr. No – sidestepping the fact that, because of him, Quarrel Sr was killed by a flame-throwing tank painted like a dragon. Well, you know, these things happen.

Solitaire is at her magical card table and tells Kananga that Bond is coming again (when isn’t he?). She also says there will be violence and that he’ll arrive via water. Kananga then asks her about the future and she once again turns over a card that suggests she and Bond are going to be lovers. He asks if the card is death and Solitaire hesitates before telling him it is. The thing is, she’s basically correct as most women who have sex with Bond end up dead. Kananga picks up the phone and tells his men that ‘Rosie knows what do’. Plot twist!

Bond and Rosie canoodle by a babbling stream, rolling around among the remnants of Bond’s posh picnic – what kind of spy brings a picnic on a recce? She tells him that finding him means so much to her, but Bond (showing some decent detective skills for once) has already seen through her act and realised she’s not who she claims to be. He tells her he wants answers and pushes a gun in her face. She tells him that they’ll kill her if she says anything, then she spots a voodoo doll made from coconuts nailed to a nearby tree, which makes her freak out (probably remembering when Baloo wore coconut tits in The Jungle Book). She runs away in panic through the undergrowth, but is shot by another voodoo coconut doll.

Kananga, bathed in red lighting, is in Solitaire’s magic card room asking her what went wrong. A trap was set and Tee-Hee was waiting to kill Bond. Solitaire points out that she probably saw the girl’s death, and that he obviously forgot to read the terms and conditions. Kananga is not buying it, though, and puts it down to impertinence. He tells her that her mother had the power of second-sight and lost it, becoming useless to him, so she should be careful she doesn’t do the same, or presumably it’s death by voodoo coconut doll.

Up in the skies, a lone black hang glider soars through the night while tied with rope to a boat below. Bond is going in for a closer look at Kananga’s house on the top of the hill. He detaches his line and kicks a man off the side of a cliff as he lands perfectly. He’s dressed all in black to blend in perfectly in the dark – to wander undetected like a ninja, a ghost, a man of shadows. So naturally he whips off the black suit and reveals that he’s wearing a bright grey one underneath. He also leaves a hang glider on Kananga’s lawn, which might arouse suspicion, but what do I know?

Solitaire walks into her magic card room to find Bond in her chair dicking around with her cards. She tells him to stop as it’s blasphemy for anyone else to use them and that they tell nothing to those who cannot see. Bond offers that the cards say that they will be lovers, and asks her to pick one to prove it. She tentatively picks a card and turns it over on the table. Once again, it’s ‘The Lovers’ and Solitaire succumbs to an existential crisis as sex will, apparently, cost her her powers. Bond moves to her side and offers her a shoulder to cry on (and the rest). As they embrace he drops the cards from his hand to reveal that they ALL have ‘The Lovers’ on them, which is essentially psychic grooming.

A post-coital Bond snoozes while Solitaire lies in bed having a mini-breakdown about how she now has no powers. Bond wakes up enough to try and make her feel a bit better, but he’s clearly not that arsed about her mumbo-jumbo. He tries to console her by telling her he fiddled the cards (I’m not sure admitting that he defrauded her out of her special powers is going to make her feel better) and that he has a boat waiting so they can escape.

They head for the coast and arrive at a graveyard where Baron Samedi pops up from behind a tombstone playing a flute and talking about how it’s going to be a beautiful day, like some sort of Pied Piper of the undead. They understandably look a bit freaked out and leave quickly, while he turns his flute into a radio and tells Kananga’s men that Bond and Solitaire ‘are headed for the hill’.

Up on the hill, they stumble upon an undercover poppy field just as a helicopter arrives and opens fire on them. They manage to make a break for it and reach a village, but a motorcycle policeman spots them and radios it in to Kananga before giving chase. Bond and Solitaire jump onto a blue double-decker bus that looks like it’s about to fall apart and drive away at high speed. The baddies all look at each other with smug reassurance, knowing there’s no way a 45-year-old man driving a bus will get the better of them. They forget, however, that the stunt driver who takes care of this sequence is the same stunt driver who drove the bus (and performed the same 360-degree water-skid stunt) in the smash-hit On the Buses movie (which, astonishingly, took more money at UK cinemas than Diamonds Are Forever), so motorbikes present no problem to him. Bond’s only nemesis during this chase is a low bridge, which slices off the top deck. They arrive back at the harbour in their new convertible bus to meet Quarrel Jr who speeds them away to safety.

Now that he’s uncovered the heroin farm at the heart of Kananga’s island empire, Bond tells Solitaire that he’s going to hand the whole case over to the CIA. He then asks her where she’d like to go now she’s free and she says she doesn’t mind as long as there’s a bed. Bond has seemingly awoken a kraken of intercourse. He tells Quarrel that they’ll be going to New Orleans next as Hamilton was killed there, so there has to be a connection – so much for handing over the case, James.

When they arrive in New Orleans they’re picked up by a cab – driven, Bond realises too late, by the same cabbie who drove him to Mr Big’s place in New York. He locks them in and delivers them to a small airport where they’re met by more of Mr Big’s men. They tell Bond that he’s made a huge mistake by taking Solitaire ‘from a friend of Mr Big’s’, and they’re going to throw him out of a plane from 10,000 feet. Solitaire causes a distraction and Bond manages to thump one of the guards in the chest and make a break for it, leaving Solitaire behind like a real gentleman. He arrives at the hanger of the Bleeker Flying School and ducks into a waiting light aircraft to be greeted by the haunting visage of Mrs Bell (Ruth Kempf), who is there for a flying lesson. She asks where the usual instructor is and Bond tells her he’s indisposed. He then drives the plane very slowly around the airport while many cars try to catch up but crash into other small planes, until the pursuit is over. Mrs Bell tries to help by occasionally offering advice about revving, but Bond is in no mood to listen to someone who looks like Bono’s nan, especially now that Solitaire has been kidnapped.

Bond reunites with Felix and they head to the Fillet of Soul, just as Strutter (who is now on Fillet-of-Soul watch) is killed by the funeral band. Inside, Bond and Felix are offered a booth, but remembering how the booth he sat in in New York was a twirling trap, Bond turns it down, and they take a table near the stage. Bond orders his bourbon with no ice, while Felix asks for two Sazeracs (New Orleans variation of a cognac or whisky cocktail), which makes me think Felix is due an intervention. BJ Arnau comes out on the stage and belts out a magnificent rendition of ‘Live And Let Die’, while Felix is told there’s a call for him from Strutter – presumably his ghost – and as he leaves to take it Bond’s seat is sent below the floor and into Mr Big’s lair.

Mr Big is sitting at the end of a long table, while Solitaire is back on the cards, blagging it now full-time. Big points at Solitaire and asks Bond, in his own inimitable way, ‘Did you mess with that?’ Bond tells him that it’s a private matter between him and Solitaire, and that he’ll only tell Kananga. Big looks Bond in the eye and reaches up to his face. He pulls at the nose and Bond watches as the whole face comes away from the head like a satisfying sheet of glue, revealing Kananga underneath. He then reveals his plot – as Kananga he grows heroin, as Mr Big he distributes it – and he plans to distribute two tons (with a street value of over $1 billion) for free, which will drive all his competitors out of business and potentially double the number of users across the US. Once he’s the only distributor, he will raise his prices and make a fortune. He clearly enjoys boasting about all of this, yet is still obsessed about whether Solitaire has lost her powers. He takes Bond’s watch and reads the registration number on the back. Is he reading it accurately or not? Solitaire says yes and, seemingly satisfied, Kananga signals to Tee-Hee to knock Bond unconscious. As Whisper drags Bond from the room, Samedi enters, dressed like he’s just come from a business conference at Studio 54, and Kananga tells Solitaire that she didn’t get the watch test right after all. Samedi pulls a ‘Death’ card from her tarot deck, and Kananga slaps Solitaire, telling her that they’ll deal with her later that night, while Samedi laughs like he’s just seen a woman fall down a hole on YouTube.

Bond wakes up as they arrive at the farm, but this ain’t no regular farm: this is a crocodile farm with a sign outside saying ‘Trespassers Will Be Eaten’, which I believe was also a sign at Elizabeth Taylor’s compound. They also process all the drugs here, with a fully working lab. Tee-Hee throws scraps of meat into a croc-infested lake, driving them mad, then leaves Bond to fend for himself on a tiny island. The crocodiles begin to circle. He keeps them at bay by randomly throwing pieces of chicken at them but it’s very clear that this tactic won’t keep them away for long. Just as it looks entirely desperate, he notices that four crocodiles have very helpfully surfaced in a line, making a sort of bridge for him to hop over, which he does in quite spectacular fashion. The real jumper is Ross Kananga, the owner of the farm, who was as mad as he was fearless, performing the stunt in crocodile-skin shoes. So mad was he in fact, that Tom Mankiewicz, the film’s co-writer, named the villain after him.

Bond vaults the fence and unbolts the gate, unleashing the crocodiles into the lab before setting it on fire, to add insult to injury. Then he jumps in a speedboat and zips off downriver. Lab technicians and Kananga’s men come rushing out to escape the flames and ravenous reptiles and start to give chase. The speedboat chase goes across river, land, wedding and sheriff, and it’s here we’re introduced to Sheriff J.W. Pepper (Clifton James), our friendly neighbourhood comedy-racist. He catches one of Kananga’s henchman doing 95 mph and pulls him over just as Bond’s boat makes a jump over their heads, while one of the boats that’s chasing Bond crashes into Pepper’s car, with hilarious consequences.

Pepper is picked up by two other officers and they continue to give chase while Bond gets the best of Kananga’s men. The whole sequence ends with Pepper arriving at the dock as Bond meets up with Felix. ‘What are you? Some kind of doomsday machine, boy?’ Pepper shouts, as he walks away from another wrecked car. Pepper is informed that Bond is a secret agent, and Pepper wonders which side he’s on, while the rest of us wonder why Pepper is in this film at all, why he’s in the next one, and why he repeats the role again in Superman II.

San Monique. Its night-time, torches are lit, make-up is on – it’s time to start the voodoo show. Solitaire is brought out and tied to poles in the exact same way as Baines was during the opening sequence of the film. Bond arrives on the island via dinghy. Felix has given him a Dirty Harry-style .44 Magnum, which will blow your head clean off, and a shark gun loaded with compressed gas pellets for the journey back. He sets his watch knowing he has 30 minutes before the bombs that Quarrel is about to set in the poppy fields will go off.

Back at the voodoo party, a hat is brought out and placed on a grave. The hat bearer then taps on the headstone three times and Baron Samedi rises from the grave underneath the hat, as if by magic. He’s painted like a skeleton and as he opens his eyes the music commences. A snake man rushes at Solitaire and as he is about to reach her, Bond puts a bullet in him, then turns and shoots Samedi, who blows into pieces. Bond is mystified – we saw Samedi’s eyes move, yet he’s just blown up as if he’s made from papier-mâché. With no time to consider this further, Bond rushes in to free Solitaire, and as he cuts her bindings the bombs Quarrel placed begin to go off. The crowd quickly disperses and Bond and Solitaire run back towards the undergrowth, only to find Baron Samedi rise once again from the grave and block their path. He begins to chant and picks up a machete, challenging Bond to a duel, but Bond punches him twice and pushes him into a coffin full of snakes, which Samedi appears to hump to death. It’s quite the way to go.

Bond and Solitaire race to the tombstone that Samedi just used and descend into Kananga’s underground lair, where he’s waiting for them. Whisper takes Bond’s Magnum and Kananga examines Bond’s other weapon, intrigued by the shark gun and its compressed gas pellets. Bond explains what they do and how they work, which Whisper thinks is the funniest joke he’s ever heard. Kananga decides to test the gun and shoots the sofa Whisper’s sitting on, which inflates like a balloon, devours Whisper before exploding and sends him rolling across the floor. Now THAT’S funny.

Bond and Solitaire are tied to a winch and Kananga cuts Bond’s arm, drawing blood. He then lifts him over a pool full of hungry sharks. As Whisper turns his back to activate the winch, Bond uses his powerful magnet watch to suck the last compressed gas pellet into his hand.

The blood drips into the water and the sharks become very interested in the meal about to come their way. As Kananga maniacally laughs to himself and watches the sharks swim around, Bond activates an as-yet-unseen feature to his watch, a spinning saw, which quickly cuts the ropes holding him and Solitaire to the winch.

Bond jumps down and kicks Whisper into a watertight rocket (which the gang use to transport heroin). Kananga charges at Bond brandishing a knife and dancing around like he’s been snorting spice. After a brief struggle they both fall into the shark tank. Bond holds Kananga around the throat and inserts the compressed gas pellet into his mouth before pushing him back below the surface. Kananga surfaces looking like Fat Albert doing a jazz trumpet solo and ascends to the ceiling while making a farting-balloon noise, before exploding in a flurry of rubber – becoming simultaneously the coolest and most ridiculous Bond villain death in history.

Bond and Solitaire are aboard a train from New Orleans to New York. They’re playing gin rummy and Solitaire beats Bond, so he decides that it’s time for some top-level sexual intercourse; like the old saying goes: ‘unlucky at cards, have sex immediately’. Meanwhile, in the mail car of the train, a bag is suddenly sliced open from the inside by an unwieldy silver claw (which suggests that there’s a deleted scene somewhere of Tee-Hee sewing himself into the bag and hopping to the post office).

Bond and Solitaire are getting ready for bed when Tee-Hee shuts off the power. Tee-Hee enters their room and approaches Solitaire while she slowly talks to herself about how much she really loves sex now. Bond walks in just as Tee-Hee’s about to snip off her fingers and prevent her from ever being able to make speech marks in the air while being ironic, and a fight ensues that is pretty vanilla compared to the train fight in From Russia with Love. After Bond uses some pliers to break Tee-Hee’s claw arm, he’s able to throw Tee-Hee out the window and then resume his lovemaking with Solitaire.

In the final scene of the movie, we see Baron Samedi, evidently risen from the dead again, perching precariously on the very front of the train, laughing to himself and raising his hat to no one like a maniacal hobo. It was rumoured for a while that he would make a return in a future Bond film, but the powers-that-be obviously decided that they’d had enough of the invincible voodoo pipe-playing skeleton man – which, I have to say, is bit of a shame. Paul McCartney begins to trill again and the titles roll.

NINE

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN

1974

HIDDEN 130 FEET from the shore of Khao Phing Kan lie a distinct pair of islands surrounded by endless seascapes that disappear into the horizon. On the golden sands of one of these islands, we are greeted by the diminutive figure of Nick Nack (Hervé Villechaize) as he awkwardly brings a tray laden with champagne and Guinness towards two bathers enjoying the sun and sea. One of the bathers steps out of the water and is handed a towel. As he dries himself we see he has three nipples. This is Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) aka the Man with the Golden Gun. His female companion Andrea Anders (Maud Adams) towels his legs and looks on mournfully. This is the first of three appearances that Adams makes in Bond movies, confusingly playing a different character each time – the others being the titular character in Octopussy and a cameo in A View to a Kill.

Nick Nack goes up some stairs to welcome a mysterious gangster to the island who has arrived by rowing boat (Marc Lawrence, who also played a gangster in Diamonds Are Forever). Nick Nack escorts him inside Scaramanga’s lair, handing him a fat envelope full of cash, and tells him to wait in a side room. The gangster walks gingerly into Scaramanga’s Funhouse, which in many ways is like Pat Sharp’s Funhouse, but with a bit more death. It’s full of weapons, targets, gymnastic equipment, bizarre animatronics, disorientating music, lights and mirrors.

It turns out that Scaramanga, the world’s deadliest assassin, likes to keep himself in peak condition by hiring people to come and kill him. When Scaramanga arrives, Nick Nack turns out the lights in the room and Scaramanga scurries around in the dark dodging bullets before dispatching the gangster with his golden gun – an item that looks like something you’d expect to see in an advert for life insurance as the bonus gift if you sign up before you turn 50. As the lights come on in the room a waxwork emerges from the darkness: it’s James Bond. Nick Nack retrieves the money from the dead gangster and tells Scaramanga that next time he will get a better opponent as he wants to win the money. ‘You’ll be the death of me yet, Nick Nack,’ Scaramanga says, before turning and swiftly, yet precisely, shooting the fingers off the Bond waxwork.

Lulu’s title song arrives with words by Don Black that contain precisely zero moments of subtlety or innuendo, and are the lyrical equivalent of hardcore pornography. Lines such as ‘He has a powerful weapon, he charges a million a shot’ and ‘His eye may be on you or me, who will he bang? We shall see’ are less of an ‘oo-er’, and more of a ‘could you stop saying these very rude words at my beautiful son’s christening, please?’

Roger Moore’s second outing arrives with a bullet, quite literally, as Bond has been sent one in the mail. Not just any bullet, either, but a golden bullet marked personally for 007. M believes that Scaramanga has been hired to assassinate James Bond and has sent the bullet as a sadistic tease. M orders Bond to take a sabbatical, but with the clear subtext that Bond should get to Scaramanga before Scaramanga can get to Bond. When asked what Bond knows of Scaramanga, 007 replies with the incredible Wikipedia-like CV summary: ‘Oh, yes. The man with the golden gun. Born in a circus. Father, the ringmaster, possibly Cuban. Mother, English, a snake charmer. He was a spectacular trick-shot artist by the time he was ten and a local Rio gunman at fifteen. The KGB recruited him there and trained him in Europe where he became an overworked and underpaid assassin. He went independent in the late fifties. Current price, $1 million a hit. No photograph on file, but he does have one disguising feature, however. A superfluous papilla; a mammary gland . . . a third nipple. He always uses a golden bullet, hence, “Man with the golden gun”. Present domicile unknown.’ All right, super fanboy.

Bond’s first port of call is a club in Beirut where Bill Fairbanks (002) was killed by Scaramanga, which, according to Moneypenny, happened in ‘69’, which is a hell of a way to go.

Bond watches a belly dancer named Saida oscillate across the room towards his table and notices that she has a gold bellybutton charm. Later in her dressing room he tells her that her dancing is superb, and that she is too. (This is a top pick-up line, I hope you’re all making notes.) He tells her that they had a mutual friend, Bill Fairbanks, and that she was with him in ’69. She remembers him and says it was a horrible night that she will never forget, and I’m not surprised. She explains that the bullet that killed 002 went right through his neck and into the wall. Like any sane person who has just witnessed a brutal assassination, she dug the bullet out and had it made into a bellybutton ring. Her obvious insanity does nothing to quell Bond’s horn, however, and they start snogging. Bond then craftily starts kissing her abdomen so that he can examine the bullet more closely, but is soon judo chopped on the shoulder by the club owner and his gang of heavies – which somehow results in Bond swallowing the bullet. A fist-fight begins and it’s not long before Bond’s laid them all out on the floor and is unbolting the back door to escape. Saida screams when she sees her bellybutton is now empty, ‘I’ve lost my charm!’ she shouts as Bond turns back from the doorway, ‘Not from where I’m standing,’ he says, adjusting his tie as he walks away. That’s classic Roger Moore, right there. So very, very good. He gets in a cab and asks for the nearest pharmacy so he can get something to help him shit out the golden bullet. A great lost scene is 007 on the toilet waiting for ‘Scaramanga’s revenge’ to make its way through his digestive system.

Bond has the bullet analysed in Q’s lab. It is custom-made and as such has no serial numbers to identify where it was made – however, Q and one of his boffins analyse the bullet’s gold and nickel content and deduce that it was made in the Far East and has all the hallmarks of a Portuguese armourer called Lazar who lives in Macau. Bond heads to Macau to find Lazar (a Lazar quest, if you will). Lazar (Marne Maitland) knows very well who Bond is, and is honoured to meet him, thus putting to bed the fact that Bond is any kind of actual spy, and merely Judith Chalmers with a handgun. He really wants to build a rifle for him, but Bond is more interested in the bullets he manufactures, and one of his clients in particular. Lazar tells him that he can’t tell him anything about his customers, as it’s strictly confidential, ‘Like a doctor or a priest with the penitent.’ He then goes on to say that guns don’t kill people, but that the finger that pulls the trigger is to blame, so he is obviously also a massive shill for the NRA. Bond listens to his protests, but isn’t particularly interested, and instead aims a demonstration model rifle at Lazar’s testicles, forcing him to fetch the latest shipment for Scaramanga and the instructions that he was given to take the bullets to a casino.

The game of the night at the casino seems to be Boggle, and the gamers all sit along a table watching the dice fly around in the little glass bowl, while buckets bring forth, and take away, whatever the players desire. Lazar receives a bucket full of cash and swaps the money for the ammo. Bond watches on as the bucket ascends to a beautiful woman, Andrea Anders, who pockets the box and walks out of the games room.

Bond follows her to a hydrofoil called The Flying Sandpiper, which takes them to Hong Kong. She leaves the boat and gets into a waiting Rolls-Royce. Bond isn’t far behind and flags down a taxi, only to have the car immediately blocked in by a tiny sports car driven by a woman. Bond rolls up his sleeves and approaches the car, ready to give her some top-level patronising misogyny, but he soon discovers it’s Mary Goodnight (Britt Eckland), an MI6 field operative who is stationed in Hong Kong and has instant gooey eyes for him. He begins to peel off some patronising classics by barking the car registration to her and telling her there can’t be many Rolls-Royces in Hong Kong, and then looks on in baffled horror as she laughs in his stupid face while explaining that the registration actually belongs to the courtesy cars from the Peninsula Hotel. She tells him it’s wonderful to see him, which he greets with a large eye roll (obviously hoping she’ll dig his hard-to-get vibe) and promises to buy her dinner later. He pays the concierge of the hotel to find out Anders’ room number and gets a hotel staff member to open her hotel door for him, which is straight out of the Ted Bundy Big Book of Spies.

Anders emerges from the shower, probably expecting to get some rest, or even some personal space, but no, she’s greeted by an armed middle-aged man who’s been watching her wash. She points a gun at him and attempts to call reception to ask for help, but Bond has other ideas. He gives her a slap and threatens to break her arm unless she tells him where the bullets are going, which is the biggest ‘anti-Roger’ moment ever filmed. She gives in, as she’d like to keep her arm in working order, and tells him it’s Scaramanga. He ascertains that she’s his mistress and then begins a small period of slut-shaming that cannot be heard through the sound of shattering from within his glass house. She tells him Scaramanga will be at the Bottoms Up club later that night and will be wearing a white linen suit, a black tie and gold jewellery – I’m just hoping that the Man from Del Monte doesn’t turn up to cause confusion.

The Bottoms Up club has all the familiar decorations you’d expect to find in a seedy drinking establishment. The crass objet d’art, the porno-funk musical background and a semi-naked lady perching on her knees on top of a table handing out drinks to lonely men. It feels like the kind of club that has ‘Tory MP Sex Scandal’ written all over it in neon letters. However, it also becomes the scene of a murder, as a man is assassinated by Scaramanga just as Bond approaches the front door. Lieutenant Hip (surname: ‘To-Be-Square’) is at the scene and places Bond under arrest, or so it seems. In actual fact he takes him to MI6 headquarters in Hong Kong harbour.

Scaramanga, meanwhile, returns home to Anders lying in bed and begins to use his golden gun to carry out a deeply disturbing massage on her. Something that even if edited with the sexiest of Barry White songs and the softest lighting would still look about as sexy as the Elephant Man doing The Full Monty.

Lying in watery state in the middle of Hong Kong harbour is the wreck of the Queen Elizabeth cruise liner, which now serves as MI6’s home from home. The ceilings, floors and hallways are angled, steep and crooked, as if it were a Jim Henson’s Labyrinth summer yacht, with some lovely and creative production design work from Peter Murton. No Ken Adam on this mission, as he was working with Stanley Kubrick on Barry Lyndon. A fact that will come into play during the next Bond adventure.

M welcomes Bond into his wonky office, which for a man who enjoys the sauce as much as he does, must be a living nightmare of coordination. Bond tells M there’s no way Scaramanga has a contract on him, as he could have murdered him that night, but instead shot a random man outside the club, which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be Gibson, the scientist inventor of the ‘Solex Agitator’, a case Bond was working on when M told him to take a holiday. Gibson told Hip (Soon-Tek Oh) that he was going to bargain for immunity and suggested that they go to Bangkok, and judging by his behaviour in the Bottoms Up club, I think we can all guess why.

Also in Bangkok is a wealthy businessman by the name of Hai Fat (Richard Loo), whom Hip believes Gibson was working for. Hip tells M that Gibson proposed bargaining with the Solex Agitator, which Q excitedly explains is a solar cell so efficient that it will solve the energy crisis, a bit like a big bowl of Ready Brek. Q does well to curb his enthusiasm, as one wave of those hands could cause a hurricane in New Mexico. Bond suggests that Hai Fat might have ordered the hit on Gibson to prevent him handing over the Solex to the British – a theory that Hip backs up when he says Gibson showed him the Solex when they were sitting at the bar, yet when he checked his body, it was gone. M then compliments Hip and Bond for being totally fucking inept and even goes so far as to call Gibson’s not-yet-cold body ‘useless’, which seems harsh in the extreme – I hope his wife and family never find out about this, or his obvious predilection for sex tourism. All is not lost, however, as Bond suggests that Fat is rich enough to fund the $1 million hit on Gibson, so he is the prime suspect – and he has a cunning idea. No one knows what Scaramanga looks like, so Bond could pretend to be him and get a meeting with Fat. All he needs is for Q to make him a pretend extra nipple, a request that Q seems shocked, but not really surprised, by. You can only begin to imagine the kind of horrors Bond has had Q construct for him in the past, like some kind of Blade Runner-esque sex parts dealer. M tells him he will need to take Goodnight with him, as she’s an ‘efficient liaison officer’, which I’m sorry to say feels like a nice way of saying ‘crumpet’.

Hai Fat’s mansion is nestled within palm trees on the top of a hill, patrolled by menacing armed guards in flares, and looking very much like it’s a sinister section of Chessington World of Adventures. Bond vaults over a high wall and immediately meets a naked woman (Francoise Therry) frolicking in the swimming pool. She tells him her name is Chew Mee, which causes Roger’s eyebrows to take down a low-flying aeroplane.

An angry Hai Fat storms up to Bond and begins to tell him to clear off when he spots the third nipple on his chest. Clearly excited by the extra nipple action, Hai Fat invites him into his house and asks why he’s there, as they agreed they would never meet. Bond then spends the next few minutes writing his own reviews and talking about how cool, sexy, hunky and awesome James Bond is, and how he should think about spending another million to whack him off. Hai Fat says he’ll think about it and tells him to come back for dinner later. Bond leaves – throwing his stunt-tit away and smiling – but little does he know that Scaramanga is watching him from Hai Fat’s house, and he really doesn’t take kindly to people mocking his triple tits.

Bond looks resplendent in his white Casablanca-style tuxedo as he arrives at Fat’s house for dinner. A wander through the strangely decorated garden of gnomes, dragons and crooked benches quickly turns sour and develops into a Ken Russell film – a world of bewildering weeping sumo wrestlers and painted dwarves wielding tridents, the latter of which (Nick Nack) knocks Bond out cold. He’s about to be murdered, but Fat orders Nick Nack to take Bond away to his fighting school.

Everyone is entitled to a holiday, a time to put your feet up and bask in the calming hue of rest and relaxation. Even one-dimensional racist policemen. Sheriff J.W. Pepper and his wife have obviously decided that after the trauma of being caught up in the chaotic and damaging speedboat pursuit in Live and Let Die, a vacation is in order – and where better than Bangkok? The best food in the world, the bustling nightlife, abundant markets, ancient temples and a thriving sex industry that caters for all foreign visitors, regardless of proclivity. There’s also the chance for Pepper to indulge in his favourite hobby: being racist. He stomps around the market dropping slurs like dandruff and generally being the worst human being to have ever walked the earth, when he is caused to stop and watch a battle on the water. A boat full of men are in hot pursuit of another and he’s able to chuckle as they are wiped out by their target, a man he instantly recognises, a man who causes him to freeze on the spot and drop the smile: James Bond, the bringer of destruction, and the architect of his pain, the man who has just escaped death at Hai Fat’s fighting school. He may be dressed like he’s going to fight Daniel LaRusso, but it’s definitely him. Pepper watches as he speeds away across the river, but is distracted by an elephant trying to pick his pocket. He stops to insult the elephant, calling it ugly, which then leads to the beast pushing him into the river, hopefully giving him terminal dysentery.

Back at Hai Fat’s house, Scaramanga empties the contents of his pockets onto Fat’s desk – a gold cigarette lighter, a fountain pen and a cufflink – while Fat witters on about how annoying it is that Bond escaped his fighting school. Fat empties his safe and gives Scaramanga an order to return the Solex to the plant and wait there for instructions. Scaramanga’s hands become busy themselves with the gold objects on the desk and within moments he’s combined them to assemble the golden gun – and Hai Fat is dead. As Fat’s personal secretary scurries into the room and asks what’s happened, Scaramanga announces that Fat has resigned and he, Scaramanga, is now chairman of the board of Hai Fat Enterprises.

At their Bangkok hotel, Goodnight and Bond are served their wine, a lovely, chilled bottle of ‘Phuyuck’, which is coincidentally the same sound Bond makes when he pushes small children into rivers. He compliments her on her dress and says that as they’ve no plans that night, they may as well ask how her father is. She mentions that her slinky dress is ‘standard uniform for South East Asia’, and that it’s made by Q. I would like to know what the practical reasons behind this dress being ‘standard issue’ are, apart from the homing beacon he’s inserted into one of the buttons, presumably so he can tune in to her movements from his sex deviant bunker. She tells Bond that she doesn’t want to be one of his passing fancies and leaves him to his thoughts. He returns to his hotel room to call the front desk to turn on the pornography, only to find Goodnight in a tiny nighty, admitting her hard-to-get act didn’t last long. They are just about to get down to business when they hear the door starting to open. Bond buries Goodnight in blankets and gets the light. Anders walks into the room and tells him that she hates Scaramanga, that she sent the bullet to Bond and that she wants his help to kill Scaramanga as he’s the only man who can. He agrees – in exchange for the Solex. While she goes to get changed in the bathroom, Bond stashes Goodnight in the cupboard and has sex with Anders. We really need to talk about his need to have people listening to him having sex.

Bond arrives late to a Thai-boxing fight, and takes his seat ringside, next to Anders. He apologises for being late and then notices she is not moving. Part of me was hoping that she was actually a mannequin and, much like in the film of the same name, only comes to life at night. However, in reality she’s been shot dead and the Solex she was supposed to bring is missing from her bag. It’s not long before we find out who did it, as Scaramanga takes a seat next to Bond, introducing himself and warning that Nick Nack is behind him pointing a pistol.

To say that Christopher Lee is having fun as Francisco Scaramanga would be doing him a disservice. He’s positively glowing as he cruises around the film like a gold Rolls-Royce on a velvet road. As Ian Fleming’s step-cousin (and his first choice to play Dr. No), there is a lovely sense of decorum about his casting, especially when you consider the first choice was Jack Palance.

While Scaramanga monologues to 007 about how he grew up in the circus, Bond spots that the Solex Agitator is on the floor in front of him – Anders had obviously managed to swipe it and was ready to hand it to Bond before she was shot – and his nemesis hasn’t spotted it, so he scoops it up with an ugly platform shoe and manages to pass it to Hip without Scaramanga noticing. Hip runs out of the arena and hands it to Goodnight for safekeeping, though he should have mailed it to the Marx Brothers, as she is immediately thrown into Scaramanga’s car boot and driven away.

The AMC showroom in Bangkok is well stocked with lovely American cars. Where else would you find an American on vacation than an American car showroom? This is where we catch up again with Sheriff J.W. Pepper, sat in the passenger seat of a red AMC Hornet. He asks about a test drive as the driver gets in, but it’s not an AMC staff member, it’s James Bond, secret agent. ‘Oh no,’ Bond says upon realising who it is, echoing the feelings of an entire cinema audience.

Bond and Pepper race after Scaramanga’s car as they speed through the busy market streets of Bangkok causing millions of bahts worth of damage in the process. Luckily, we have the comedy racist utterings of J.W. to keep us entertained in between fender benders. Things soon take a turn, however, as it becomes clear that Scaramanga has somehow managed to cross to the other side of a river, so Bond, as ever, decides to improvise.

Computers aiding movies is a part of cinema now. We can bring monsters to life, make objects move, attempt to cover up moustaches, and even bring back dead people. However, all this was unheard of in 1975. That was until Raymond R. McHenry, of the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, used one to compute how James Bond could cross the river via a broken, twisted bridge. The end result is extraordinary and the go-to car stunt moment in cinema: a high-speed barrel-roll, executed to perfection by the splendidly named Loren ‘Bumps’ Willard and landed on a dime. However, the filmmakers decided that that there was something missing: a fucking awful slide whistle. Those two elongated notes toot out like the last farts of a dying Clanger, and manage to paint shit all over our elevated senses. Instead of coming away purely wowed by this incredible feat of human invention, we’re left cursing that awful noise and the choices made to put it there – the cinematic equivalent of hitting unicorns with hammers the moment they are born. To make matters worse, the first reaction post-jump comes from J.W. fucking Pepper, sprawled on the back seat shouting excitedly like he’s just been injected with orgasms. The jump is all the more in vain, however, as Scaramanga’s car turns into a plane and flies away – and I’m not even joking.

The look on M’s face when he hears the news just about sums it all up. Whether he’s reacting to the flying plane car, or word of the slidevwhistle has just reached him, he looks thoroughly unimpressed, especially when he hears Scaramanga got away with the Solex. However, there’s some good news as they have picked up Goodnight’s homing beacon and traced it to a group of small islands.

The Republic RC-3 Seabee flies low to avoid radar detection as it navigates its way through the rocks, trees and seas of Scaramanga’s islands. But for all these precautions, Bond is expected and as he lands he receives a warm welcome from the villains. Scaramanga is positively giddy to receive his new guest and shows him around like it’s MTV Cribs. He’s a huge fan of solar power and the Solex is part of an over-elaborate machine he’s installed that can harness the power of the sun and shoot lasers, which he uses to destroy Bond’s SeaBee. Scaramanga points out that they are very similar – they kill and enjoy it – so proposes a toast: ‘we are the best’, which is a toast I will be adopting from now on. It’s so very simple, yet so fiendishly effective in terms of raising morale. He tells Bond that his one goal is to kill him ‘mano-a-mano’, which Bond accepts, but insists on eating lunch first.

Their duel starts off in a traditional manner, pistols at dawn, but soon evolves into a cat-and-mouse chase around the island. Goodnight, meanwhile, has her own duel to contend with, as she’s stuck in the power plant with Kra, the security chief, who is a sex offender with wandering hands. Bond enters the ‘Funhouse’ and after a brief battle of wits, gets the better of Scaramanga by pretending to be the mannequin he has stationed inside (a mannequin on the move). The lesson here is never have a mannequin made of your greatest enemy as you’re opening yourself up to him using it to kill you. I think that’s from The Art of War. Goodnight, meanwhile, has rid herself of Kra by hitting him over the head and sending him into one of the temperature control vats in the power plant – although this causes the plant to begin to overheat and start to become unstable. Bond and Goodnight rush to the solar laser to retrieve the Solex Agitator and make their escape as the whole place begins to blow up.

They escape aboard Scaramanga’s yacht, and watch from a distance as the entire island explodes and collapses. The yacht is set on automatic pilot, and Bond says they should reach Hong Kong in eight hours, so there’s plenty of time for some coitus. In the finest black kimono, Bond steps into the bed with Goodnight and their embrace begins. However, it’s premature (and probably not for the first time), as Nick Nack drops from the ceiling in an attempt to kill them both, only to be thrust into a suitcase like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and with the same amount of protestation.

Bond and Goodnight get back to it just as M calls to ask how they both are. Bond picks up the receiver as Goodnight passionately works his neck to tell him, ‘She’s just coming, sir.’ He then leaves the receiver off the hook next to them as they begin to have sex, and yet again, M is left listening to Bond’s Mexican push-ups while the titles roll, for what feels like the 900th time, with Bond shagging in a boat.

TEN

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

1977

If Live and Let Die was the kick up the arse Bond needed, The Spy Who Loved Me was the epic tantric session of sensual lovemaking that the franchise deserved. The fact that sex is such a key aspect to the plot is hardly surprising given that this adventure was written by Christopher Wood (oo-er), who also wrote the Robin Askwith Confessions films and a wealth of other erotica. Who better to write Bond?

We open with a new gun barrel. Bond now has FLARES. But not just any flares, these are the kind of flares that, if he turned too quickly, could knock over a small child.

A British nuclear submarine mysteriously disappears and, if that isn’t bad enough, a Russian nuclear submarine has also gone missing. General Gogol of the KGB (Walter Gotell, who previously played the SPECTRE henchman, Morzeny, in From Russia with Love – but would reprise the Gogol role in a further five Bond movies) reaches out to agent ‘XXX’ (not Vin Diesel, but Barbara Bach) who is in bed with her lover Sergei Barsov (played by Michael Billington, a very hairy man who came agonisingly closes to playing 007 after numerous screen tests and even had an official photo shoot before losing out to Roger Moore; the fact that Billington has such a minor role in a Roger Moore Bond film must have felt like salt being rubbed into an open wound). XXX gets a message to report to headquarters immediately.

Meanwhile, M takes a call from the Prime Minister with orders to put his best man on the case, so he asks Moneypenny about Bond’s whereabouts. She tells him he’s on a mission in Austria, so M orders him to ‘pull out immediately’. You see? This is the kind of magic you get from an erotic screenwriter.

In a remote Austrian cabin, in front of a roaring fire, Bond is on the floor in a romantic clinch. They’re just about to move on to some heavy petting when his Seiko watch begins spewing out a Dyno label telling him to report to HQ immediately. As he leaves, telling the woman that England needs him, she puts in a call to a team of Soviet agents who’re on stand-by.

In 1977, John Barry was a tax exile (and had been since 1975) due to hefty UK tax rates (about 80% for the wealthy), so he was unavailable to work on this film. Cubby Broccoli instead hired Marvin Hamlisch, a veteran composer still boiling-hot from his success on The Sting, to bring his unique stylings to 007. The end result is a beautifully chimerical elephant’s foot: disco infused, dreamlike in places, but with the traditional sweeping strings and cocksure brass we’ve come to expect from the saga thus far. He kicks things off with the Bee-Gees inspired ‘Bond ’77’, and oh boy does it make you feel like dancing.

During a beautifully shot Willy Bogner ski sequence, Bond is ambushed by the aforementioned Soviet agents in natty black jumpsuits with red piping. Their leader is Sergei Barsov (quite how he managed to get there so quickly from his lovemaking scene with XXX is casually skimmed over). The baddies follow Bond down the steep, snowy peak firing out the occasional rifle round, while Bond zigs, zags and backflips (though he’s not showing off) to avoid their rounds. During the melee, 007 fires off a shot from his ski-pole gun and blasts a hole in Barsov’s chest, killing him immediately – the smell of burned hair probably carried over into France. The chase continues, but they’re running out of slope as they career towards a giant cliff-edge.

While planning the opening sequence to this film, the producers came upon a magazine advert for Canadian Club. It showed a skier jumping off El Capitan with a parachute on his back. Thinking it looked suitably spectacular, they decided to find the skier and hire him to repeat the stunt in this pre-credits scene. The skier’s name was Rick Sylvester and he told the producers that the advert was faked and he didn’t actually do the jump – but he was sure he could and he wanted to do it off Mount Asgard in Canada. So John Glen (the second unit director) and his crew flew out to the mountain with Rick and they made movie history.

Bond flies over the edge of the cliff. The music stops. Hearts race. Time ceases. James Bond is going to die. As the skis fly off his outstretched legs, he pulls the cord, and out billows a Union Jack parachute, followed by the Bond theme in all its audacious pomp and circumstance. You can sit back, smile and breathe again.

The opening titles arrive and seem rather more gymnastically nude-heavy than usual, like Binder had been reading some of Christopher Wood’s books when he planned it. The Hamlisch/ Bayer Sager song, ‘Nobody Does it Better’, delivered so beautifully by Carly Simon, is an absolute triumph.

Gogol takes a seat in his typically stark Russian office. You can immediately tell Ken Adam is back as all the rooms are huge and covered in angles. He tells XXX that she will need to go to Cairo to investigate a lead on the missing submarine and that her hairy lover, agent Sergei Barsov, has been killed on a mission. He should then tell her how cool the ski jump was, but he doesn’t – I guess ‘a time and a place’ and all that. She’s visibly upset, but thanks Gogol for the update, adding that she would very much like to meet whoever is responsible, and one suspects she will.

007 steps out of the helicopter in full naval uniform, a look seldom seen but always appreciated. It’s always nice to be reminded that Bond is a commander. He’s debriefed by Captain Benson (George Baker, back again after appearing as Sir Hilary Bray in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – they really do love recasting actors in different roles, as if there’s only a limited number ever available) and Q via the way-too-complicated ‘Polaris operating authority’ – a computer that requires a key to be inserted, a series of buttons pushed and a 20-minute wait while it drifts out of the wall. Benson shows everyone the tracking data showing the last known course of the missing submarine. Bond produces an acetate chart that has been sent by M and lays it over the top of the submarine’s course. It matches exactly. The acetate came from a source working for Karl Stromberg, a wealthy entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of a shipping company called Stromberg Shipping, showing that they have the ability to track British submarines – and, therefore, potentially sink them. The room is shook.

Stromberg (Curd Jürgens) is an odd chap. He loves being under the sea. Absolutely adores it. He even has a flipper hand, which undoubtedly comes in handy when he’s beneath the waves, but presumably only if he wants to swim in really fast circles. Had he lived to see 1989, there’s no doubt in my mind that his favourite film would have been The Little Mermaid and he would have absolutely adored Sebastian the lobster’s song about life under the sea. Stromberg’s sitting at his long table eating lobster (don’t look, Sebastian) opposite his assistant (Marilyn Galsworthy), when Dr Bechmann (Cyril Shaps) and Professor Markovitz (Milo Sperber) are brought to him. He congratulates them on their submarine tracking device, but tells them that someone has been attempting to sell the plans to competing world powers. His assistant is then excused as things are about to get heated. As she gets into the lift, Stromberg uses his webbed flipper hand to press a button that feeds her to his sharks. She was the traitor selling the plans, presumably having had enough of the life aquatic and fancying a life on land again.

Stromberg bids a fond farewell to Bechmann and Markovitz and watches them fly off in a helicopter – which he then blows up. One thing’s for sure, in these early glimpses of our villain, he has a taste for pointless theatrics. If you’re going to kill three people who are in the same room, just shoot them and then feed them all to sharks – if nothing else, it would save you money on helicopters.

Jaws (Richard Kiel) and Sandor (Milton Reid) are summoned to the room with instructions to recover the microfilm of the submarine tracking system. Jaws stands at seven feet tall, has hands as big as baseball mitts and has deadly metal teeth, while Sandor looks like a pub bouncer. Horses for courses, I suppose.

The desert outside Cairo is both a wonderment and delight for the cultivated traveller and home to some of the world’s most famous historic monuments. Bond, apropos of nothing, arrives there astride a camel and dressed as Lawrence of Arabia to speak to his friend, Sheikh Hosein (Edward de Souza), whom he knew at Cambridge. Hosein’s tent is well stocked with pipes, fruit and plump cushions, while also boasting a fine cellar of semi-naked women holding trays. Bond’s offered sheep’s eyeballs and a drink, but instead he wants information about who is putting the submarine tracking system on the market. Hosein tells him it’s a man called Max Kalba, but he must meet a man called Fekkesh at his apartment in Cairo first. As it’s too late to meet him now, Hosein instead offers Bond a young lady for the night. ‘When one is in Egypt, one should delve deeply into its treasures,’ Bond utters, before presumably taking the poor young woman for some disappointing British sex.

The door is wide open at Fekkesh’s apartment, so Bond steps inside to look around, ignoring the Egyptian etiquette for doorbells – normally you need to toot and come in (hey, how about you fuck off). He’s not alone, however – his every step is being watched by Sandor through the window. Felicca (Olga Bisera), Fekkesh’s associate, emerges from a doorway to tell Bond that Fekkesh is running late and that she was told to entertain him while he waits, leaning in heavily to the not-too subtle notion that they could have sex. Bond tells her he’d love to and they then kiss very awkwardly. Sandor, meanwhile, has opened a hatch in the wall and begins to slowly and carefully point his gun at 007. Felicca sees it, and as she has immediately fallen in love with Bond, pushes herself in the way of the bullet. Bond takes off after Sandor and, after a brief punch-up on the roof, forces Sandor to tell him that Fekkesh is at the pyramids – after which he drops Sandor off the roof to his death.

Fekkesh (Nadim Sawalha) is sitting next to XXX during an aural presentation about the pyramids. It’s all very Open University and dry (with narration by Charles Gray, making this his Bond hat-trick), and they’re having a quiet chat when Bond arrives and takes his seat nearby. Fekkesh looks agitated and uneasy, a look that soon turns into terror when he spots someone else watching him: Jaws. He makes a run for it and Bond follows, giving us one of the greatest moments in cinema history. During the editing of this sequence, a shot was required of Bond peering from behind a rock as Fekkesh makes his escape from Jaws. The problem was that they’d not filmed it, so director Lewis Gilbert asked the art department to help solve the problem. They sourced a photo of Roger that suited their needs then blew it up to size, created a painting of him leaning against a rock and inserted it into the shot. Problem solved. For many, many years I didn’t notice it was there, but once it’s noticed, it’s all you can see – and the same goes for the audience watching the pyramid show as Bond makes his way to his seat – look closely and you’ll notice they are all a painting, too. Movie magic.

So, back to the action. Jaws chases after Fekkesh, biting his way through a metal chain to open a gate before biting Fekkesh’s neck like a vampire with mental dentures, killing him instantly. Bond finds the body and examines Fekkesh’s diary, which reveals that he has a meeting with Max Kalba at the Mojaba Club at 9.40 p.m. on 3 August.

The Mojaba Club is a happening joint. There are dancers with floating skirts, hanging lanterns, an erotic fountain and two spies with detailed knowledge of one another. Both are there to find Kalba and both are there to retrieve the microfilm. Bond tells the waiter which drink XXX likes and she reciprocates. She knows all about his past and even treads on the corpse of his wife by bringing up her death, which suggests to me XXX is the kind of person who doesn’t get many dinner party invitations. They both meet with Kalba and tell him they want to bid for the microfilm. Before either of them can close a deal, however, Kalba’s murdered by Jaws, who’s disguised as a telephone repair man. XXX and Bond then follow Jaws as he leaves the club and jump into the back of his van.

Quite why Jaws decides to drive them all the way to Luxor is anyone’s guess, as he clearly knows they’re hiding in his van. He could have just driven the van off a bridge, or parked up and covered the van in petrol and torched it. Or just eaten them with his metal teeth. However, as they reach the sunrise-drenched ruins, he parks up and leaves the van. Bond and XXX follow him into the ruins and engage him in a fistfight. Bond vs Jaws is always an odd fight to watch. There’s passion there, sure, and a good helping of determination, but sadly Bond’s too small to really land a definitive hand on him. XXX watches for a bit, but eventually decides she’s seen enough and draws a gun, forcing Jaws to hand over the stolen microfilm. Jaws then kicks the gun out of her hand and resumes his battle with Bond while XXX takes off with the microfilm. Sadly for clumsy Jaws, he manages to smash down some scaffolding and rocks onto his head, to which Bond inexplicably curses, ‘Egyptian builders.’

Back at the van XXX is having trouble driving, because she’s a woman. Bond ribs her about the noise the gears are making as Jaws rips apart the tin-foil exterior of the van, like some sort of driving test conceived by the Jackass dudes. They speed away and drive through the desert to jaunty music which may as well have the lyrics:

Oh my God, a woman is driving a van,

She changes gear like she burns all my chips.

Oh my God, a woman is driving a van,

See how she uses the mirrors for make-up and nonsense.

They break down in the desert – definitely XXX’s fault – and take the rest of the journey on foot while the theme to Lawrence of Arabia inexplicably plays out, as if it’s been chosen by a committee of literal thinkers.

On a boat to Cairo, Bond and XXX snuggle up and Bond tries his luck with his favourite seduction technique, which we will call ‘waiting for the in’. This technique works by asking some bland and innocent questions, but with a mild flirtatious twist at the end of each one. He then considers each answer and waits for the ‘in’, whereupon he will leap into sexual contact. In this instance it’s about KGB survival techniques. She tells him that you need:

a) A positive mental attitude (‘Nothing more practical than that’ – no sex)

b) Food is also important (Bond thinks for a moment: no, nothing. Ask what else)

c) Shared bodily warmth (THE ‘IN’ IS HERE – SEX CAN BEGIN)

The kiss begins, but XXX has a trick up her sleeve. She lights a dummy cigarette that releases a gas that knocks Bond out.

MI6 have built themselves a home from home within some desert ruins and Bond arrives to find that Gogol and XXX are in M’s office. M tells him they have agreed to pool their resources to find out what happened to the submarines. ‘We have entered a new era of Anglo-Soviet co-operation,’ says Gogol, in a way that uncannily predicted the Leave referendum campaign.

In Q’s lab the heat has obviously got to all the boffins as they’ve started inventing some really insane equipment – from a magnetic floating tea tray to a machine-gun pipe and a literal Arab spring. I guess they have to justify the budget somehow. Q has set up a projector and, from viewing the microfilm blown up on the screen, Bond is able to spot a small detail at the side. It’s half a picture of a fish and the word ‘oratory’. Gogol asks what it means and Bond smugly announces it’s another word for a chapel. XXX, however, spots that the fish looks like the symbol for the Stromberg shipping line. Bond gives her the side-eye knives and then leaps forward like some annoying kid in class to point out that it’s not ‘oratory’, actually, but ‘laboratory’. Stromberg has a laboratory in Corsica, Bond adds, which XXX corrects by pointing out that it’s actually in Sardinia. Gogol excitedly stands up and tells them that they will be working together, which Bond and XXX both begin to sulk about.

After a hearty meal, Bond and XXX return to their train cabin and chat about the business they are in. They laugh about how they can’t go into too much detail as they are on different teams; it’s all terribly jolly. Bond offers her a night-cap ‘on the company’ in his partition room. She says she’ll need to get some sleep, so he slides the door shut and bids her goodnight, no doubt mystified that his advances haven’t worked. XXX is tempted to return to him, but thinks better of it and instead opens her wardrobe to find that Jaws has been standing in there, possibly for hours, looking a bit like he’s had a lobotomy. After a fight which once again looks like a pre-school production of No Holds Barred, Bond electrocutes Jaws in the mouth and kicks him out the window. XXX sees Bond is hurt and tells him to ‘lie down and let me look at it’, which cues a saxophone player to go into overdrive.

They arrive in Sardinia to be greeted by the exciting sight of Q in a Lotus Esprit, one of the sexiest things on the planet in 1977 – and the car isn’t bad either. The story goes that the head of production at Lotus heard that the film producers were looking for a new car for Bond, so he drove a Lotus prototype to Pinewood and parked it outside their office. When Broccoli and Saltzman saw it they immediately asked for two.

Bond and XXX find themselves on a boat heading for a tour of Stromberg’s laboratory, claiming to be a married couple of marine biologists, with Bond deciding to attend in a GIANT pair of bright white flares, while XXX, in Daily Mail-speak, ‘cuts a casual figure’ in a white balaclava pulled up around her forehead like a Soviet Frank Spencer on winter patrol. Aboard the lab, which sits in the middle of the sea like a giant spider crab, Bond asks Stromberg’s new assistant, Naomi (Caroline Munro), to show his wife around while he’s with Mr Stromberg – a nice slice of misogyny, there; can’t have a woman seeing things or sitting in on meetings with important people (men).

Bond is warned that Stromberg prefers not to shake hands – probably because he knows where Bond’s have been rather than any awkwardness about his flipper hand. When they meet, Stromberg skips the niceties and launches straight into a monologue about the fact that humans shouldn’t bother with space exploration when the world beneath the sea remains unconquered. He wishes to live under the sea for ever, and points to the three main reasons why:

1) Beauty – some fish

2) Ugliness – some ugly fish

3) Death – a shark

None of these are entirely convincing as a foundation on which to build a new society, but Milton Keynes started on less. Stromberg shows Bond his plans for an underwater city, which looks like something out of Stingray and about as inspiring a place to live as Chernobyl in 1987. Bond’s response obviously disappoints merman Stromberg and he quickly makes his excuses that he has to get back to work. As Bond and XXX leave, they examine a model of Stromberg’s supertanker, the Liparus, which Bond observes has a strange design to her bows. Remember this, people.

We cut to Stromberg chatting to Jaws (well, Stromberg chats, Jaws just stands there mutely like Frankenstein’s monster). Stromberg reveals that he knows who Bond and XXX really are and orders Jaws to kill them when they get ashore.

The Lotus Esprit screams along the Sardinian country roads, with the bright-blue sea providing a rolling background. It’s not too long before they’re pursued by Jaws in a Ford Cortina and some bad bastards on motorbikes, but the Lotus has far too many tricks up its sleeve, concluding with a magnum opus: when cornered by a helicopter firing round after round into its path, the Lotus leaps into the sea, turning at once into a sleek and beautiful submarine, which fires a missile out of its head, destroying the hovering chopper.

The elegance of the sub is something to behold as it glides under the waves to the soothing beats of Hamlisch’s ‘Journey To Atlantis’. Some divers attack and inflict a mild leak, but are no match for the submersible, which fires out mists of ink and highly explosive depth charges. They eventually emerge on a Sardinian beach, as Victor Tourjansky (assistant director) looks on in shock, topless with a bottle of wine in his hand, a comedy device that would be repeated in two further films.

Back at the hotel, the receptionist (Valerie Leon) appears with a message for Bond and, looking at her cleavage, he announces she’s ‘just delivered it’, which suggests his laundry bill has just increased. He lights XXX’s cigarette and tells her that he bought a nice lighter in Austria – Berngarten to be precise – which raises an alarm with XXX, as that’s where her beau was murdered. She shows Bond a picture of her hairy dead boyfriend and asks if he recognises him. He doesn’t – well, it was chaos on that slope. She asks if he killed him and Bond basically says that he probably did, but can’t remember. He kills a lot of people, you know. She tells him that once the mission is over, she will kill him. Bang goes another shag.

They arrange to board an American submarine so that they can take a closer look at Stromberg’s supertanker Liparus. The submarine commander (Shane Rimmer) is staggered to discover that XXX is a woman and compounds this awkwardness by telling her she’s welcome to use his shower. She declines and he says that he now needs to take a shower – cut to a view of the submarine rising like an erection. Some more magic from the pen of Christopher Wood.

The sub locates the Liparus and they head to its location but, within minutes, Stromberg’s mighty tanker eats them, in much the same way Blofeld’s capsule ate satellites in You Only Live Twice – not that this is a bit of a cheeky remake, oh no . . .

The inside of the Liparus is one of the most incredible sets ever built in film history. Still annoyed by the fact that the volcano set in You Only Live Twice was highly expensive, exposed to the elements and had to be dismantled quickly, Ken Adam proposed the building of a giant sound stage, complete with a water tank with a capacity of 1,200,000 gallons, at a cost of well over a million dollars that could be used again and again. The ‘007 stage’ (the ‘Albert. R Broccoli 007 stage’ as it’s known now) at Pinewood Studios was purpose-built to house Adam’s grand design of the interior of this incredible tanker, and the end result was so vast that cinematographer Claude Renoir felt incapable of lighting it. So Adam called in a favour from his friend Stanley Kubrick, who came in at night when the set was clear and set about planning just how to light the behemoth. When the time came to shoot the sequence, the set leaps out of the screen as a grandiose feat of modern movie engineering. The stage was so effective that it is still in constant use to this day.

The crew are removed from the sub and sent to holding cells. Bond and XXX disguise themselves as grunts, but are soon spotted and taken to Stromberg. Missiles are loaded aboard the sub while Stromberg monologues to the agents. He explains that he will fire the missiles on New York and Moscow, which will cause global destruction and start a new era. He essentially explains that the world is rubbish and decadent and that he wants to live under the sea like SpongeBob SquarePants. He has Bond imprisoned with the rest of the crew from the American sub, while telling XXX she’s to come with him to ‘Atlantis’, his new home beneath the waves. You can already imagine him trying to force her into a fake mermaid tail and a shell bra.

Stromberg’s speedboat shoots out of the side of the tanker – at a speed that would definitely kill everyone on board if this was real life – and heads to his spider-crab base. Bond, meanwhile, quickly murders all the stuntmen guarding him and races to free the captured sailors on a monorail (Ken Adam bloody loves a monorail). He frees them all, and the assault on the Liparus begins in earnest. After a great deal of shooting, exploding, dangling and bomb intrigue that frankly all goes on far too long, Bond reprogrammes the subs to blow one another up and saves the world. However, there’s still XXX to save. He takes a sexy jet-ski to Stromberg’s base and, avoiding the shark trap, meets the maniac face to face in his aquatic-themed dining room. Stromberg tries to shoot Bond with a sneaky under-the-table pipe gun, but misses. What a clown. Bond immediately retaliates by shooting back through the pipe, catching Stromberg square in the testicles (which, in his weird fish-fetish way, he probably calls his ‘tentacles’), twice. No more newts playing the flute or carps play the harp where he’s going.

Only one thing stands between XXX and Bond now: Jaws. Bond’s gun doesn’t work this time as the bullets bounce off Jaws’s teeth and, for some reason, Bond doesn’t think about shooting him in the balls – or anywhere else on his ginormous target of a body. Instead, he catches Jaws in an overhead magnet and, much like a game at the funfair, drops him into shark-infested water to battle with a shark, who is probably also called Jaws.

Bond and XXX jump into an escape pod just as Atlantis begins to explode and find themselves surrounded by plump cushions, soft bedding and champagne. There’s an awkward silence as Bond, not believing his luck once again, produces a bottle of Dom Perignon ’52, offering it with a smile. XXX, however, points her gun at him with the reminder that she promised to kill him once the mission was over. The tension mounts, but the ice is broken by the pop of the champagne cork. They both smile and instead decide to have sex, giving peace a chance once and for all.

The escape pod washes up within a British aircraft carrier where M, Gogol, Admiral Hargreaves (Robert Brown) and Q crouch down to peer through the window and are shocked to discover that their agents are sexually cavorting inside. M pretends to look surprised as he surveys the scene, but this is a scenario he’s witnessed on too many occasions. ‘Bond, what do you think you’re doing?’ asks the Admiral. ‘Keeping the British end up, sir,’ Bond replies as he pulls down the Vegas-style curtains and continues the sex with a jaunty, cheeky version of ‘Nobody Does it Better’ as encouragement. I feel there needs to be a scene after this one of the assembled dignitaries looking on as the pod pathetically jiggles back and forth for a few minutes, before the awkwardness gets too much and they go and have a cup of tea.

ELEVEN

MOONRAKER

1979

Eagle-eyed viewers may have noted that at the jaunty climax of The Spy Who Loved Me, James Bond was said to be returning in ‘For Your Eyes Only’. However, something very important happened in 1977 to change all that: Star Wars. Luke Skywalker and his brave cohorts not only destroyed the Death Star and dealt a critical blow to the Empire, they gave birth to arguably the greatest Bond film ever made: Moonraker.

The eponymous Moonraker shuttle is ‘piggy-backing’ on a jumbo jet, in perhaps the only subtle metaphor of the film. Stowed away on board are two of the villain’s best Likely Lads lookalikes. They clamber out of cupboards, power up the shuttle and it takes off, leaving the jet to explode into a ball of flames. So now you know what happened to the Likely Lads.

Meanwhile, Bond is smooching with a pretty air steward on board a private jet. Why is not entirely clear, aside from trying to conquer the world record for high-altitude lovemaking. Norris McWhirter is no doubt observing with a clipboard. But before things can get too spicy, the steward pulls a gun as the pilot, who looks like one of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, emerges from the cockpit, strapped into a parachute and telling Bond that ‘this is where we leave you’. A fight breaks out and Bond throws him through the aircraft door. As he watches the pilot plummet to his death, he is shoved from behind by Jaws – back again – who has not been eaten by sharks, and is now fully goggled and parachuted.

Bond barrels through the air like a 52-year-old bullet and makes a beeline for the pilot. He tackles him, shoves his face into his arse and, after a brief scuffle, procures his parachute. (We can assume that the steward didn’t know how to work her parachute and has died.) Jaws meanwhile is also taking up some airspace, careering towards 007 at high speed. He tries to bite Bond’s ankle, but fails at the last second when 007 pulls his cord and shoots upwards. Jaws tries to deploy his parachute but is too heavy-handed and breaks it. He then flaps like a chicken all the way to the ground where he pierces a circus tent, leaving us with a close-up of his groin as the titles begin.

No expense was spared with Moonraker. Coming in at $30 million, it was the most expensive Bond film ever made at that point (according to Cubby Broccoli the opening credits alone cost more than Dr. No took to make).

Bond is greeted in the office by a worried M. Q and the Minister of Defence (Geoffrey Keen) are pacing the room, sharing the same anxious features, like someone’s found their browser history. The official story of what happened to Moonraker is that it crashed, along with the jet, and was destroyed. However, Q has the real story, and uses a mirror in M’s office that doubles as a TV screen to explain. The video has the message ‘Most Secret’ flashing all over it as Q shows footage from the crash site. Not a scrap of shuttle is to be found anywhere in the wreckage, so the speculation is that Moonraker was stolen mid-air. This is a real problem as the shuttle was on loan from NASA and they don’t have a good enough excuse about losing it. NASA will have to be stalled with stories about taking it to be valeted when they ring. Bond is told he must go to California to visit shuttle manufacturers Drax Industries. Q issues him with a new watch that can fire darts, and explains that it is activated by nerve impulses in the wrist muscles, which suggests a real danger of Bond killing himself while having a private moment.

Bond is collected at the airport by Drax helicopter pilot Corinne Dufour (Corinne Cléry). She points out the Drax estate from the air, and it all looks incredibly French, like they’re actually shooting this in France but pretending it’s California. But that would be silly. Drax, we are told, brought his estate from France brick by brick, and even tried to buy the Eiffel Tower, but had no joy with an export permit, which sounds like Drax’s way of saving face.

The astronaut trainees are out on the sun-drenched gravel exercising in skimpy clothing. We are told that Mr Drax is funding the entire training programme out of his own pocket, which presumably means he gets to stand at the back of their sessions and ‘firm up’.

Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale), who looks like Count Dracula’s accountant, is at the piano, gliding his hands over the keys. He tells Bond it’s unfortunate they’ve lost the shuttle, but is fairly philosophical about it, going so far as to quote Oscar Wilde and then talk about building a world master race. He invites Bond to tour the facilities – a Dr Goodhead will facilitate it. When Bond leaves, Drax turns to Chang (Toshirô Suga), his bodyguard, and tells him to make sure some harm comes to Bond.

James wanders into the lab and announces that he’s looking for Dr Goodhead. The female technician looks up from her clipboard and tells him he’s ‘just found her’. Which Bond greets in such a way as to suggest that she may as well be a cat dressed as a clown riding a unicycle. ‘A woman?’ he murmurs – a statement that may as well have been followed with: ‘But don’t your tits get in the way?’

Goodhead (Lois Chiles) tells him she is on loan from NASA, which begs the question: why are NASA lending things out everywhere? Shuttles, scientists, stationery. Is it a tax-loss thing? She shows him the Moonraker shuttle and begins to explain how it can land like any conventional aircraft after orbiting Earth, but Bond butts in and finishes her sentence like any proper man would.

She takes him to the G-force Simulation Machine, plugs him into the chair and helpfully points to the ‘chicken switch’, should he feel the need to stop. He asks how fast it can go and she explains that it can go up to 20Gs but that would be fatal (so why does it go that fast?), and that a 70-year-old can handle 3Gs, to which Bond retorts that there’s never a 70-year-old around when you need one.

Goodhead is informed that she has a call, and Chang secretly takes over in the control room, turning the knob higher and higher and pulling the ‘chicken switch’ lead out. The machine begins its slow whir into life, gently spinning, then turning at speed, which makes Bond’s face crumple and fold, giving us a future glimpse of how he will look in A View to a Kill (Roger was 57 in that). He’s now stuck in the furious spin of deadly G-forces. As he begins to pass out, and the end becomes nigh, he sees one final vision that will surely bring him solace as his life force ebbs away: Q’s face. But more usefully, he remembers his special wristwatch and fires a dart into the panel. This stops the machine instantly, causing Chang to curse his luck and exit the control room. Goodhead returns just as the contraption comes to rest and tries to free Bond from his seat. He looks at her angrily, refusing her help, then spots Chang leaving the room.

It’s the middle of the night. Dressed in disco gear, Bond enters Drax’s office and begins to rifle through his desk. Corinne soon joins him and they find the safe, which he easily cracks with a cigarette case. He uses his 007-branded camera (free with a James Bond magazine) to take photographs of Drax’s secret space plans and discovers blueprints for glass phials made in Venice. They both scuttle back to their rooms, oblivious to Chang watching them.

The next morning starts with a gentlemanly game of pheasant shooting. Drax is wearing a Sherlock Holmes-style Inverness cape and an Alpine hat with a feather in it. Bond arrives to say goodbye and to thank Drax for his hospitality, but Drax has other ideas. He foists a gun into his hand, telling him to shoot a pheasant. Bond relents, takes the rifle and waits for a bird to be flushed out of the bush (not for the first time). As they pour from the undergrowth, Bond takes aim and fires. Just as it appears that he has missed, a Drax would-be assassin flops out of a tree and lands on the ground. It’s at this point that Drax should really call the police and have Bond arrested for murder, but instead he watches as Bond departs for the airport. Corinne is summoned and accused of showing Bond the safe. She denies it, of course, but Drax is not convinced, and rather than giving her a verbal warning, he tells her she’s fired, and gives her a small head start to run for her life from his vicious right-wing dogs. Sadly, the dogs run faster.

Venice, with its waterlogged roads and train-replacement boat services, is the home of Venini Glass, a factory that may well be involved in nefarious activities. Bond wanders in and catches the eye of the receptionist – and you would in that suit, a sort of heavy-hanging, big-collared, flared-trousered monstrosity that looks as if it was tailored by Steve Rubell on acid. Bond observes a man in the factory engaged in some blowing, and notices that it is the same kind of hexagonal shape as the phials in the Drax blueprints. He checks the photograph he has in his pocket, and it’s a match. As he leaves, a tour guide is pointing out all the glass cabinets, shelves and objects that will be broken later in some sort of fight. Another person on the tour is also taking a keen interest: Dr Goodhead. Bond follows her as she skulks away from the group. On the embankment outside, he asks her why she is in Venice. She’s there for a European Space Commission seminar, and Bond essentially says that he keeps forgetting she’s a human being with a brain because she’s beautiful. In any event, his repartee works, and they arrange to meet for drinks later as he hops into his waiting gondola. There’s no better way to celebrate being the king of banter than a nice, calming ride on a gondola through the winding lanes of the Venice canals. But Drax’s men have other ideas.

‘Hi, is that Keith? Keith, the knife thrower?’

‘This is he.’

‘Hi, Keith. Hugo Drax here.’

‘Hi, Hugo. How’s the French château that you moved to California brick by brick and isn’t just actually in France?’

‘Good, thanks.’

‘Great! How can I help?’

‘I was wondering if you’re free tomorrow?’

‘Sure, why?’

‘How would you like to go to Venice?’

‘Venice! I’d love to! What’s up?’

‘Well, there’s this spy poking his nose into my affairs, and I’d like you to help me deal with him – I’ll pay you well.’

‘Sure. As you know, I have a vast selection of knives and I’m very good at throwing them. Shall I jump him in an alleyway or something?’

‘Well, no. I’m thinking you could be in a coffin on a funeral boat, and then sort of spring up and throw knives at him.’

‘Right . . . OK . . . Wouldn’t it be better if I just jump him in his hotel room or something?’

‘No. It needs to be a coffin on a funeral boat.’

‘I could cut his throat while he sleeps?’

‘Funeral boat.’

‘OK. You’re the boss.’

‘Don’t forget to wear make-up so you look a bit like a zombie.’

‘. . .’

Bond is suspicious of the large funeral boat as it winds its way around the corner of the canal. It’s a touch too showy for his liking. He raises an eyebrow as they approach one another and the coffin lid flips open. The corpse sits up in his seat and hurls a dagger into poor Franco the gondolier. He misses Bond with the other blade, and is dead within seconds as 007 sends it back from whence it came. And that’s the end of that over-elaborate ruse.

Many people have a problem with the hover-gondola sequence, but the many who do are wrong. It’s Bond magic, it’s why we love him, and it’s not a million miles away from the idea of a submarine Lotus Esprit. Yes, the pigeon does a double take, but so would you if you saw a 52-year-old man drifting on an air cushion through a busy tourist attraction.

Bond returns to Venini Glass under cover of darkness, dressed like disco Zorro, to further inspect the glass. He stumbles upon a secret laboratory. To enter you have to enter a special keycode, which just happens to be the five-note sequence from Close Encounters of a Third Kind – a tongue-in-cheek joke Broccoli managed to achieve by personally asking Spielberg for permission. (Being a huge Bond fan, Spielberg agreed immediately, and many years later asked for the favour to be returned when producing The Goonies, asking Broccoli if he could use the 007 theme when Data swings through Mikey’s screen door.)

The scientists are using the hexagonal phials to store a mysterious clear liquid while busying themselves with other science. Bond goes in to investigate, pockets one and leaves the other in a highly precarious position on the side of a trolley. The scientists return, and he ducks into a room to hide, which gives him a perfect view of the poor sods knocking the bottle over. In fact he may as well be eating a packet of Monster Munch as he watches them slowly fall to the floor and die in a cloud of deadly gas. (A cage of rats nearby are mysteriously unaffected.)

Bond exits the factory and is promptly jumped by Chang. The fight inevitably leads to the precious glass-object room, and they trash it heroically, throwing everything in the room through cabinets, jars and vases. They kick and punch one another among the boxes in the warehouse (all marked for Rio de Janeiro) until Chang is thrown through a clocktower window, landing dead inside a piano. His demise elicits Bond to comment, ‘Play it again, Sam,’ which probably sounded better in than out.

Holly Goodhead takes a moment on her balcony to consider the constellation of lights that garnish the picturesque Venetian night scene. She seems distracted as she walks back into her room and moves to turn on the lamp; at which point her hand is grabbed by someone making a duck noise. When the light comes on, it’s Bond – the noise remains inexplicable. It soon becomes clear that all is not what it seems with Goodhead. She is in actual fact a CIA agent, with a bagful of gadgets to prove it. They suggest pooling their resources, and judging by what happens next, fluids too.

The next day, M, the Minister of Defence and the Italian authorities join Bond in raiding the laboratory. They are all handed gas masks by 007 and warned that it will be dangerous in there. He inputs the Close Encounters theme and opens the door, only to find Drax, a desk and an otherwise empty room. Drax turns to see them all standing there like the cast of Threads on a tea break. The Minister apologises on behalf of the entire nation, and M tells Bond he has some explaining to do. After a telling-off from the Minister, Bond hands M the phial he found in the lab and tells him to have Q test it. M realises his agent is once again correct, and playfully tells him he should take a sabbatical for a couple of weeks. Does he have anywhere in mind? ‘I’ve always had a hankering to go to Rio, sir,’ Bond replies, and with a sudden flood of warmth and love, M says, ‘I think I can recall your mentioning it.’ It’s a perfect ‘M moment’. This scene would be the last thing the imperious Bernard Lee ever filmed. He was already ill at the time of shooting, and died shotly after completion. Forever loved and always greatly missed.

Drax sits behind his vast desk like Harry Redknapp trying to get a new striker. He’s offered a name and immediately lights up – with good reason. He’s just signed Jaws on a season-long loan from Stromberg United, with an option to buy. We see Jaws wander through an airport metal detector and set it off. He smiles and reveals his metal mouth to the security guard, who looks suitably freaked out.

To Rio de Janeiro, one of the most vibrant and bustling places on earth, with its golden beaches, verdant hills and stunning mountains. There’s only one way for Bond to arrive in the land of ‘Cidade Maravilhosa’ and that’s via an Air France Concorde while dressed like the Man from Del Monte. Waiting for him in the presidential suite of his hotel is Manuela, from Station DH; she’s been sent to help out, and starts by mixing him a Martini, shaken not stirred. She tells him all about a local warehouse that is a subsidiary of the Drax company, which Bond says he would like to visit later. Until then, he suggests they use the remaining five hours having sex, the poor girl.

The Rio Carnival is the biggest in the world, and the perfect backdrop for some late-night shenanigans. While the festivities go on in the streets, Bond breaks into the warehouse while Manuela keeps watch. Meanwhile, from within the large carnival crowd, a terrifying clown – at least a foot higher than everybody else – drifts down the alley towards the building, unleashing many years of childhood nightmare fuel as it does so. Manuela spots it drawing closer and looks uneasy as it removes its mask. It’s Jaws, and he smiles his metal smile and grabs Manuela to go in for the bite. However, just as he does, Bond leaps from the rafters and pushes him away. Jaws offers a small smile of recognition, which Bond returns in pure sarcastic glee. Before Jaws can attack again he’s interrupted by a group of revellers who proceed to drag him along in their wake to what is presumably an acid-fuelled fuck party.

With collars the size of hang gliders, there is no real danger of Bond falling to his death, which explains the confidence with which he peers over the side of Sugar Loaf Mountain. If he were to slip, he could simply just flap those babies and drift gently down to earth. He’s looking through a telescope at an airport, which relates to the ‘Drax Air Freight’ label he recovered at the warehouse in town. He watches a plane take off, and then notices he’s not alone in his spying. Holly Goodhead is one telescope along. They once again suggest working together and quickly conclude that Drax is moving out, but to where is a mystery. They board a cable car to head back down the mountain but are stopped suddenly by Jaws, who has located the control room and bitten through a cable (which was actually made of liquorice – fact). Jaws boards the other cable car and with the help of a small, fat bald man who has taken over the controls meets Bond and Goodhead in mid-air. ‘His name is Jaws. He kills people,’ Bond tells Holly. While Bond and Jaws scuffle, it’s worth pointing out that each time it cuts to a long shot of the fight, these are real stuntmen (Richard Graydon as Jaws, Dorothy Ford as Goodhead and Martin Grace as Bond) hundreds of feet above the ground, with no real harnesses, pretending to fight for our pleasure.

Jaws is eventually manhandled inside the cable car, and Goodhead and Bond zip down the cable holding onto a chain. The small, fat bald man activates the controls to send the cable car in pursuit, but the pair manage to drop down to a hill below, and the cable car crashes directly into the control room and main building, sending dust and rubble all over the area, and presumably killing the small, fat bald man. As Jaws emerges from the rubble amidst blatant 7 Up adverts he’s helped by a petite blonde woman in glasses and pigtails called Dolly (Blanche Ravalec), whom he instantly falls in love with. Director Lewis Gilbert said that kids loved Jaws so it was decided to make him a goodie, and you can imagine what the internet would have to say about that now. The lovestruck pair literally scamper away from the crash scene holding hands, and Lord fucking God alone knows what they get up to next. Some sort of horrendous love-related activity, the logistics of which are frankly mind-boggling, seeing as he’s at least two feet taller than her and probably hung like a French loaf.

Meanwhile, on the hillside Bond and Goodhead decide this is exactly the time and place to engage in a spot of afternoon delight. Before Bond can tell her not to worry about condoms as he knows a good trick, they are joined by four ambulance men who kidnap them, tie them to gurneys and shove them in an ambulance. All a bit heavy-handed; Bond may be riddled with STDs, but did they really have to involve the healthcare services?

Inside the ambulance Bond and Goodhead are watched over by a guard doing his nails. Usually this would be an inescapable situation with the odds too heavily stacked against our heroes, but there’s no need to panic. The plan is to have Goodhead look at the guard in a flirtatious manner, banking on the fact that he’ll get the horn. While you may think that act alone brilliant, there is another highly significant component: Bond will also wink and smile at the guard, just in case he’s gay. The guard glances between the two, gaining more and more encouragement from both. He can’t believe his luck. He’s kidnapped a pair of secret agents and they’re both swingers (probably an apt moment to note that the screenwriter is Christopher Wood of Confessions fame). However, before he has to get his pants off, Bond frees himself and squirts a fire extinguisher into the guard’s face.

As the two men fight, the ambulance careers uphill round bendy corners. They find themselves on a gurney that springs out of the back of the vehicle, sending them both rattling downhill. Bond leaps off in time, but the guard is sent flying into a billboard for British Airways, and presumably dies of horrible internal injuries. The ambulance careers off around the next bend with Holly still aboard and disappears from sight.

Elmer Bernstein’s ‘Magnificent Seven’ rings out with a real sense of ‘what the fuck am I doing in this film?’ as Bond, dressed as a gaucho, rides over the hill and arrives at MI6’s Brazilian HQ, which appears to be a monastery. Once again, it seems MI6 has moved location to exclusively service Bond wherever he goes on the planet. The other 00s must absolutely hate him.

Q is in the courtyard showing off his latest gadgets: some explosive bolas, a sleeping peasant who turns into a machine gun and a laser gun that melts faces – the latter two resembling something out of John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Q confirms to Bond that the liquid from Venice is a highly toxic nerve gas that seems to have no effect on animals. It’s made from a rare orchid found in a remote part of Brazil, and Q has just the thing to get him there – a speedboat.

Not long after that, we see Bond’s boat crawling along the Amazon river before he’s attacked by mortars. It’s Drax’s men, all dressed in yellow like rogue IKEA workers, with Jaws looming gigantically at the helm. He’s leading them on their boats as they aimlessly pump out rockets to try to blow up Bond, missing every time. Meanwhile Bond’s busy dumping mines and torpedoes from the back of his, causing most of them to explode in fireballs. Eventually he gets bored of them and heads to a waterfall, converts his boat into a hang glider and flies away, leaving Jaws and his men to plummet off the edge like a boatful of twats.

Bond lands with a bump in the jungle. He’s wearing a light grey safari suit, so sartorially he’s ready for anything. As he wanders through the undergrowth it’s not long before he stumbles upon a mysterious woman dressed in a flowing white robe. Enchanted by her beckoning finger, he follows her into a Mayan temple. There he’s greeted by more women in various states of dress and undress. He stands on a rock by the water and wryly smiles. This could be another lucky day. Sadly, the rock he’s standing on flips him into the water and he’s attacked by a giant snake. The tables have turned somewhat. Luckily he has a pen with an extendable point that he jabs into its head, killing it instantly.

Jaws pulls him out of the water as Drax arrives, flanked by guards who have cushions stuck to their heads for some reason. Drax invites Bond into his control room, whereupon we are treated to yet another piece of spectacular Ken Adam production design: a vertical, triangular stack of video monitors, with workstations in the cavernous space underneath, all set around a floating plastic bowl containing an orchid. It’s as breathtaking as it is gorgeous, and it wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar.

They watch as four Moonraker shuttles take off, and Drax briefly explains that he stole back the shuttle as he needed to replace one of his faulty crafts. This begs the question why he didn’t just make another one, but he must have had his reasons. Bond is shoved into a holding cell and meets up once again with Holly Goodhead. Before they can get too cosy, the roof opens to reveal that they are directly beneath another shuttle launch. Drax peers over the side and announces that ‘even in death my munificence is boundless’ – someone’s eaten a dictionary. He bids farewell to our spies and boards Moonraker 5, to start his new life in space, the lucky fucker.

Bond blows the door off the air vent via a gadget inside his watch, and he and Holly manage to get aboard Moonraker 6. It’s a good thing Holly is a trained astronaut pilot otherwise they would be utterly screwed as take-off commences. As they reach the blackness of space, John Barry’s ‘Flight Into Space’ begins to march in majestic style through the ears. A grand symphonic ostinato that never outstays its welcome, and evolves with each cycle.

They check to see what cargo they have aboard the shuttle and note that it’s full of sexed-up couples all kissing each other. Bond realises the whole mission is about repopulation, a bit Noah’s Ark with humans. From the darkness of space a shape emerges – a giant, floating, spider-like space-station city with a revolving satellite. It doesn’t show up on radar, so no one on Earth will know about it.

They all dock at the space station (this not a euphemism) and once the horny couples emerge from the ships (including Bond and Holly), Drax begins his speech. The plan is to wipe out Earth (I’m with it so far), then to return and start a new life with their superior race. He sells it well, and with conviction, but wanders into mild insanity when talking about ‘the ultimate dynasty which I alone have created’. Even Jaws throws a look that suggests this guy hasn’t got both paddles in the water, and Jaws seems as thick as a dinosaur sandwich.

Bond whispers to Holly that if the space station was visible from Earth it would be investigated, so they make their way to the orbital communicator, passing through the zero-gravity part of the ship (which involves them walking slowly and waving their arms about). After knocking out the guards inside, they pull a cable and thus the space station is now visible. It works too, as almost immediately Russia and America start arguing about who put it there, with the latter agreeing to send a ship to investigate.

Bond and Holly watch as Drax launches his ‘globes’. These globes are large capsules filled with phials of deadly gas, but before they can act Jaws and Drax’s men catch up with them.

They are brought before Drax, who has discovered there has been a US shuttle launch and their radar-jamming system is down. There have been memorable lines in film history, but there have rarely been any that are as indelible as ‘James Bond. You appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season’. Well done, Christopher Wood, for making the decision early on to give Drax the best lines of dialogue in motion picture history: it was a good idea.

Drax explains that his plan is to release 50 globes over Earth, which will all release their gas, killing 100 million people. Bond decides to raise the issue, while looking sternly at Jaws, of what will happen to the non-perfect human beings, and Drax makes the schoolboy error of admitting they’ll all be exterminated. Jaws looks at Dolly, Dolly looks at Jaws and Bond realises he’s nailed it. Drax orders the metal-mouthed menace to throw Bond and Goodhead out of the airlock, but Jaws rebels and starts a fight with the goons, which Bond is only too happy to join. It’s short-lived, however, as Drax soon has the rabble under control, and will shortly be blowing up the approaching American shuttle with a laser. It’s looking bleak, but luckily Bond has spotted a button that may get them out of this, so he leaps forward to push it. It stops the space station rotating, and everybody begins to float around on strings. Note to Drax: don’t put that kind of a button in the middle of a control desk. Maybe put it somewhere out of reach.

Drax’s army comes slowly floating out of the space station, looking like a chorus-line tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey performing at a funeral. In response, the US shuttle opens its cargo doors, releasing its astronauts, and the space-laser ballet match commences. This is surely the footage Donald Trump viewed when getting excited about the prospect of a Space Force, and you have to admit it’s an alluring sight.

Gravity is restored on the space station, and the shuttle pilot suggests docking to his co-pilot. The laser battle continues inside the station as Drax orders another one of his globes launched. Bond, Holly, Jaws and the US Space Force begin their assault, and the air is thick with the sight of laser-beams and the sound of late seventies synthesizers in overdrive. Drax tries to make a break for it, only to find Bond has followed him to the airlock. He pulls a laser gun and begins once again to talk instead of firing; this gives Bond the opportunity to use his watch to fire a dart right into Drax’s heart. Bond then opens the airlock, and Drax is sent hurtling into space, possibly regretting the fact that he too often favoured talking over shooting people in the head.

The space station begins to creak and fall apart, and three of Drax’s globes need to be destroyed before they reach Earth. Bond and Holly get aboard Moonraker 5, Drax’s ship, as it has a laser on board they can use to track the globes and shoot them. The docking-release system is jammed though, which is just Sod’s law. Jaws meanwhile has found Dolly and some champagne. They take a moment to sit down amidst the rubble, look into each other’s eyes and clink glasses. He announces in a voice like Barry White, ‘Well, here’s to us’ – a moment that in pure cinema terms is up there with The Day the Clown Cried. They then decide to go for a walk and bump into Moonraker 5. Bond radios to tell him they’re stuck, and Jaws helps them get away by manually releasing the docking-release system. As the shuttle departs, the part of the station that contains Jaws and Dolly separates and drifts away towards Earth, prompting Bond to take a moment out of this world emergency to tell us that they’ll be fine as it’s ‘only a hundred miles to Earth’. I don’t know, James, that sounds like a lot of miles to fall to your death in a giant doughnut of metal.

As the space station finally explodes, Moonraker 5 races to destroy the remaining three globes before they reach the Earth’s atmosphere. Showing off his joystick skills, obviously honed at Cambridge, Bond shoots the last one just as it nears the target. NASA Mission Control celebrate wildly and receive confirmation that Jaws and Dolly made it safely back to the ground, though I would dearly love to know how. A technician announces they will have audiovisual within minutes from the on-board monitors of Moonraker 5. In fact they are so excited about this joint agency venture they are broadcasting live to the White House and Buckingham Palace. The Minister is very excited about this and says he’s sure the Queen will love it, though M looks, once again, resigned to his fate. Audiovisual is confirmed, and as the screen flickers into life they are treated to the sight of their two agents having sex in zero gravity. The Minister springs forward in shock, and M just feebly murmurs, ‘007,’ in such a way that suggests he has become all too inured to it by now. He is broken. He’s seen that arse going up and down far too much for his liking, and it’s starting to show. The Minister demands to know what he is doing, and Q, checking the radar and not looking at the screen, answers that he’s ‘attempting re-entry, sir’. M sits back in his seat, shaking his head to himself. This is it, this is the fucking limit, in front of the Queen, Bond, for fuck’s sake.

Bond looks directly down the eye of the camera and for a moment seems shocked, but then quickly turns that frown upside-down and smiles for the camera, knowing that this time he has really succeeded. Not only has M had to watch, but the whole wide world too.

As Shirley Bassey’s disco ‘Moonraker’ starts up, Holly demands to go round the world one more time, and the shuttle leaves our sight, heading for the depths of space. The world below is safe once again, thanks to its greatest pervert.

TWELVE

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

1981

So, while Moonraker was a massive orgiastic Freddie Mercury-style party, with Roger Taylor wandering around in a crown followed by a dwarf in a hat filled with cocaine, champagne vomiting from the taps and caviar spilling from the fridge, the producers woke up the next morning and surveyed the damage. Moonraker had been expensive – seriously expensive – and it was also, let’s be totally honest, a bit daft. Some sensible thinking was required: thus Bond’s laser gun, space-suit and zero-gravity contraceptives were removed and he was returned gently to Earth.

James (still wearing flares in the gun barrel in 1981) is visiting the grave of his beloved Teresa, though judging by the state of the gravestone obviously not that beloved. A priest tells him that the office has sent a helicopter and Bond is soon whisked away. As he leaves he notices the (scene-stealing) priest giving him the last rites.

Ernst Stavro Blofeld (John Hollis) has a big board with switches mounted to the front of his wheelchair and is observing the helicopter’s interior from a grim industrial estate in London. He flicks a switch and the pilot is electrocuted to death via a powerful cartoon. Blofeld takes control of the chopper and informs Bond that he’s now ‘flying Remote Control Airways’. After a brief stunt show, Bond wrestles back control, and Bill Conti’s disco-lite soundtrack kicks in. Close your eyes. There’s Roger in his flares and polyester turtle neck down at Studio 54 dancing with Elton John while Bianca Jagger gets the drinks in and David Soul drinks champagne from a shoe.

Bond scoops up Blofeld’s wheelchair and takes him for a spin, whereupon Blofeld, begging for his life, utters the immortal, stupendously baffling line: ‘I will buy you a delicatessen in stainless steel.’ After playfully slapping Blofeld on his bald head, he drops him down a giant industrial chimney stack, which in all honesty is Bond’s coldest ever kill. Remove the context that this is Bond’s arch-nemesis, and ponder the dropping of a disabled man down a chimney stack, and then ponder that his body would probably only be found during the demolition decades later. A skeleton strapped to a wheelchair. It’s the stuff of nightmares.

The opening titles arrive in unusual fashion with Sheena Easton appearing in person to trill her ode to an optician (Maurice Binder apparently ‘liked her appearance’, i.e. he fancied her). Fact: Kate Bush turned down the chance to do the Moonraker theme. Why, kate, why?

The St Georges Valetta, a humble fishing boat, brings in its fresh catch as a man on board, in naval uniform, watches. The Navy’s special secret computer – aka the Automatic Targeting Attack Computer (ATAC for short) which coordinates with Polaris submarines (and probably has Pong on it) – is stashed in the guts of the boat. The naval man goes below deck and through a secret door to a series of rooms where dozens of Royal Navy officers are hard at work at a series of computers and machines with lots of flashing lights. It’s his turn to take over controlling the ATAC and, just like the man he’s relieving, he is handcuffed to the controls as he begins his shift. Back on the surface, the fishermen haul in their net. They’ve caught a sea mine, which blows up the boat and gives the naval man no time to press the self-destruct button on the ATAC system as the room floods. The boat sinks, and the ATAC is lost – for now.

Melina Havelock (Carole Bouquet) charters a sea plane to visit her parents; they’re marine archaeologists working on a secret job and are cagey about what they are up to. As the plane departs, she hands them some gifts: a dress for Mum and a book for Dad (likely a Wicked Willie annual). She’s about to take some nuts to her dad’s parrot when the sound of an engine breaks the silence. The plane is coming back, and before anyone can figure out why, a burst of machine gunfire rips through the deck. Melina races to her parents, but they are dead, and that dress will be covered in blood so she can’t even get a M&S refund.

Moneypenny walks over to her filing cabinet and opens the top drawer, which causes a mirror to fold outwards. She’s just putting the first coat of lipstick on when a hat flies through the air and lands on the hatstand behind her. Bond’s here. He hands her a flower on his way to meet with the Minister of Defence (Geoffrey Keen) and the Chief of Staff, Bill Tanner (James Villiers). We are told M is on leave, but in reality Bernard Lee had sadly not long died and they couldn’t face recasting him just yet, which was decent of them.

The two men waste their time and ours by asking Bond if he knows what the ATAC system is, which he obviously does. He duly explains what it is in great detail, only pausing at the end to ask for a donation to keep his personal Wikipedia going. They tell him that five days ago it sank in the Ionian Sea, and if it were to fall into enemy hands our submarines could be ordered to fire on our cities, which frankly sounds like a blessing. They can’t mount an official salvage operation, so they asked marine archaeologist Timothy Havelock to do some covert digging. But before he could submit a report he was murdered by Cuban hitman Hector Gonzales (Stefan Kalipha). Operation Undertow is launched. Bond is handed a folder marked ‘For Your Eyes Only’, and his orders are to go to Gonzalez’s villa near Madrid and find out who hired him, what his favourite band is and who does his nails.

The Lotus Esprit is back, weaving its way along Spanish country lanes while Bill Conti’s mariachi band toot their horns to celebrate in Mexican Top Gear-style. Bond locates the villa, just as another car arrives, driven by the evil Emile Locque (Michael Gothard) who looks like the leader of the terrorist wing of Gardeners’ World. A party is in full swing with revellers strolling around the pool in skimpy swimwear – it’s all a bit reminiscent of the last 30 minutes of Boogie Nights. There’s playful chasing, swingball and laughing, but probably also a man crying while dealing with a woman who’s OD’d on coke in Burt Reynolds’ bedroom.

Bond watches from the bushes as Locque arrives to pay Gonzalez for the hit, but he’s cause to pause when he notices a figure walk past. He follows, obviously hoping it’s a dogger, but is ambushed by two of Gonzalez’s men, and brought before him. Gonzalez can tell he’s a British secret agent from his gun (which should get him on You Bet!), and orders his men to take him away, before proceeding to the diving board. In the worst case of ‘Watch this!’, he dives into the water, only to be killed by an arrow in the back. Bond takes advantage of the chaos and punches his way out of trouble, utilising a sun umbrella to leap over the hill and land to safety. He runs through the woods, fired at by armed men, until he comes face to face with a crossbow. The arrow fires past him, right into the chest of a pursuer. The archer removes her mask. It’s Melina Havelock, enacting her revenge while also becoming a beekeeper. Bond grabs her hand, and they run away. Gonzalez’s men foolishly try to break into Bond’s trusty Lotus Esprit, only to be engulfed in an explosion. Luckily Melina has a car waiting, a cute lemon-yellow Citroën CV, which receives a double take from Bond, some jaunty beep-beep music from Bill Conti and a broken heart from children everywhere who wanted more Lotus action. However, the car chase we end up with is stunning. It’s fun, creative and on the right side of silly, with the ever reliable Rémy Julienne and his team of awesome drivers once again turning the ordinary into the sublime.

Melina was there to avenge her parents’ death, and she now wants to kill the man who paid Gonzalez. The wise Bond warns her that the Chinese have a saying about ensuring you dig two graves before setting out on revenge. She tells him she doesn’t expect him to understand because he’s English. She’s ‘half Greek’. She’s going back to her father’s boat to carry on his archaeological work.

The Minister is displeased: Bond was supposed to question Gonzalez, not allow him to be murdered with an arrow. But Bond saw the man who paid Gonzalez and could identify him, so he’s sent to the Identigraph, which isn’t an eighties nightclub but a special machine in Q’s lab. As ever, the creative spark is off the charts down there, with a plaster cast that smashes plastic people’s heads (manned by Boba Fett himself, Jeremy Bulloch) and an umbrella that closes and kills someone at the first sign of water, which could become problematic when used in Britain. Bond and Q approach the Identigraph room and enter the keycode – the tune of ‘Nobody Does It Better’, and sadly not ‘Shaddap You Face’. The computer is booted up by inserting a gigantic data disk into what looks like a washing machine, and Q explains that it’s still at an experimental phase. As it beeps and whirs into life, the lights dim to a menacing red. Q asks Bond to describe the man he saw, and begins to type in stuff. Within about 64 hours, a real 3D photofit of our man emerges, looking every inch like a photograph. Q prints it out on a dot matrix printer and they have an instant match. Emile Locque is an enforcer responsible for many murders, including strangling his prison psychiatrist, and he’s currently in Cortina. The Chief of Staff tells James to meet their man Luigi Ferrara (John Moreno) there, and not cock up again.

The red (‘copper’ to be pedantic) Lotus Esprit stands out somewhat as it speeds through the snowy landscape, complete with a jaunty ski rack. Ferrara tells Bond that if Locque is in Cortina they will find him, and takes him to meet Aristotle Kristatos (Julian Glover), a reliable Greek contact who knows everything that’s going on. He introduces Bond to his protégée, Bibi (Lynn-Holly Johnson). She asks if Bond will take her to watch the biathlon. He agrees, which makes her day, and surely proves that she needs to get out more.

Bond shows the picture of Locque to Kristatos and asks if he knows him. Yes, he does: Locque is Columbo’s right-hand man. Milos Columbo (Topol), known in the Greek underworld as ‘The Dove’, is involved in numerous smuggling operations. Kristatos tells them that Columbo and he were once like brothers, but Columbo took a different path. He’s more machine than man now, and has been seduced by the dark side. Ferrara thinks Columbo could very well mount a salvage operation for the ATAC, as he runs a fleet of intercoastal freighters in the Aegean. Bond tells Ferrara he’ll see him later, as something has caught his eye. It’s Melina in a sports shop buying a crossbow.

Bond ducks into a florist’s and spots a gang of bikers beginning to drive towards her. He rushes out to save her, sending one of her assailants through the florist’s window. (Bond asks her to send the lilies she’s holding to the biker’s funeral, which just goes to show that, deep down, he really cares.) He asks Melina why she’s in Cortina, and she tells him he sent her a telegram telling her he’d found out who hired Gonzales and to meet him there today. Bond obviously did not send this; he sent her a crude picture of his genitals. He suggests she leaves for her own safety.

Back at his hotel room, he finds the door unlocked and a Do Not Disturb sign on the handle. He knows he didn’t put it there, so draws his gun and slowly enters. Hearing the sound of the shower, he approaches the bathroom door, only to see Bibi come bounding out, wrapped in a towel. She slides into his bed and confesses that she wants to have sex with him. She tells him sex is good for muscle tone and will help with her training, and this is where he should tell her that 25 years’ hard labour is also good for muscle tone, but he’d like to avoid it if possible. He suggests she gets dressed and that he’ll buy her an ice cream, which is as nice a way to put it, really. Say what you like about 007, he isn’t a wrong ’un at heart.

At the biathlon, East German champion Erich Kriegler (John Wyman) shoots all his targets perfectly as Locque spies through binoculars. Bibi, a fan, says hello to Kriegler, but he totally ignores her. He obviously doesn’t want to end up in prison either. Bond offers Bibi a word of advice about not growing up too soon, which is a caring way of telling her to stay away from him until she’s at least 20.

He skis down the hill at a casual pace, passing the rough undergrowth and snow-topped tree line. He’s unaware that he’s in Kriegler’s rifle sights. A shot rings out, misses, and Bond hurries behind a tree stump. An hour ago Kriegler was an ace shot, but clearly the experience of Bibi trying to snare him has rattled his powers.

A ski and motorbike chase begins, with Bond out-jumping, out-tricking and out-skiing his pursuers at every turn. Bill Conti realises he accidentally left the music for a softcore porno on his orchestra stand. Cue slap bass, trumpets, cowbells, synths and bongos – all the ingredients you need for a top movie in 1981.

In what can only be described as ‘asking for trouble’, Bond arrives at the ice-skating rink to say goodbye to Bibi. He pumps her for information about Kriegler. She’s about to spill the beans about him being a defector when her trainer tells her it’s time for her rubdown. ‘I could eat you up alive,’ she says, embracing Bond, which is probably the go code for the FBI guys in the van nearby. As Bibi leaves the ice, the lights go out, and Bond is suddenly surrounded by an evil ice hockey team, who begin to bump him around – obviously trying to break his hip, knowing what age he is. He deals with them and returns to his car, only to find Ferrara dead, a white dove badge in his hand – the exact same badge Locque was wearing.

Melina comes to shore in Corfu – to ‘do some shopping’ – and is over the moon to be greeted by Bond. A day spent together ends with the pair watching the sunset and Bond asking if her father left any clues about the wreckage site. She tells him she hasn’t had the courage to go back into her dad’s study since he died. Bond tells her not to worry; he’s meeting a contact at the casino who may give them a lead.

Bond and Kristatos take a table outside and chat about Columbo. Kristatos assumes he’s there to arrest him due to his drug connections and urges caution, suggesting instead that killing him would be best. He points Columbo out to Bond. He’s at the table opposite with the Contessa (Cassandra Harris, married to Pierce Brosnan at the time – fact), and what Kristatos doesn’t know is that Columbo has a secret recorder at their table taping everything they’re saying. He and the Contessa have a very public spat, and she storms out. Bond, sensing he may be able to use the occasion to have sex, races after her to ‘make sure she gets home all right’. She declares that he looks like a gentleman, possibly the biggest stretch since David landed an uppercut on Goliath.

In the car Bond tells the Contessa he is a novelist writing about Greek smugglers. Does she happen to know any? (This line of questioning might be considered very, very shit and deeply transparent, but let’s move on.) She asks him back to hers for champagne and oysters, proving once and for all that the surest way to a woman’s heart is to pretend you are a novelist writing a book about something highly specific and mildly suspicious. However, it turns out that Bond isn’t the only one out to deceive. The Contessa is actually a scouser, and admits that the argument with Columbo was all an act. She was sent to find out more about him as he is a spy. Bond takes this as a cue to kiss with tongues while pouring champagne on the carpet.

The next morning, as they take a stroll along the beach Bill Conti farts out a soft jazz trumpet – a brand of MOR muzak that’s scientifically designed to make middle-aged men don a comfy cardie and take up pipe-smoking. The couple seem to have really connected over the music – and their night of intercourse – and as they look into each other’s eyes to embrace, surely nothing can ruin this sensual moment. That is, apart from Charles Dance and Locque in dune buggies, who drive over the hill, run over and kill the Contessa. So that was nice while it lasted.

Dance grabs Bond and takes him to Locque for execution, but is quickly executed himself with an arrow to the back. As Locque speeds away Bond sees a group of scuba divers dressed in black emerging from the sea. They are emblazoned in white doves, and before questions can be asked Bond is knocked unconscious.

A guard opens the door to his cabin and orders him to get dressed in a blue roll neck, with matching sports jacket and slacks. It’s time to meet Columbo, who welcomes Bond to his office while stuffing his face with pistachio nuts. He plays him the tape from the table chat with Kristatos and tells Bond that he’s got it all wrong. He’s not the bad guy. Kristatos is; he’s the one who smuggles heroin, employs Locque and works with the Russians. He explains that Kristatos wants Bond to kill him because he knows too much. Bond doesn’t trust him though, so Columbo suggests they visit one of Kristatos’s warehouses in Albania. Then he’ll see for himself what kind of operation he runs. Columbo admits that he likes Bond, that he has courage, what the Greeks call ‘thrasos’ – which presumably means gonorrhea.

At the Albanian warehouse, Locque oversees the workforce from behind a clipboard – surely the most well-travelled and overworked henchman in movie history. A gunfight begins, and it’s not long before Bond and Columbo’s men are essentially high-fiving each other after murdering bad guys. If it was Columbo’s intention for this warehouse raid to act as some kind of workplace bonding activity, then he is a management genius. Bond dips his finger in a barrel and licks it. It’s raw opium, and the warehouse is full of it, but before they can really explore this, Locque blows it up and drives away, probably thinking he’s covered his tracks and got away with it. He doesn’t bargain on a 53-year-old man with an unquenchable taste for revenge and the best pair of lungs in the business. Bond runs up hills, over bridges, through tunnels and to the top of a giant staircase to get in front of Locque’s car, and as it speeds towards him he puts a bullet in the villain’s shoulder, and then watches as the Mercedes comes to a stop, leaning precariously over a cliff edge.

Locque tries to escape, but each movement makes the car tip closer towards the drop. Bond approaches the passenger door. ‘You left this with Ferrara, I believe,’ he says as he pulls the white dove pin from his coat and throws it into the teetering vehicle before booting the side of the car and watching it tumble down the cliff face. Of all the scenes Roger Moore shot as James Bond, this was the one he had the biggest problem with (think about that for a moment). He felt that his Bond appealed to children. He was fun, warm and, for want of a better word, cuddly. He certainly wouldn’t kick a man’s car off a cliff, and he really wasn’t comfortable with a scene showing him to be so callous. John Glen managed, eventually, to talk him into it by suggesting that perhaps the weight of the pin being thrown into the car resulted in its fall, and the boot was merely a garnish. This eased Roger’s conscience and he filmed the scene through gritted teeth.

Melina is a strong, independent woman. She has shown that she knows her way around a crossbow and isn’t afraid to use it. She’s proved that she’s brave enough to walk into any situation and has a burning urge for revenge. Shame, then, that we next see her in Crete, hoovering the bottom of the sea – a terribly reductive female cliché, and a job that anyone can do, regardless of sex. She is cleaning an underwater archaeological site, which is a chore, but before she can sing ‘I Want To Break Free’, her spirits are lifted by the arrival of Bond in his scuba gear, looking like E.T.’s deep-sea cousin. Interesting fact about this sequence is that all the close-ups are not underwater, but shot on a dry sound stage with slow-motion wind machines, with bubbles added later. (Carole Bouquet, who played Melina, had a health condition that meant she couldn’t go underwater.)

Back on the boat, Bond tells Melina that her father was using the temple site as a front while he searched for the sunken ship, so Kristatos killed him to ensure that he found it first. He asks to see his daily log, just like Gillian McKeith would, but the book is all in a special kind of shorthand. Luckily for Bond, Melina is the only one who can decipher it. They discover the spot where her dad was looking, and race there in a two-man submarine to retrieve the ATAC. On their return, they are greeted by Kristatos and his men.

They’re roped together, and prepare to be keelhauled – not an actress, but a horrible method of torture which like scurvy, flares and prostitutes was popular with sailors. This sequence is lifted directly out of the Live and Let Die book – another example of the Bond movies treating the source material like a buffet, rather than a set menu. The boat speeds away as Bond and Melina watch the rope rapidly uncoil. ‘Hold tight,’ Bond tells her before they are whipped into the sea and dragged along the waves at high speed. They escape and swim down to the bottom of the sea, to the site of the archaeological dig – Melina left a scuba tank there earlier – and they both take turns breathing while Kristatos looks for their bodies, eventually giving up, the lazy bastard.

Back on the boat they sit in luxury dressing gowns, having dressed their wounds, and curse the fact that the ATAC is most probably on its way to Moscow or Havana by now. The smell of failure hangs heavy in the air until the parrot chirps, ‘ATAC to St Cyril’s,’ a few times, causing Bond to raise an eyebrow.

St Cyril’s is where Columbo’s family used to hide from the Germans, a mountaintop location that looks as hard to reach as Douglas Bader’s shoelaces. Bond has a plan, though; he’ll don a middle-aged man’s gilet and climb the side of the rock as Topol, his men and Melina watch anxiously – and it isn’t even for charity.

Bond reaches the top, only to be immediately spotted by a guard and kicked in the face. He drops a very long way, but manages to not die, and prepares to shimmy back up the rope. Meanwhile, at the summit, the guard who kicked him is trying to hammer out the pitons Bond has secured, which will cause him to fall even further. He’s just about to hammer out the last one when Bond reaches his location and sends a piton into his heart (surely a love song for climbers). This causes the baddie to fall to his death with a floppy dummy body, a known medical condition when under deep stress during a fall in eighties action movies. A basket on a rope brings up Columbo and co., and the assault on St Cyril’s begins in earnest.

Gogol approaches the monastery in a helicopter with armed guards, and the time for handing over the ATAC draws near. Bond and Columbo deal with assorted henchmen, and the former is sent bursting through a stained-glass window right into Kristatos’s room, like a hapless Frank Spencer. After a brief scuffle that ends with Kriegler being thrown to his death, a race on foot to stop Kristatos reaching Gogol with the ATAC begins. Columbo tries, but only manages to grabs a shoe. Bond gets there, and pulls the machine from his desperate hands. Melina steps in front of Bond and begs him to get out of the way. She’s itching to put an arrow into Kristatos to quench her thirst for revenge, but before she can fire it off, Columbo lands a knife square in his back, and the villain falls to the floor.

Gogol and his guards dismount the chopper and join the scene. He needs to get his hands on the ATAC. Bond goes to hand it over, but at the last second flings it off the cliff. Everyone watches as it spins towards the ground for a good fifteen minutes, eventually shattering into thousands of pieces at the bottom. Gogol looks on in shock. ‘That’s détente, comrade. You don’t have it. I don’t have it,’ says Bond. His smile says it all. He’s a man who has just saved the world again. Gogol decides he admires the move. Columbo, meanwhile, is having his wounds tended to by Bibi. He hands her some of his pistachio nuts by way of thanks. ‘It looks like Bibi has a new sponsor,’ Bond observes. Columbo winks at him, not knowing that he will soon be arrested by the FBI as part of a highly complicated sting operation.

The Minister and Chief of Staff are in Q’s office, and everyone is excited. They’re about to patch a call through from the Prime Minster herself. Bond is mid-snog with Melina, considering a midnight skinny-dip, so this may be an inopportune moment to call, but as he’s dropping his dressing gown, his Seiko watch begins to talk to him. He takes it off and puts it on the parrot’s perch.

Here’s where John Glen’s ‘I want this to be a hard-edged Bond’ story falls to pieces, as we start off with a disabled man shouting about kitchens and plummeting to his death in a chimney, and we end with Janet Brown – at the time the primo Thatcher impersonator (before Steve Nallon) – being verbally harassed by a parrot, who she mistakes for Bond. The Minister has Q quickly cut the call before the parrot descends into some real filth. The parrot laughs like he smokes 70 a day before throwing the watch into the sea, where Bond and Melina are presumably having rampant sex underwater. Roger Moore allegedly hated this parrot/Thatcher end to the film, believing it was the just the kind of silliness that his Bond movies were criticised for – and you can see his point. Although, compared to some of the stuff that would happen in Octopussy, this is small fry.

THIRTEEN

OCTOPUSSY

1983

In 1982, Roger Moore was humming and hawing about doing another Bond film. After his three-contract deal finished with The Spy Who Loved Me, he was on a sort of rolling contract, like a builder, and much like a builder he would suck through his teeth at the job in front of him and then sit in his van for a few days. However, at the eleventh hour, Roger said yes to donning the safari suit (and, in this instance, clown costume) and work began on Octopussy. Curiously, the film went head-to-head with a remake of Thunderball, produced by Kevin McClory (one of the original screenwriters of Thunderball) and starring, astonishingly, Sean Connery, back one last time to play Bond. McClory had fought a long legal battle to retain the film rights to Fleming’s Thunderball novel and was now ready to cash in on this new, independent adaptation, called Never Say Never Again. As far McCory’s rivals at Eon were concerned, this battle-of-the-Bonds was a race where they could not finish second.

Octopussy opens at an army base somewhere in South America. Bond has arrived in a convertible Land Rover with a horse box, looking every inch like a country gentleman who’s turned up to throttle your goose for a small fee. However, within moments he’s whipped off that outfit to disguise himself as Colonel Luis Toro, complete with fake moustache and military uniform, like some sort of cold war Leclerc from ’Allo ’Allo. He’s there to plant a bomb inside an aircraft hangar, but the mission has been complicated by the fact that the real Colonel Toro is also in the hangar – and catches him planting the bomb. As plans go, this is a very shit one – at least wait until the guy you’re impersonating isn’t in the room.

Bond is thrown into the back of a truck and driven out of the base, but help is at hand, as his female contact follows in the Land Rover and ‘Operation Boner’ can begin.

Operation Boner is very simple: Bond’s companion draws alongside the truck and shows the two soldiers guarding Bond her legs and a bit of boob. The guards become distracted enough for Bond to pull the cords on the parachutes they’re inexplicably wearing, which drags them off the back of the truck. Bond climbs into the Land Rover, and he and his accomplice drive away. They are soon pursued by Toro’s men, however, so Bond gets into the horse box where he finds a Bede BD-5 aircraft, which essentially looks like Ronnie Corbett’s private jet, hidden underneath a fake horse’s arse. The arse opens and out he pops in his tiny plane before taking off. As he flies back towards the base, Toro’s men fire a heat-seeking missile at him, so Bond zips down to the hangar (missile in tow) and flies out the other side just as it detonates, killing Toro and most of his men. Toro should have thanked him – fiery death being preferable to filing a report detailing everything that just happened.

East Berlin. A circus clown is running away from a Big Top under the cover of night. As he vaults a barbed wire fence and runs through the woods, a pair of knife-throwing twins give chase, eventually hitting him right between the shoulder blades and sending him tumbling into a river where he’s swept downstream. This clown is made of sterner stuff than most clowns, however, because he is 009 of MI6. He gathers just enough strength to climb out of the river, stagger across a garden and fall through the glass back door of the British ambassador’s residence clutching a Fabergé egg before finally expiring. Great job. RIP 009.

There’s a new set of sexy legs in Moneypenny’s office. They belong to her new assistant, Miss Penelope Smallbone (I know, wtf). Bond tries some mild flirting while looking like her dad’s old pervy mate and Moneypenny looks on, looking more like her gentle mother than the sexy love interest of years gone by. Time is a cruel thief.

We have a new M played by Robert Brown (who appeared as Admiral Hargreaves in The Spy Who Loved Me) and although he lacks the hidden pockets of love and affection that Bernard Lee showed for Bond, he has the perfect degree of ultra-grumpiness and is great in the role. He introduces Bond to art expert Jim Fanning (Douglas Wilmer, with a voice like velvet) and they show Bond a Fabergé egg, which, of course, Bond knows everything about, being a smartarse – except for the fact that the one he is holding is a fake. The real version is being auctioned at Sotheby’s later that day and it’s the fourth egg to show up for auction that year. The circumstances of this appear dodgy and Fanning says the vendor appears to be a Russian, so M would like Bond and Fanning to go to the auction and investigate. M hands Bond a folder marked ‘Operation Trove’ and tells him he will be replacing 009, the clown who turned up dead in East Germany holding the egg (which is not the euphemism Bond is probably imagining).

In Moscow a bunch of senior ministers and generals are having a meeting about disarmament talks with NATO. The room looks like the Soviet version of The Apprentice, but with a longer desk and angrier-looking bearded men. Our old friend Gogol is telling the room that by adopting the NATO proposal, the USSR will not be compromised, however one man rabidly disagrees: General Orlov (Steven Berkoff). Orlov is obviously the Minister for Mad Bastards, as he goes on to tell the room that the USSR has overwhelming superiority over NATO and essentially suggests invading neighbouring countries, believing that the West will not retaliate because they’re ‘divided and decadent’. Someone should really point out that just because Western countries generally hate each other and enjoy the odd bit of cake, it doesn’t mean they won’t fight back if the Soviet army start driving tanks into their gardens. The room agrees with Gogol and Orlov is sent to sit down and sulk. However, what the room doesn’t know is that Orlov has a sideline in hooky gear, like Del Trotter, and after he leaves the meeting, he visits Lenkin (Peter Porteous), his forger at the Kremlin Art Repository. Lenkin tells Orlov the fake Fabergé egg he made was lost by the knife-throwers and they think it fell into the river. Lenkin is freaking out because he’s replacing the Fabergé eggs in the repository with fake ones (allowing Orlov to sell the real ones for a fortune) and if anyone finds the fake one they lost, the scam will be uncovered. Orlov plays it cool and tells Lenkin not to worry – he’ll get the real egg back via the London auction and everything will be fine.

Bond and Fanning are at a green poker table watching as the real Fabergé egg is being paraded around the auction house for potential buyers to drool over. Fanning tells him it should fetch £300,000 at auction, but Bond barely hears as he’s perving on a woman (Kristina Wayborn) who has just walked into the auction room. She takes her seat next to the mysterious Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan) and as the egg reaches the predicted £300,000 price tag, Khan raises his hand to take the bids higher; Fanning explains that Khan is usually a seller, so it’s interesting to see him buying today. The price rests at £400,000 and there’s an air of acceptance in the room – until Bond raises his hand to take it to £425,000. Fanning gulps like he’s just seen a naked ghost and wonders if Bond has lost his mind. Bond explains that he wants to see how badly Khan wants the egg and, as the price rises, he asks to take a closer look at it. Despite the whole room looking at him, Bond manages to swap it for the fake that was delivered by 009. In the end Kamal is forced to pay £500,000 for the fake egg and storms out of the auction room giving Bond the stink-eye.

M is livid at Bond’s auction antics, which sounds like a cracking early nineties game show, and asks him what he would have done if he’d ended up having to buy the egg. Bond coolly explains that he would have claimed it was a fake, because he swapped it, which causes M to almost shit his pants. Bond explains that if it were a genuine purchase the buyer would complain, but he’s sure that Khan will not, because he’s crooked, like Hillary in the future, and is up to something. M tells Bond to get his ass to Delhi and do some digging into Khan.

Having arrived in India, Bond steps off a boat at Gangaur Ghat and walks up the stairs to be greeted by a snake charmer (Vijay Amritraj) playing the Bond theme on a flute – and everyone thinks Wes Craven was good at meta filmmaking. The story goes that Cubby Broccoli met Amritraj while at Wimbledon and cast him there and then – and had his tennis skills incorporated into the script (sort of). Cubby obviously wanted in on that highly lucrative tennis movie fan market. Umm.

Vijay tells Bond he’s the special expediter for Universal Exports, which presumably means he does everything really quickly, and introduces Bond to Sadruddin (Albert Moses), who is head of Section I but also drives a taxi on the side (which is a terrible way to drive a taxi). On the way to the hotel they fill him in on Kamal; he’s an exiled Afghan prince and a keen sportsman – yes, he plays tennis. This titbit causes Vijay to pipe up and tell Bond that he plays tennis, in a cack-handed wink to the audience. They point out Khan’s hilltop palace and tell him the best way to get to him is to play him at backgammon – at the very hotel where Bond happens to be staying.

The hotel games room. There are all sorts of table-based games going on in here: backgammon, roulette, craps, blackjack. There’s probably a corner where some keen games of Buckaroo, Mousetrap and Monopoly are in full swing. Bond wanders down the stairs in a white tuxedo, looking like the star of a regional TV station remake of Casablanca, and observes an army major playing Khan at backgammon. The major is taking a beating and losing a load of money, but Kamal goes right for the Achilles’ heel of the gambler and suggests doubling the stake, which the major accepts immediately, while sweating like a turkey that, due to an administrative error, has mistakenly been invited to a Christmas party. Kamal then rolls a double six and chuckles about how it’s ‘all in the wrist’.

Suddenly the major begins to have a bit of luck and it looks like he might beat Khan at last. However, he isn’t wholly stupid and turns down the proposal to raise the stakes even higher, as Khan always seems to be able to roll a double six at the crucial moment. Bond, though, tells Khan he’d be delighted to take the bet and swaps with the major. So Khan rolls again and gets his familiar double. The room gasps, like he doesn’t do that every five minutes, but Bond asks if they could double the stake again to 200,000 rupees, which Khan happily accepts, though asks him if he has the money. Bond replies by plopping the Fabergé egg on the table and pointing out that it should be enough capital to cover the debt. The room gasps once again and Kamal tells Bond he will need a lot of luck to beat him – so with a classic Roger eyebrow raise, he grabs Khan’s dice and says he’ll use player’s privilege, rolling a perfect double six and then demanding his 200,000 rupees. Khan goes to pay him with a cheque, like a student buying milk, but Bond tells him he’d prefer cash, like a baller. Khan gives him a face to suggest ‘you’ve made a powerful enemy’ and tells him to spend the money quickly. ‘It’s not really in the wrist, you know,’ Bond says as he hands Sadruddin a wad of cash, before ruining the whole thing by adding, ‘Keep you in curry for a few weeks, won’t it?’ – a line that feels like it was taken from an early episode of Till Death Us Do Part.

Vijay fires up the tuk-tuk and they drive away from the hotel, presumably to point at more Indian people and make curry jokes – but they are not alone, as Khan’s henchman, Gobinda (Kabir Bedi), is following behind with a fleet of angry men and a comedy blunderbuss rifle. Bond tells Vijay to put his foot on it and a tuk-tuk race begins through the streets, featuring a gag that the filmmakers had clearly been dying to put in since the casting process, which sees Vijay hitting bad guys with a tennis racket. Oh, how the 1983 audience laughed at that one – particularly with the added kicker of the crowd turning both ways as the fight progresses, like a tennis match, proving once and for all that tennis and comedy make the finest of bedfellows. They soon escape Gobinda, but not before we see a browned-up Mark Heap juggling fire, just to add an extra bonus insult to proceedings.

Q’s Indian lab is a wretched sight with depressed-looking lab technicians, some just wearing pants, frantically trying to assemble the fruits of their labour. Q himself is tending to a real-life rope trick, that doesn’t work and requires someone to wear pants and climb up it as it pathetically bends under the weight. To what purpose this gadget could serve is anyone’s guess, unless it’s to be used outside the window of someone getting undressed. Q has developed a homing device with a microphone in it to be placed inside the egg and, while inserting it, he exposes his hands to a magnifying glass, giving us a terrifying enhanced vision of his baguette fingers and disturbingly long, thick nails. He then shows Bond a pen with acid in it, that also has a listening and homing device included, and a camera watch, which is the latest in ‘liquid-crystal TV’. Ever the Steve Jobs, Bond then utilises the technology to zoom the camera right into a pair of boobs. You can imagine director John Glen guffawing in the cutting room, ‘That’s one for the dads out there.’ God save us.

Bond is pleased that Magda, the woman from the auction, has joined him for dinner at the hotel, however, it’s not purely a social call as she tells him Kamal Khan wants the egg back or he’ll have Bond killed. The threat of death might usually be a bit of a passion killer, but Bond is made of sterner (unrelentingly persistent) stuff.

Back at his hotel room, Bond and Magda’s clothes are strewn in such a way as to suggest that rather than get undressed in a sensual manner, they simply exploded off their bodies. In bed they drink champagne and kiss, making me wonder what she’s getting out of this, and how the scenario reminds me of that man who pretended he’d won the lottery for a weekend so people would like him.

Bond spots a tattoo on Magda’s back that looks like a child’s transfer that you get free with bubblegum. It’s a picture of an octopus and he asks what it is. ‘That’s my little Octopussy,’ she says, like it’s a thing that normal people would say. She then waits until he’s asleep and steals the egg – it’s awful how young people can prey on the elderly and steal their valuables. Bond wakes to find Magda about to leave and then watches as she ties one end of her dress to the balcony railing before hurling herself over the edge and sort of abseiling to the ground on her unfurling dress, where she’s met by a waiting Kamal Khan. Bond smiles smugly, knowing he can now trace where the egg is going, but the smugness is soon interrupted as he’s knocked unconscious by a lurking Gobinda.

‘In-out-in-out,’ a female voice says as a boat full of women work the oars on their way towards Octopussy’s floating palace. Kamal stands on the deck, egg in hand (again, not a euphemism), taking in the sights of the extravagant elephant statues as the boat slowly docks. ‘The egg has been recovered,’ Khan announces when he sees Octopussy (Maud Adams, another weird bit of recasting, having played Andrea Anders in The Man With the Golden Gun), as if to suggest it has been up someone’s colon and he’s come fresh from A&E. He tells her he has Bond at his palace and he’ll find out all he knows soon enough, but Octopussy wants Bond brought to her, which Khan isn’t happy about.

Bond wakes up at Khan’s palace and watches through a window as Khan brings the egg back. That night, he burns out the bars on his window with the pen Q gave him. Does he escape and go for back up? Does he head straight for Khan’s room and batter him to death with a Slazenger tennis racket? No, these things can wait: it’s best to go to Magda’s window and watch her get undressed. His deviant behaviour is soon interrupted, though, as Orlov arrives in a helicopter, meaning Bond can follow and spy on his meeting with Khan via his pen-microphone. You can say what you like about Q, but his selection of add-ons with this pen have been spot-on. Khan shows Orlov all the fake jewellery they’ve made for him and also presents him with the egg he’s recovered, which Orlov then smashes, thinking it’s the fake, and tells Khan he must kill whoever stole it. Bond ducks into a freezer room full of hanging corpses and swaps himself with one of the bagged-up bodies, making his escape from the palace when some grunts come to dispose of the bodies outside.

Khan and Gobinda discover that Bond has escaped and begin a hunt to track him down, each riding an elephant into the jungle. Bond races through the trees while Khan announces the sport has commenced. His first obstacle is a giant candyfloss web full of plastic spiders, which he manages to brush off, before being viciously attacked by a stuffed tiger on a wheelbarrow that the producers found in the palace of the Maharajah during a cocktail party. Luckily for Bond, he’s able to wheel out a surprise of his own, and give us a Barbara Woodhouse impression. Woodhouse had her own TV show in the seventies and eighties where she would train dogs and help owners to gain control of their pets. Her catchphrase was ‘SIT!’, which she would proclaim in a loud stern voice while holding up a finger. The filmmakers obviously thought it would be hilarious if Bond shouted this at the tiger. And you know what? It is a bit funny, but I do wish they’d stopped there. Instead they went for one more gag, deciding that the thing that would cap this chase scene would be Bond swinging through the trees on vines doing the actual Tarzan roar from the old TV show, which is as dire as it sounds.

Back at Q’s lab, while being massaged by Vijay for some reason, Bond shows Sadruddin a very good drawing he’s made of Magda’s tattoo. Sadruddin tells him it’s the symbol of a woman who lives in a floating palace. No one knows her real name, but they call her ‘Octopussy’ and we don’t want to know why – ever. Vijay tells Bond the island is supposedly full of beautiful women, with no men allowed. ‘Sexual discrimination,’ Bond says. Yes, this Bond, who just 20 minutes ago was using his new spy watch to get a close-up of a pair of boobs.

Outside the floating palace, a lone crocodile weaves its way through the calm water and surface vegetation. The majestic, wrinkled old beast opens its mouth like a car boot to reveal another inside, like some sort of Russian doll of cold-blooded predators. What this scene is really missing is the addition of a horny male crocodile following on and falling in love with the model, with hilarious/terrifying consequences.

Bond watches on from the bushes like a public park pervert as naked women frolic in the clear waters inside the palace, before making his way to Octopussy’s room. When he creeps in she reveals that she’s been expecting him. As is the norm by this stage of the franchise, she, like everyone in the world, knows his name, his 00 number and that he has a licence to kill (although, at his age, he’s nearing a time when he’ll have to do an annual test for his licence to drive). She asks him if he remembers a man called Major Dexter Smythe, whom he was once sent to arrest. Bond, unable to recall the fact that he spent most of The Man with the Golden Gun with Maud Adams, is nevertheless able to instantly recall Smythe, who ‘after a brilliant military career, was seconded to our Secret Service. His mission was to recover a cache of Chinese gold seized in North Korea. Both he and his native guide disappeared. The gold was never found.’ Twenty years later, Bond was sent after Smythe when the guide’s body turned up with a bullet in his skull – from Smythe’s service revolver. Bond found Smythe in Sri Lanka and gave him 24 hours to sort out his affairs before taking him back to the UK – but Smythe committed suicide rather than face the disgrace of a court-martial. Octopussy reveals that Smythe was her father and Bond asks if she wants revenge – but she doesn’t, she wants to thank him for giving her dad an honourable end.

Bond obviously thinks he’s about to get some thank-you sex, but just then Kamal Khan bursts into the room to tell Octopussy that Bond’s escaped – only to discover Bond there drinking champagne, which is awkward. Khan asks for the chance to take care of Bond personally, which sort of sounds like code for swinging, but Octopussy tells him she’ll deal with him herself, which confirms Bond’s suspicions that he’s in there. Khan leaves, but he’s not very happy – and nor should he be as getting to her floating palace is a real pain in the arse.

‘My father became a leading authority of octopi,’ she says, in a sentence that will only ever appear in this film. She shows Bond a picture of him holding one like they’re a comedy double act. ‘His pet name for me was “Octopussy”,’ she adds, which leads to so many questions that are never truly answered and makes me suspect there may have been another reason why he shot himself.

After murdering poor Vijay (who is keeping watch on Octopussy’s island from across the river), Gobinda’s team of mercenaries sneak into the palace under the cover of nightfall. One of his men, who uses a saw on the end of a yo-yo (but seems to only be able to work exclusively from high vantage points and mezzanines), tries to kill Bond and Octopussy while they are snogging, but his effort fails miserably. There then follows a fight with yo-yo man and various other heavies – which sees one of them die via an octopus humping his face. Bond and yo-yo man get in a struggle by a window and end up falling through it and into the river below, whereupon a crocodile arrives and seems to kill them both. However, all is not what it seems, as the crocodile is actually Bond’s getaway vehicle – for times when I guess he needs to make a snappy exit. Sorry.

Bond makes it back to Q in his fake crocodile, where they find Vijay’s mangled body. After momentarily grieving and thinking about all the free tennis lessons he’s now lost, Bond tells Q to radio M and ask him to meet Bond in Berlin, as that’s where Octopussy’s circus is going next. Yes, she has her own circus.

The Big Top stands out in East Germany’s Karl-Marx-Stadt, like a rococo oil painting in a brutalist car park. Bond sneaks into the audience to watch the show and observes Orlov sitting next to Khan and Octopussy. The knife-throwing twins do their act, followed by a drunk-looking human cannonball. As the show climaxes, Bond sneaks out dressed as an employee and tails Orlov into Octopussy’s train caboose that stands on the tracks outside the tent. Inside the caboose, Khan, Gobinda, Octopussy and Orlov watch the knife-throwing twins seal a canister full of fake jewellery inside the base of a cannon. Bond hides underneath the train as Orlov’s men move it down the tracks and into a tunnel, and then watches as, unbeknownst to Octopussy, they swap the caboose with a duplicate which has a nuclear bomb inside the cannon instead of the jewels. The circus’s next stop is a US Air Force base across the border in West Germany and thousands will die – either in a nuclear meltdown or via circus boredom – when Octopussy’s circus smuggles it in there.

Bond returns to the original caboose where he finds one of the twins recovering the jewels. Bond kills him by dropping a cannon on his head and then changes into his clothes – which somehow stretch to fit his significantly larger body. Orlov comes to collect the jewels but Bond’s there waiting for him. ‘Sit on that box. Hands on your knees,’ Bond barks at Orlov as he enters the carriage. He tells Orlov he’s from the British Secret Service and is very concerned about the bomb that’s set to go off. Orlov seems entirely not-arsed, so Bond asks why he’s not worried about US retaliation. ‘Against whom?’ Orlov asks with a cheeky smile and Bond quickly works out the plan: the US early-warning system will rule out the bomb having come from Russia and assume it was an accident with one of their own weapons, which will lead to disarmament in Europe. With borders undefended, Orlov and his army will be free to invade. Bond is about to get Orlov to disarm the bomb when a guard walks in and Orlov escapes during the subsequent shoot-out. Meanwhile, the circus bomb-train of death sets off towards the border.

Bond grabs a Mercedes and, after puncturing the wheels, takes it on the tracks to follow the train. He jumps aboard and sneaks inside the caboose as Gobinda and the other knife-thrower chat. The train stops at the border and guards perform an extensive search of the carriages – even searching the cannon carriage. Who am I to cast aspersions on their searching skills, but they somehow miss the middle-aged man who has climbed into a gorilla suit and is standing in the corner. Quite how Bond managed to get into the outfit without being spotted by Gobinda, the knife-thrower or the guards is equally mysterious. Nevertheless, they find nothing and the train is allowed to proceed into West Germany.

As Orlov arrives at the border by car, trying to catch up with the train, a helicopter lands with Gogol onboard. He watches as Orlov races through the border gates but before he can get too far he’s gunned down and falls onto the tracks. Gogol reaches him and reveals he found the car full of jewellery that Bond crashed in pursuit of the train, and was not impressed. ‘A common thief,’ he observes, but Orlov tells him that tomorrow he will be a hero, before closing his eyes and dying, kissing goodbye to this B-plot that felt like two films fighting each other for our attention.

Back on the train, Bond, still ludicrously dressed as a gorilla, watches as Kamal, Gobinda and the knife-thrower begin to arm the bomb. Khan confirms the time and how long they have before it goes off, and the comedy gods smile on us once again as the gorilla suit breaks cover to check its wristwatch in the background. After a noise made while Bond tries to penguin-walk towards the bomb, Gobinda realises that someone is in the suit and draws a sword to chop the head off. However, with the same speed as the costume transformations in Stars in Your Eyes, Bond has somehow already got himself out of the suit and climbed to the roof of the train. After a very cool bit of train-walking and a fight with Gobinda, Bond and the knife-thrower tumble from the train. A chase through the woods ensues that is a throwback to the start of the film, but this time it’s the British agent who gets the upper hand. ‘That’s for 009,’ says Bond, as he watches the thrower die in a shed, proving the old adage that revenge is a dish best served with knives.

The circus, meanwhile, has arrived at the airbase and the pilots are having the time of their lives as they watch trapeze artists spin and flip and sad-looking elephants stamp on see-saws to avoid getting the hose again. Gobinda guards the cannon and then signals to Khan that it’s time to go if they don’t want to die in a massive nuclear holocaust.

Bond speeds up to the base in a stolen car and, after getting no joy with the jobsworth on the front gate, ploughs through and dumps the car. There is very little time left on the clock before it blows, in fact just over five minutes. Time is of the essence and it’s very important that Bond gets to the bomb and defuses it as quickly as possible. So he decides the best thing to do is to duck into a trailer and dress up as a clown – with full make-up, giant shoes, extravagant costume and matching hat and wig. He lollops into the Big Top and demands to be taken seriously about there being a bomb in the cannon. Luckily the US generals believe him – probably because clowns are never funny – and Octopussy helps him open the cannon to reveal the bomb, with eleven seconds left on the clock. Bond manages to defuse it in the nick of time as Octopussy looks on, face loaded with rage at Khan’s betrayal. She asks Magda where Khan was going and she tells her, ‘Back to India,’ despite her lips not saying that at all.

Khan is getting ready to leave. Money, gold, printing plates, toothbrush, razor, they’re all going in the bag. Gobinda tells him the plane is refuelled and they’ll be ready to go at sunrise. Outside the palace some sexy ladies are occupying the guards while Octopussy’s action ladies silently enter, taking out each and every guard they come across and getting into position to lift Octopussy up to Khan’s room via a pole (so maybe Q’s magic rope gizmo might have come in handy after all – if only he’d got it to work).

Suddenly a hot-air balloon floats into range, but not just any hot-air balloon, a Union Jack one, piloted by Q and co-piloted by 007. Bond sees Octopussy has been taken by Khan’s men and jumps through a window as they run down the stairs. He snatches a machine gun and fulfils the dream of every child when they see a long, winding banister. The Bond theme kicks in as Bond slides down the banister while firing a machine gun – being careful not to smash his bollocks into the decorative knob at the end. Q lands the balloon on a bad guy and is warmly received by the ladies. He offers to have sex with them later and, somehow, they’re not outraged by this suggestion. Soon he’ll have them in the palm of his hands – but in a literal rather than metaphorical sense.

As day breaks and the palace falls, Khan and Gobinda board the plane with Octopussy. Bond arrives just in time to leap onto the wing and hold on for dear life as it takes off. Khan sends Gobinda out to fight him, which he doesn’t seem very keen on, and tries his best to stop Bond while waving a dagger, but is quickly, and entertainingly, twanged in the face with an aerial and sent falling to his death (radio killed the Gobinda star). Still clinging onto the plane, Bond bends the flaps, forcing it to land. As it hits the ground, Bond slips inside the plane and grabs Octopussy just before the plane tumbles off a cliff edge, killing Khan in a fiery explosion.

Bond is lying on a bed in Octopussy’s boat, looking like something out of Carry On Again, Doctor. His leg is propped up and his arm is in a sling above his head – but it doesn’t stop him from necking with Octopussy. She mourns the fact that he’s in a weakened condition and wishes he was better, so just like that he pulls his leg and arms out of the braces and begins to snog her properly. ‘Oh, James,’ she murmurs erotically and, as we watch the boat sail away towards the sunset, she then exclaims, ‘JAMES?!’ and I will go to my grave wondering what this could possibly mean. Was he sick? Was his penis broken? Did he briefly die? None of this will ever be answered and you know what? Maybe it isn’t important. What is important is that Octopussy won the 1983 battle of the Bonds, sending Never Say Never Again packing, making $27 million more at the international box office. And quite right too.

FOURTEEN

A VIEW TO A KILL

1985

A View to a Kill is not a comedy. It was written as a straight-down-the-line traditional Bond movie. Yes, they’ve always contained humorous elements and gags, but the serious nature of the enterprise has always managed to surface. However, A View to a Kill is without doubt the funniest Bond film ever made. Hands down. Obviously it’s not meant to be, but literally everything about it is just so very, very funny. From the fact that Roger Moore is 57 years old to the Carry On dialogue, it’s the feelgood comedy of the Bond franchise, and whenever it goes on, my heart soars like an eagle.

It’s 1985, and we still have Roger in the gun barrel wearing flares. It’s only a film, but James Bond should not be wandering around in the mid-eighties in flares. He isn’t Kirk St Moritz, he’s James effing Bond. He should be in a shiny suit with rolled-up sleeves, a ‘Frankie Says’ T-shirt, white trainers and Wayfarers. Instead of shooting a bullet at the screen, he should be winking over those shades and moonwalking out of shot. Alas, they obviously thought ‘fuck it, it’s his last one’, and left the flares in – to their eternal shame.

A Red Army helicopter flies over Siberian glaciers. The pilot, the spitting image of Gordon Brown, is observing a snow patrol below (not the band, thank goodness). Meanwhile, a lone, hunky and definitely not old skier is using a gadget to detect something buried in the snow on a peak. He finds a corpse buried there and searches it for the prize. Located within a necklace of the dead man’s family is the purpose of this mission: a precious microchip. (In 1985, microchips were very important and scary.) Predictably Bond is spotted and the ice-ledge he is perched on collapses under intense gunfire.

After a brief, action-packed chase he’s left looking at the pieces of his once trusty snowmobile. Thinking fast, he utilises the blade from it as a snowboard, causing a karaoke version of ‘California Girls’ (performed by Gidea Park) to begin. It fits like an embarrassing dad doing ‘La Bamba’ at a wake with the deceased, and it’s an example of one of those moments that must have felt funny on set, and that they then decided to film, rather than wait an hour or two to consider whether it is funny or shite.

Bond makes it back to a submarine that’s disguised as an iceberg – and I use the word ‘disguised’ loosely. It looks like a Blue Peter Christmas project based on a Thunderbirds polar expedition. Inside, a woman waits for him, presumably the submarine pilot who has sadly drawn the short straw for spending an Arctic mini-break with 007. He delights her with the contents of his satchel – one microchip, some chilled vodka and a tub of caviar – and pushes a button that converts the interior into a giant, creepy bed, something along the lines of a blueprint for Peter Stringfellow’s camper van. Within moments he has her in an embrace and sucks the very life force out of her. When the sub arrived in Alaska the smell must have been medieval, her body a bumper pack of dried prunes.

Duran Duran launch into the theme tune, and visually it’s a feast of glow-in-the-dark women, laser eyes, ice sculptures and naked skiers. As opening credits go, it’s a barnstormer. Le Bon, Rhodes, Taylor, Taylor and Taylor get Bond completely, delivering a dynamic theme that is arguably one of the very best (and inarguably the biggest seller of the lot). Plus, Simon Le Bon gets to say his name like James Bond and use his Walkman to blow up an airship in the video – possibly the happiest he’s ever been when not on a yacht or tied to a windmill.

In M’s office Q is humoured as he drives a beeping robot dog around the office carpet. ‘A new pet, Q?’ Bond enquires as he enters. Q has the temerity to suggest that it’s a ‘highly sophisticated surveillance machine’, when in fact it looks like it was made by the pre-schoolers’ branch of Fisher-Price. Q puts aside his toy and briefs the room about a new microchip that has been developed to withstand the effects of an EMP blast; the chip Bond recovered in Siberia is identical, so the KGB must have a pipeline into the research company. Q, regrettably, is not helped here by a close-up of his hand holding a tiny microchip, which only serves to act as a monstrous proportional nightmare, like the Elephant Man wearing a child’s woolly bonnet. The company that makes the chip was recently acquired by Zorin Industries. Bond suggests Max Zorin could be behind it, but the Minister says no. Zorin is a leading French industrialist who hates communists and has friends in the government. Surely it’s suspicious that the leaks started just after he bought the company, counters Bond, and M agrees. They tell him to investigate, but to be very discreet.

With a combined age of over 300, Bond, Moneypenny, M, the Minister and Q watch the horses warm up for the big race at Ascot – one horse in particular. Pegasus, Zorin’s horse, is running. M and Bond train their binoculars on Zorin who’s in the crowd. Apparently he was ‘born in Dresden, fled from East Germany in the sixties, holds a French passport and speaks at least five languages, no accent’. If all that is truly the case, why get Christopher Walken, the man with the strangest accent in the world, to play him? Bond asks who the giant woman is with him (it’s Grace Jones), and all M knows is that she’s called May Day. Trainer Sir Godfrey Tibbett (Patrick Macnee) is not amused; Pegasus wins the race with absolute ease, and in all his years he’s never seen a horse run that fast. As Zorin receives the trophy May Day calms the crazy horse down. Tibbett suspects some tampering may be going on. He tells Bond that the French Jockey Club agree and have hired an investigator. It makes sense for Bond to meet this investigator toute de suite.

To the Eiffel Tower, that ‘huge, massive private part, penetrating the skies’ (to paraphrase Rowan Atkinson), and the restaurant halfway up the shaft. Bond is having after-dinner drinks with Achille Aubergine (Jean Rougerie), perhaps the greatest character in 20th-century cinema history. He is to detectives what the baby-eating Bishop of Bath and Wells is to the Church. He marinates in champagne at the table behind a Kenny Everett-esque French moustache and obvious dubbing. He tells Bond that he has no information about Zorin, it’s all been a totally wasted journey, but before he can drink more, or fondle himself under the table, they are interrupted by Dominique and the Enchanted Papillons, an act so bankrupt as a form of entertainment it should feature in the end titles of Phoenix Nights. The lovely Dominique beckons butterflies and whistles at them while some chamber porn music dribbles out in the background. Achille is becoming aroused. ‘Perhaps we should add this butterfly to our collection, no?’ he says, dribbling. Bond asks if Zorin could be drugging his horses, but Achille tells him nothing shows up in the tests. Zorin is holding a sale at his stud farm near Paris. ‘Security is formidable,’ says Achille, ‘but the key to this mystery is there. And I, Achille Aubergine, intend to find it.’ These are inspiring words. After all, if Bond approaches detecting in the same way he does being a committed pervert, there is no way he can fail. However, before Achille can say anything else, he is murdered by a rogue butterfly that shoots straight into his face. Don’t cry for him. It’s surely how a man like Achille would have wanted to go: face down in some potage, with a rictus face of sheer terror. RIP Achille.

May Day runs from the room and Bond’s stuntman gives chase, only to be momentarily floored by a fishing rod that gets tangled in his legs. He watches on helplessly as she climbs onto a girder and parachutes from the tower. He gives chase, stealing a car from a stereotypical French cab driver who was quietly reading a paper, probably while drinking wine and selling pen knives to English schoolkids with naked ladies on them. Bond follows the parachute as it descends, with some formidable driving from Rémy Julienne (doubling for Roger while wearing a cat on his head). May Day comes to rest amidst a wedding party, on a boat, and Bond leaps over a bridge in pursuit. Unfortunately he crashes straight through the skylight and crushes the wedding cake with his heavy old body. ‘Congratulations,’ he says, handing the bride a broken chunk of cake – utterly ruining her day and leaving her with the vain hope that someone filmed it and can post it on YouTube decades hence. Bond is captured by two chefs brandishing cleavers and is forced to watch as May Day boards a waiting speedboat and glides away across the waves. ‘So?’ the pilot of the speedboat, Zorin, asks. May Day nods, and they both begin to laugh, with May Day going on for a fraction too long, but she is supposed to be unhinged.

A miffed M collects Bond from the police station. He was supposed to be very discreet, remember, not recreate Wacky Races on the streets of Paris. M then utters one of the greatest lines in Bond history: ‘What did you learn from Aubergine before his untimely demise?’ – one that feels as heavy as a solid granite slab of Shakespeare. Bond tells M about the horse sale and that he feels he should go; Tibbett can arrange things.

Bond reminds Sir Godfrey to wear his hat as they drive the Rolls-Royce into Zorin’s estate. He can’t pose as Bond’s driver/ butler without wearing it, apparently. Bond announces himself as ‘St John Smythe’, a name so utterly conspicuous that he may as well have said, ‘Dr Spy Man’. As Bond looks around the estate, Sir Godfrey follows Zorin’s in-house Nazi, Dr Carl Mortner (Willoughby Gray), who’s escorting Pegasus into his stable. He waits for Mortner to leave the scene and then sneaks into the stable – only to find the horse gone. Scarpine (Patrick Bauchau), Zorin’s head of security, tells Bond that his boss is keen to meet him at a reception later, and that he has a room at the château. There, they are greeted by an attractive young woman who introduces herself as Jenny Flex (played by a young Alison Doody, who has worked with three Bonds), to which Bond replies, ‘Of course you are.’ This makes no actual sense, linguistically. He asks her if she spends much time in the saddle, and she makes the mistake of telling him she enjoys an early ride, so he tells her about his morning glories.

The reception is a glamorous affair, with many guests dressed like they’ve just traipsed off the set of Howard’s Way or a Haircut 100 video. Bond spies Zorin with a beautiful woman, and quickly puts on his varifocals. She’s handing over a cheque. Once the pair leave, Bond sneaks inside and makes a perfect traced copy of the written cheque. It’s for $5 million, and not a drawing of a man with an erection.

Dr Mortner sees Bond exit the office, and tells him he will show him to the bar. Bond assumes that Mortner is a doctor of medicine, but he’s not: he’s Zorin’s ‘breeding consultant’, which sounds like he holds Zorin’s clothes while he goes at it on the living-room floor. He starts talking about selective breeding and how it can apply equally to human beings. Alarm bells ring. Zorin butts in and introduces himself to ‘Mr Smythe’, telling him his stables were built by a duke who believed he would be reincarnated as a horse, and that duke’s name? Mr Ed. Bond feeds Zorin a line about a ‘dotty old aunt’ who left him some stables, so he thought it might be fun to breed horses. He prods Zorin with a comment about whether he enjoys fishing, which annoys Zorin slightly and makes him leave. He doesn’t care though; the woman he saw with Zorin earlier has just walked past on her own, so he chases after her with a champagne bottle and two glasses. He asks if she fancies ‘joining the party’, in the way a man in the seventies who owns a mobile disco would have done, but she seems distant and tells him she’s not there for the horses. May Day pushes in. The woman’s ‘heellycopter’ is leaving in 20 minutes. This disappoints Bond, but, ever the gentleman, he asks if he can walk her ‘to the chopper’, which we sense is not what May Day meant. He smiles wryly as May Day escorts the woman away from him and his various issues.

It’s night-time, and Mortner is locking up the stables after a hard day at the eugenics chalk face. Tibbett and Bond emerge wearing tracksuits, looking like a couple of dads who’ve come to pick up Donna and Tracy from the disco as it’s nine o’clock already and it’s a school night. They sneak into the stable and discover a lift that takes them to a subterranean lab. They soon discover that Pegasus has had microchip-implantation surgery. Performance-enhancing steroids can be injected via a remote-controlled transmitter that’s small enough to fit into the exact kind of cane Zorin had at Ascot. Before they can talk further, two of Zorin’s men, dressed as bookies, are heading down in the lift to investigate. Bond puts the test tube he was looking at back in the wrong place, and they both head down to a deeper level that turns out to be chock-a-block with giant boxes full of microchips. They take out the guards and head back to their rooms before they are caught.

May Day is sporting a leotard that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination – rather like any recent Ridley Scott film. She’s helping Zorin perfect his white guy karate moves, but as he pins her to the floor and goes in for a kiss, she attempts to bite his face off. The phone rings, and he shouts angrily that he gave explicit instructions not to disturb his white guy karate session. However, his head of security tells him there have been intruders in the warehouse. They check Bond’s room. His bed is empty. May Day suddenly remembers where she’s seen him before – he was the man who chased her at the Eiffel Tower. He must be found. She goes back to her bedroom to get changed, only to find Bond in her bed. He’s been waiting for her to take care of him personally, which momentarily seems like he has early-onset dementia and thinks she’s his late wife. She’s fine with that, though. She strides right in and shuts the door behind her. Bond may think this will be normal sex, but it will not: she flips him onto his back and climbs aboard. He will be a changed man in the morning, with a noticeable limp.

Zorin has Bond brought to his study in the morning. He knows all about the break-in, and Mortner noticed that a test tube was out of place. He’s not letting on yet, though; instead he tells Bond he has a sophisticated computer that will help him select the right horse for his purchase. It’s a BBC Micro, and he doesn’t even bring out the tortoise that you could programme to go round corners. He takes secret photos of ‘Smythe’ and types this into the computer:

REQUEST INFORMATION IDENTITY OF SUBJECT

CLAIMS TO BE ENGLISH

JAMES ST JOHN SMYTHE

The computer instantly replies:

THE SUBJECT IS . . . . . . . . . . . JAMES BOND

USUALLY ARMED . . . . . . . . . . .

EXTREMELY DANGEROUS

LICENSED TO KILL

Zorin had Google beat in 1984. If only he’d lived, he may have invented the iPhone and a workable version of iTunes.

Zorin suggests they go for a morning ride together; Bond can try out the horse that is ideal for him. After Bond gets dressed he tells Sir Godfrey to go into town and call M to get that cheque traced.

The horse is called Inferno, and he has plenty of spirit. Zorin tells him that if he stays the course and doesn’t fall off, he can have the horse for free. They’re joined by some odd-looking men on horseback who look like ‘they keep themselves to themselves’ most nights. Zorin explains that they are exercise boys, to make the jump training seem more realistic. The race begins, and many dirty tricks are employed to make Bond fall, such as raising fences, prolonging jump distances and showing Inferno a picture of a lady horse with no clothes on. However, Bond is way too good at this. Even when he’s crowded out by the weirdo exercise boys and punched and kicked, he stays in the saddle. Zorin has had enough. He activates the button in his cane, causing Inferno to suddenly go crazy and bolt into the woods.

As Bond approaches a road he sees the familiar sight of Sir Godfrey’s Rolls-Royce and heads directly to it, but upon jumping in, he finds Sir Godfrey dead in the back and May Day in the driving seat pointing a gun. Zorin pulls up on his horse and reveals he knows exactly who Bond is, and that it’s time for him to die. Bond is knocked out and put in the back of the Roller with his dead companion, and the car is then pushed into a river. Zorin and May Day watch as it slowly sinks beneath the surface. Bond awakes just as the water rushes in, and manages to swim out of the car and use the air valve from the tyre to breathe while he waits for the pair of villains to leave the scene. (There’s a great episode of the Robert Llewellyn and Jonathan Hare series Hollywood Science where they attempt this very trick to see if it would work in real life. It didn’t.)

Gogol is annoyed with Zorin. He did not request approval before killing Bond. Zorin essentially tells him he doesn’t want to work with the KGB anymore, and has May Day lift one of them up and throw him to the floor while Grace Jones’s boyfriend at the time, Dolph Lundgren, observes. Gogol tells him he will regret it: no one ever really leaves the KGB.

Zorin, though, has other things on his mind. He’s convened a meeting of microchip investors on his airship – where else? – to show them his plan (title: Project Main Strike) to get rid of Silicon Valley. They all need to pay him $100 million to be part of the gang, which causes much gasping around the room. One of the investors is so outraged he says he wants no part of it, so Zorin asks him to wait outside (you’re thinking this scene is exactly the same as the one in Goldfinger, and you’d be right). May Day escorts him out and drops him through the floor, causing him to turn into a dummy, because of the extreme stress, and fall hundreds of feet to his death. As the airship floats over the Golden Gate Bridge, Zorin and May Day enter the cockpit to take in the sights. ‘What a view,’ she says, rapt, ‘To a kill,’ he replies, not realising that he’s just made no sense whatsoever.

Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco: crabs, clam chowder and a flock of seagulls (not the band). Bond is there to meet CIA agent Chuck Lee, who reveals that Mortner’s real name is Hans Glaub. During World War II he experimented on women in concentration camps to enhance intelligence, and it led to a handful of babies being born with phenomenal IQs. There was an unfortunate side effect, though, in that they were all psychotic. Zorin fits the profile. Lee tells Bond that there’s something interesting going on with his oil operations: a local fisherman confirmed that Zorin’s oil pumping station has caused all the crabs to disappear, at which point Bond checks his underpants.

The water bubbles as Bond emerges in scuba gear, looking like he’s got lost from a Saga undersea adventure expedition. He watches guards patrolling Zorin’s oil station and overhears them mentioning the testing of some new equipment. He isn’t the only diver eavesdropping. Across the water, two KGB agents in scuba gear are listening in to Zorin’s meeting. Bond submerges and sneaks into a water pipe, just as a test begins and the turbine fires into life. Not for the first time, he is being sucked into a big hole; on this occasion he will have to make his excuses and leave by shoving his air tank into the propeller and jamming the turbine (which is how sex worked back then). As he emerges from the water he spots May Day grabbing one of the KGB agents, who was busy planting a bomb, and dragging him upstairs. Zorin is very unhappy. Main Strike is in three days and this stunt could have wrecked everything, so he hurls the KGB man into the pipe and watches as he gets chopped up by the propeller. Bond follows the other KGB agent to the shore, only to discover that it’s the sexy Pola Ivanova (Fiona Fullerton). She has a secret tape of everything Zorin just said. They jump into her car and get out of there fast.

Naturally, as a spy duo on the run, they decide the best thing to do is to have a quick hot-tub session. Which makes perfect sense when you recall that Burgess and Maclean did exactly the same on arrival in Moscow after defecting. The spa looks like the backroom of a dodgy restaurant that doubles as a knocking shop. The music twangs and pings like a Now That’s What I Call Oriental Music! cassette. It’s certainly interesting seeing little old Roger in a hot tub, hair at this point something of a frizz fest. He and Pola chat about the old days and snog. She begs him to change the music, so he slides out of the bath to give way to the obvious body double who marches over to the tape deck. What will he go with? Wham!? Level 42? Duran Duran? No, Tchaikovsky. This will really get the juices flowing.

While Bond is in the shower Pola grabs the Zorin tape and runs outside where Gogol is waiting. As they drive away he puts on the tape, expecting to hear of Zorin’s secret plans but only hearing the twangs and pings of Now That’s What I Call Oriental Music!. He looks at Pola with a face like thunder. Back in the spa, Bond is listening to the real tape, rewinding the same statement to emphasise its importance to the filmgoer while making top-spy notes:

SILICON VALLEY

IN 3 DAYS –

MAIN STRIKE

?

James Stock is a reporter for the London Financial Times. He’s here in San Francisco to ask Mr Howe of City Hall some questions about Max Zorin. Howe is of the opinion that the Californian economy needs investors like Zorin and he should be welcomed with open arms. Stock has other ideas: ‘My readers want to know why Zorin is pumping sea water into his pipeline, instead of pumping oil out.’ This article sounds like a lot of fun. Howe explains that sea water tests the integrity of the pipeline in case there are any leaks. ‘I didn’t know that,’ Stock replies, revealing an alarming gap in his knowledge of pipeline integrity testing. James Stock is of course James Bond – and this is just another incredible piece of espionage and an awesome display of his chameleon-like powers of disguise. As Bond leaves the meeting, he spots Stacey Sutton, the cheque woman, and decides to follow her home and possibly break into her house. She catches him looking for her in the shower and quite rightly points a gun in his face. He begins to explain why he is there, but Zorin’s goons burst in, one of whom is wearing the worst curly wig seen since Colin Baker regenerated. As the fight between three gasping and wheezing old men breaks out, it looks less like an action adventure movie and more like chucking-out time at a provincial Wetherspoon’s.

‘Et voilà! Quiche de cabinet,’ Bond announces proudly as he pulls a dish out of Stacey’s oven (this is not a euphemism for a horrendous sex act). He tells her he’s been known to dabble with cooking, like he’s the dark horse on Celebrity Masterchef. Roger Moore is the only Bond who can get away with delivering a freshly baked quiche de cabinet, and he’s earned it. Stacey explains that the $5 million from Zorin was a pay-off to buy her silence, and the goons were sent today to get her to cash it and keep quiet. She tears it up and tells Bond she’ll never give up, so he agrees to stay the night and protect her, in case they come back, and presumably to watch her sleep in a creepy way.

The earth has moved! There’s been an earthquake, and its epicentre is Zorin’s oil field. Bond mentions to Stacey that Mr Howe told him Zorin was pumping sea water into the pipes. She points out that the wells are on a fault line, and that it’s incredibly dangerous. When she brings this up with Mr Howe, he promptly fires her. So Bond and Stacey cook up a plan: they’ll go back to City Hall that night and check out the pipeline plans.

It turns out Main Strike is not a top secret code name after all. It’s actually an abandoned silver mine near the San Andreas Fault. ‘Alive and well, I see, and still bungling in the dark,’ scoffs Zorin as he bursts in on them checking the files, making one lament that Bond wasn’t actually disguised as Bungle from Rainbow. They’re both taken into Howe’s office, and after he calls the police Zorin begins to brainstorm like he’s doing a night at the Comedy Store. ‘So she and her accomplice came here to kill you. Then they set fire to the office to conceal the crime, but they were trapped in the elevator and perished in the flames – now here’s Richard Vranch to set it to music.’ Howe is shot dead with Bond’s gun, the office is doused with petrol and Bond and Stacey are shoved in the lift, with the power turned off so they’re trapped in there. This could have been a good time for Bond to tell Stacey he’s a pervert, but fire breaks out and they escape up the lift shaft and then down a fireman’s ladder to the street.

‘I wanna talk to you,’ growls a burly police captain as he slices his way through the onlookers. Bond is tending to Stacey, who got overwhelmed by the smoke, and tells the captain if he goes up to Howe’s office he’ll find him dead. ‘We found him – and this gun. This yours?’ the captain says in an accusatory tone. ‘Yes, thank you,’ Bond confirms, and the world puts its head in its hands in unison. He tells him to check with Chuck Lee of the CIA who will confirm who he is, but Lee has also been found dead. ‘This is James Stock of the London Financial Times!’ Stacey remonstrates, assuming that will help matters. Bond interjects at this point to reveal he is actually James Bond, a secret agent, just before he sprays the officer with a hose and steals a fire engine. After a car chase that’s like a scene from the Keystone Cops, Stacey and Bond escape, leaving a wake of police car-related destruction behind them.

They drive the fire engine all the way to Main Strike and pull over a truck delivering explosives. Bond gets to try on his American accent as he knocks out the driver and steals the truck. He has another stab when the foreman notices Stacey is a woman. ‘Women’s Lib, they’re taking over the Teamsters,’ he jokes in his best fractured American as the pair stroll away from the truck. Inside a shed, he watches the explosives being taken inside the mine and proposes that he should really have a look. Luckily Stacey has found some uniforms. ‘This is a good idea of yours. Pity you couldn’t find one that fits,’ Bond remarks, a lovely in-joke regarding the fact that Stacey’s overalls are perfectly tailored to her.

They observe Zorin and his men lowering a bomb onto a huge pile of explosives, obviously planning to do some redecorating. Fortuitously Stacey finds an ornate plan that reveals Zorin’s intention to flood the faults causing a double earthquake, which will submerge Silicon Valley underwater for ever. Judging by the last iPhone, not the worst idea in the world. When Zorin and his men catch them in the office, they run into the mines, with May Day also giving chase. However, before she can catch them, Zorin blows the fault and kills all his workers by water and by Uzi – totally against any kind of union regulations.

May Day and Bond, meanwhile, are caught in a rapid stream of water. (Stacey manages to escape to the surface.) Zorin and his head of security leave the mine on a cart, laughing uproariously and flinging aside their hard hats in a flagrant breach of Health & Safety. Everything is going according to plan. They clamber aboard their airship, which inflates from inside a Portakabin – rather like Pavarotti emerging from his tent at Glyndebourne – and float away from Amberley Working Museum in Sussex, which doubled as ‘Main Strike Mine’. If you visit the museum today, they still have the Zorin-branded mine carts and the windmill, and you can look inside the mine entrance.

May Day is livid at having been betrayed. She thought Zorin loved her, and she weeps as Jenny Flex’s corpse floats by in the water. So, she’s ready to help Bond stop the bomb. It can’t be defused manually due to a booby trap, so she lowers him down and helps him bring it to the surface. They place it on a cart with the timer at 35 seconds and push it away, but the handbrake slips. May Day jumps aboard, screaming, ‘Get Zorin for me!’ Bond tells her to jump, but knows she can’t, and looks on mournfully.

Zorin and Mortner are hovering in the airship, waiting for the explosion and flood to start, but instead they witness May Day bringing the bomb out of the mine on a cart and exploding. Zorin removes his glasses and clutches his face, absolutely raging. With Plan A in tatters, he settles for Plan B, and snatches Stacey as she tries to run to James. As the airship takes off, Bond grabs one of the mooring ropes and goes with it. After a while it becomes apparent that he won’t let go, so Zorin decides to take the next most sensible course of action and fly the airship into the Golden Gate Bridge. However, Bond ties the mooring rope to it, meaning the ship is now stuck. Dr Mortner has a lovely comedy seatbelt moment, where he tries to stand up out of his seat but realises he’s still strapped in – talk about the master race (and God knows he does, constantly).

In the chaos that ensues, the airship crashes into the bridge, knocking out the doctor and leaving a giant hole in the side. Zorin launches himself at Bond, armed with an axe, but forgets he’s wearing tan loafers and can’t fight for shit. Before too long he’s holding onto the bridge for dear life while Mortner does his best Alan Partridge impression by shouting the word ‘Max!’ over and over as Zorin clings on fruitlessly.

Zorin loses his grip and lets out a laugh of pure disbelief before sliding off the bridge and falling to his death into the sea below. Mortner, meanwhile, has seen enough, and if there’s one thing they teach you at Nazi school, it’s that you don’t take things lying down – and, when you can, blow shit up. He heads into the airship’s on-board fridge – curiously full of dynamite – and lights a stick. Seeing this, Bond cuts the mooring rope, which sends the airship away from the bridge, causing Mortner to drop it and the airship to explode.

‘The order of Lenin, for Comrade Bond,’ Gogol says as he opens the box to reveal the medal. M is surprised as he thought the KGB would want Silicon Valley wiped out, but Gogol points out that Russian research would be nowhere without it. After a brief chuckle, he asks to see Bond and thank him personally, but M tells him he’s still missing. The worst is presumed. Moneypenny is eavesdropping outside, dabbing a tear from her eye. This would be the very last time Lois Maxwell played Moneypenny, so this tear feels all the more poignant as we wave goodbye to her. She would definitely be missed.

Q’s ‘highly sophisticated surveillance machine’ trundles into Stacey’s house via the cat flap (passing a water bowl with ‘PUSSY’ on it), looking like K9’s alcoholic brother. Q is outside in a Winnebago watching through a monitor as it searches the house and follows the sound of laughter and chatter to the bathroom. As the head of the little machine extends to look into the shower – where Bond and Stacey are scrubbing each other – Q hears this precious exchange of dialogue.

‘A little bit of soap here, and a little bit of soap there. Oh, drat! I’ve dropped the soap.’

‘I’ll get it.’

‘That is not the soap.’

Q views the scene with a mixture of mild arousal and depressed resignation. M asks what is happening, and Q tells him that 007 is alive, well and just ‘cleaning up a few details’. As Roger Moore literally throws in the towel to block the camera’s vision, his last words could not be more fitting: ‘Oooh!’

Goodbye, Roger – forever loved and forever missed.

FIFTEEN

THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS

1987

In many ways Timothy Dalton was like Marty McFly at the end of Back to the Future – rolling around the stage pumping out Van Halen-style guitar licks, scaring the strait-laced doo-woppers of the fifties, but rather than wielding a rock ’n’ roll guitar, Dalton was wielding a brooding, brutish interpretation of James Bond that the kids of 1987 just weren’t ready for, but that the kids of the future would love. He was laying the groundwork for a celebrated interpretation of Bond that would follow 20 years later, but is he thanked for it? No. Is he fondly remembered? Not nearly enough.

Dalton was initially approached to play James Bond in 1968 when Sean Connery announced You Only Live Twice would be his last Bond film. Dalton had come to everyone’s attention in theatre and in the 1968 film A Lion in Winter with Richard Harris. Cubby Broccoli was a fan of his work and thought he would make a perfect Bond. However, at the age of 22, Dalton felt he was far too young to play the part.

When dear Roger Moore eventually left Bond in 1985, Broccoli invited Dalton again, but he was committed to a Brooke Shields film. So Broccoli turned to Pierce Brosnan, a young Irish actor who was wooing American TV audiences as Remington Steele. However, Brosnan couldn’t get out of his contract and had to turn the part down. After screen testing Sam Neill, Broccoli discovered that Dalton was now free to play Bond. The role was his to attack, but he had a tough job on his hands. Up until 1987 Bond was all gadgets, gags, tits and glamour. Dalton’s approach was to read the books and rebuild the character into the serious part he saw it to be. The Bond machine wasn’t tuned for a serious hardman though; it had been ticking along nicely for twelve years, its phasers set to pun. Dalton had essentially arrived on the set of a Carry On with a Stewart Lee routine. He wanted to start again and give the part an edge so hard you could smash testicles with it.

John Barry’s last Bond film starts with a couple of fierce stabs of the familiar Bond motif, and our first glimpse of the new Bond is via his inaugural gun barrel. He’s not wearing flares, so we can see he means business sartorially. There’ll be no farting around in Egyptian discos or space this time. However, before we meet our new 007, we get a little tease first. John Glen’s hat-trick Bond was a tough call. Before 1987 only Guy Hamilton and Peter R. Hunt had had the job of pushing a new 007 onto the stage and watching nervously from the wings. In yet another example of the playful nature of Bond cinema, the decision was made to toy with the audience and literally launch multiple 00s in the pre-credits sequence. The audience was left to wonder which one of these handsome sky-diving bastards was the real James Bond, as they dived into Gibraltar to challenge the SAS in a training exercise. The first one (Glynn Baker of Return of the Jedi) doesn’t last very long, falling victim to a paintball gun and a shot in the arse by an SAS officer. The next 00 is very quickly murdered by an evil henchman on a mission to spread misinformation and frame a foreign power. See? Bond was doing fake news long before the orange Mess Goblin in the White House. As this new 00 falls to his death from a cliff, we get the moment we have all been waiting for . . . the NEW BOND. And Timothy is glorious. We get a beautiful, windswept close-up of the new 007, and as a first shot Glen nails it to perfection. There’s no ‘Bond, James Bond’ or ‘This never happened to the other fella’, but it says all you need to know about Dalton-Bond: he’s mean, moody and will not take any of your shit.

Bond approaches the body of the fallen 00 agent and notices that his climbing rope has been severed. As he finds another body (an SAS officer) he’s surprised by a Gibraltar monkey, which he momentarily fixes with a steely glance, as if to suggest that the monkey was the perpetrator. A Land Rover speeds away, and he leaps into action. There’s no long shot of a stuntman in a tuxedo; this is Bond in a black jump suit, chasing down his quarry like a leopard. He catches the baddie and attaches himself to the car roof in an adrenaline-pumping race scene. Much to the despair of Cubby Broccoli, Dalton did a lot of his own stunts. Bond despatches the baddie in a hand-delivered explosion, but his parachute becomes damaged and he needs to land. As luck would have it, he lands on a sexy lady’s boat. This is where we catch first sight of Timothy Dalton’s Achilles’ heel: comedy. He is given a Roger-esque line to deliver, and it slides through his teeth like a bitter slab of liquorice.

Bond: Exercise Control? This is 007, I report in an hour.

Badly dubbed lady brandishing a glass of chilled champagne: Won’t you join me?

Bond: Better make that two.

Now, this is a decent line – Bond in a nutshell – but it’s Roger-Bond, not Tim-Bond. In reality he would have said:

Tim-Bond: Exercise control? This is 007, I report in an hour.

Badly dubbed lady brandishing a glass of chilled champagne: Won’t you join me?

Tim-Bond: No.

Behind the scenes of action and fire, we are treated to John Barry 1987, with some brass and synth drum-driven bursts of his moments from The Pretenders’ ‘Where Has Everybody Gone?’ – a song that features heavily in this film. It’s almost as if John Barry despised A-Ha and everything they stood for (he did) and was championing The Pretenders instead (he was).

Talking of A-Ha, their brilliant song blasts out over the titles and Maurice Binder’s women in hats, women in cocktail glasses, women wearing glasses and women floating in water. We can only presume it was done at 5 p.m. for a 6 p.m. deadline.

Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, and a concert is in full flow. There’s a late arrival up in one of the boxes, James Bond, and he takes his seat next to Saunders, a bureaucrat from Section V. Saunders (Thomas Wheatley) tells him he’s ‘bloody late’ and points out their man in the crowd. ‘Lovely girl with the cello,’ remarks Bond, and he’s sharply told to forget the ladies for once. Pointless. It’s like telling a flower not to bloom. Their man is General Georgi Koskov, played by Jeroen Krabbé. He has a great deal of fun in this film, and is a total joy to watch. Koskov wishes to defect and the plan is simple: during the interval, he will go to the toilet, sneak out through a window and run over to the bookshop where Saunders and Bond have now ensconced themselves (the latter with a sniper rifle just in case). When Bond asks Saunders what the escape route is, he’s met with a smug grin and: ‘Sorry, old man, section 26, paragraph 5 – that information is on a need-to-know basis only. I’m sure you understand.’ As Koskov appears at the toilet window, a sniper appears; it’s the cellist who caught Bond’s eye and she’s brandishing a rifle. Bond has seconds to take the shot before she gets Koskov, but instead of killing her, he shoots the rifle out of her hands, which displeases Saunders. ‘YOU MISSED DELIBERATELY!’ he roars as he races downstairs to let Koskov in. Bond watches the wounded cellist leave before running down to the alley to drive Koskov away. Saunders has put him in the boot – a schoolboy error, as it’s the first place they’ll look – so Bond puts him in the front, and when asked by Saunders what his Plan B is, he gets to return the compliment: ‘Sorry, old man, section 26, paragraph 5 – need-to-know. Sure you understand.’

Koskov is panicking about the borders being closed, but Bond tells him to relax; they have a pipeline to the west. Rosika Miklos (Julie T. Wallace) is waiting for them at the Trans-Siberian pipeline gate, and takes them inside. She tells them they must get Koskov in ‘the pig’, a scouring plug that’s used to clean the pipes. This one has been designed to accommodate a man, but Koskov isn’t too eager to try. Rosika tells Bond to turn the handle at the right time as when the pig launches it will light up the control panel ‘like Christmas tree’. Her distraction of the supervisor is as old as time – man’s greatest weakness: some breasts. She grabs the old man, submerges his face into her chest and watches as the panel lights up while he squeals with delight.

While a Harrier Jump Jet takes off for England with Koskov onboard, Bond picks up Saunders at the border, and has to deal with his incessant moaning and insistence that he will report everything to M. He admits he missed deliberately, but the girl wasn’t a professional and ‘whoever she was, I must have scared the living daylights out of her’ . . .

Bond perches on Q’s desk as he searches the female assassins database, which looks like a prototype for Tinder. There’s an assassin who kills with her thighs, another who uses exploding teddy bears and one who says, ‘If you don’t love me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best.’ The new Moneypenny (Caroline Bliss) tries to flirt with Bond while telling him that M wants him at the safe house. She comes across as far too meek and lovesick. Moneypenny’s whole shtick is that she encourages but doesn’t engage directly – like she’s working on reception at an STD clinic and Bond is a regular she feels sorry for. It’s all about confidence boosting, suggesting what might happen one day, if you play your cards right. On his way out Bond asks her to look into Czech news services for any mention of a female cellist at the Bratislavan Conservatoire. She asks if he wants to come to her house and listen to her Barry Manilow records, and he essentially tells her to fuck off while patting her on her arse – another sign that the dynamic’s gone wrong. Moneypenny is the one who gives Bond the cold shoulder; never the other way round.

The murder of a milkman is never a trivial affair, and in this case it’s rather serious as this particular milkman is strangled with the headphone lead from a Walkman playing that Pretenders song at a very loud volume (get used to hearing that) – a doubly unpleasant way to go. The murderer’s name is Necros. He’s a blond, muscled, male model-type assassin, who has arrived at the safe house to take the milkman’s place and get to Koskov.

Bond arrives as Koskov is giving his post-defection briefing to M and the Minister. M’s mood plummets as he’s handed the receipt for a Harrods hamper Bond picked up on the way, which is full of the most expensive kinds of food and drink imaginable, and probably led directly to Black Wednesday in 1992. Koskov names Pushkin (Gogol’s replacement and the new KGB head) as the reason he defected. Pushkin is sick in the head like Stalin, and has no interest in détente. From his shoe Koskov unfurls a secret Pushkin directive entitled ‘Smiert Spionom’. ‘Death to spies,’ Bond says as he pops a fag in his mouth. Koskov explains that it’s an assassination programme targeting British and American agents, which will lead to retaliation and, eventually, nuclear war, presumably via a public phone/landline vote. Unless they whack Pushkin when he arrives in Tangier in three days for a North African trade convention, that is. M and the Minister announce that this will have to be taken to a higher authority and leave. Bond puffs out a lungful of smoke and looks at Koskov with eyes of doubt.

Necros, the deadly milkman who drives the fastest milk cart in the West, enters the safe-house kitchen and is met by a parrot, which looks exactly like the one from For Your Eyes Only. It’s nice to see Bond actors return. Necros despatches two of the guards and enters the house with his tray of exploding milk bottles, blowing up each room he enters and taking out guards as he goes. He grabs Koskov, knocks him out and flies him away in a helicopter.

‘We’re the laughing stock of the intelligence community,’ the Minister wails to Bond after it’s discovered that the KGB have snatched Koskov from under their very noses – something he didn’t say after seeing the footage of 007 inside that crocodile in Octopussy, strangely. Bond doubts Koskov’s story about Pushkin – he knows him well – and refuses to believe he’s a mad murdering tyrant. M issues the death order and shows Bond the message that was tied to 004’s body in Gibraltar – a tag with the message ‘Smiert Spionom’. M reminds him that his name was on Pushkin’s list too, and that he needs to be whacked.

Keyring finders were huge in 1987. They were hours of fun, basically what people used to do before the internet. The idea was that whenever you whistled, it beeped, meaning you would never lose your keys again (in theory anyway). While a real game-changer in terms of key retrieval, they must have been an absolute nightmare for Roger Whittaker at his gigs. Q has, of course, jumped on the bandwagon and made a keyring finder of his own, but this one can pump out stun gas on hearing ‘Rule Britannia’ and fully explode during a wolf whistle, which may hinder Bond who often does both during sex.

The Aston Martin V8 is parked outside the concert hall in Bratislava. Inside, Bond is watching a string quartet play Borodin with a mild smile on his face. He’s seen that cellist cum sniper before. After the concert ends, he follows her onto a tram. She is arrested by Pushkin and the KGB, and leaves her cello case behind. Bond takes it with him into a public toilet, and gets funny looks from the attendant. Inside is a rifle with a bullet hole in it, and as he opens the chamber two bullets roll out – blanks.

Kara Milovy (played by Miryam d’Abo) is dropped off by the KGB, and wanders upstairs to her apartment looking dejected. The KGB have turned the place upside down, though it may also be a Beadle’s About prank, and he may pop up in a moment dressed as a Jamaican traffic warden. Bond walks in and returns the cello case, telling her he dropped the gun in the river. ‘I heard you play at the conservatoire yesterday. It was exquisite,’ he says, obviously lying – and talking of lying, he also tells her he’s in touch with Georgi Koskov, who’s an old friend. He tells her they need to go to Vienna and she should pack warm clothes, which sort of sounds like he’s going to abandon her on an ice flow. After a quick stop to pick up her cello, during which Bond acts like he’s having to wait in the Boots car park while his daughter buys some spot cream, they leave for Austria.

The beautiful Aston Martin V8 is put through its paces, showing off its multitude of gadgets: from a laser that cuts cars in half to bulletproof glass, twin missiles, a rocket booster and outboard skis. However, just as you feel like you are bursting with love for it and you can’t help yourself, it’s heartbreakingly blown up, leaving Bond and Kara to cross the border into Austria sitting awkwardly in a cello case while waving a passport, thus making a total mockery of the Schengen Agreement.

Brad Whittaker (Joe Don Baker) is a big show-off. His estate in Tangier is filled with appalling mannequins depicting him dressed as famous tyrants. There’s Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Hitler, Cromwell, Ming the Merciless and even Keith Chegwin. He tries to stand still to imitate one of them, but a broad smile beams across his face as he welcomes Pushkin (John Rhys-Davies) to his house. He shows him inside his hobby room where he has a few toy battle recreations set up. It must have cost him a small fortune to collect them all from magazines; it’s like a National Trust museum in there. Pushkin tells him the weapons order they made with him is cancelled, that he wants his $50 million back within 24 hours and that he knows he and Koskov are up to something.

In Vienna Bond and Kara are taking a horse-drawn taxi to the hotel. She tells him she loves Koskov as she owes him everything. He got her the string quartet gig and gave her a Stradivarius cello, which seems very generous. Best not to dwell on what he asked for in return. She tells Bond that one day she hopes to play Carnegie Hall, and he doesn’t even think of doing the ‘practice’ joke (Roger would have). Hans at the hotel asks him if he will be needing his usual suite while eyeing up Kara. ‘Not tonight, Hans,’ Bond answers, which begs the question: what exactly is in that suite that he doesn’t want Kara to see? A sex swing? A delicatessen in stainless steel? Being a gentleman, he asks for something with a second bedroom and then buys her a very expensive dress – putting things firmly into grooming territory.

Whittaker angrily deconstructs a lobster during his al fresco lunch as Koskov and Necros tear themselves away from their re-enactment of Love Island to ask why he’s so angry. He tells them the Russians want the money back. Koskov tells him to chill out; the British think Pushkin is dangerous and James Bond will kill him soon enough. However, if he really wants to ensure that he does the job, they may have to give him a push and annoy him by either murdering another British agent or financing another series of Len Goodman’s Partners in Rhyme. Whittaker wisely opts for the murder. If Bond doesn’t kill Pushkin by the end of the conference, Necros will have to do it.

After a night at the opera, Bond takes Kara to the funfair, but not just any funfair. This is Wiener Prater amusement park, as featured in The Third Man. After a trip on the ghost train, a go on a shooting range where he wins her a cuddly toy and a necking session on the famous Ferris wheel, he ducks away to meet Saunders in the Prater café. Saunders tells him the Stradivarius was bought by Brad Whittaker, the arms dealer, and gifted to Kara via Koskov, proving that they are in cahoots. He gives Bond a pair of passports and heads towards the doors to leave. Necros – listening to that Pretenders song again – sets off a device that causes the sliding glass doors to shut at such speed it chops Saunders in half. Bond rushes to his aid, but it’s clear he’s dead. He looks around in total boiling rage as a balloon marked ‘Smiert Spionom’ floats across the corpse. He grips it in his angry hands and pops it.

Pushkin exits a lift carrying a bunch of flowers and a basket of wine. As the room door opens he sees his wife (Mad Max 2’s warrior woman Virginia Hey) looking disturbed. Before he can ask what’s wrong the door closes behind him and Bond puts a gun to the back of his head. Smiert Spionom, Pushkin explains, was an old Beria operation from Stalin’s time. Koskov was about to be arrested for misusing state funds with Whittaker, and he shouldn’t be trusted. Bond tells him that if he trusted Koskov they wouldn’t be talking, and Pushkin must die.

Pushkin walks up to the podium to address the trade convention. He has a cracking speech lined up about what the Soviet Union are up to trade-wise. However, before he can even get to his first joke, three bullets are fired into his heart by James Bond, which Necros thinks is a bit off as he was about to do it. After a lengthy chase along the rooftops of Tangier – thankfully not the planned magic carpet sequence that would have had Bond sitting on a rug surfing telephone wires – he makes it to the street and jumps into a car with two hot babes. They ask if he wants to come to a sexy party. However, the party turns out to be a meeting with Felix Leiter (John Terry aka Hawk the Slayer), so it’s not sexy. Felix asks if he’s planning on starting World War III. Bond quickly calms his nerves when he explains that Pushkin makes a miraculous recovery.

‘I TOLD YOU! I TOLD YOU!’ Koskov yells in delight when he hears the news of Bond whacking Pushkin. There’s a celebratory mood by the pool as Koskov pumps the air and Whittaker licks his lips at a deal that can now be done. The phone rings and it’s handed to Koskov, who suddenly looks worried. Bond returns home to find Kara frantically playing the cello like it’s full of flaming bees. He tells her there’s no sign of Koskov, and she offers him a drink, shaken not stirred. He downs it in one, telling her it’s perfect, which is yet another lie as those drinks taste like shite. He then feels it’s time to tell her the truth: he isn’t a friend of Koskov’s at all. He’s a British agent looking for him as Koskov has betrayed all sides, and betrayed her. But Kara counters that she’s spoken to him and he’s told her the truth: that Bond is a KGB agent using her to kill him. As Bond attempts to explain he suddenly loses his train of thought. He realises he’s been drugged, and before passing out he manages to slur that he was the one who shot the rifle out of her hands, and that she was great in Xtro.

A plane lands in Afghanistan, and Koskov hands over Bond for Pushkin’s murder, and then throws in Kara for good measure, thus earning double points. They’re taken to a jail run by a burly scouser, who comes across less like a jailer and more like a compere at a rundown working men’s club in Knotty Ash. After gassing him with the novelty keyring finder, and knocking out the other guards, Bond and Kara get over the fence only to be captured by the Mujahideen, but luckily for them the deputy commander, Kamran Shah (Art Malik), is also escaping the base after being set free by Bond, so he takes them back to his gaff.

Shah and his men have a very simple set-up; whenever he, or one of his guests, says something, his men laugh boisterously. It’s served them well all these years, however, Bond is not impressed by the constant guffawing and tells Shah that he’s uncovered a plot where a Russian general named Koskov is going to purchase hi-tech weapons that can be used against Shah and his men. This stops the laughing, and Shah tells him this is very important news, and he will need to take him up the Khyber Pass, even though he’s only just met him. Time is tight, though, and Bond points out that this could take days. He insists they go back to the base and stop Koskov leaving. Shah tells him to get some rest. He’ll see what he can do.

John Barry creates a bewitching aural warmth as Bond, Kara and the Mujahideen ride out on an operation, but Bond’s mood is soon dampened when it turns out that Shah and his men are selling raw opium to the Russians. Once again (as in For Your Eyes Only) Bond tests it by licking it – one day he will have to fess up to the massive opiate addiction he so obviously has. Shah explains that he doesn’t care what kills them and he needs the money to buy weapons, which is all well and good, but Koskov will sell the heroin for millions and buy more hi-tech weapons to blow up Shah’s men. Bond has a brilliant solution: he’s going to blow up the opium when it’s loaded onto the Russian plane. This would have been an absolutely foolproof plan were it not for the fact that once he loads the bomb he walks straight into Koskov and Necros. To spare his blushes, the Mujahideen choose this moment to invade the base and do a very good job of wiping out Russian soldiers, which leads you, justifiably, to ask why they hadn’t thought of doing this before.

Bond runs into the cockpit of the Hercules, which very slowly begins to take off as Russian soldiers try, and fail, to stop him and Kara drives a jeep up his back entrance. As they ascend, leaving a trail of explosions, chaos and a seriously charred Koskov behind them, there remains the small matter of disarming the bomb. But when Bond goes back to do it, he finds Necros waiting to kill him. There then follows one of the most exciting aerial sequences in the Bond canon, with B. J. Worth (perfect Bond name) and his team of brilliant skydivers once again providing the spectacle, with Bond and Necros dangling from a net that’s hanging out of a Hercules plane thousands of feet in the air. We are left with the tantalising sight of Necros clinging for dear life to Bond’s shoe, and then Bond slicing the laces off, sending him and the shoe falling to their deaths. ‘He got the boot,’ Bond quips to Kara when she asks what happened, but once again Dalton delivers the joke with the disdain and bemusement of a waiter being asked for a Pot Noodle at The Ritz.

‘Pickett’s Charge was up Cemetery Ridge, not Little Round Top,’ offers Bond to Whittaker as he walks in on him playing soldiers, which for kids reading this now is the analogue equivalent of playing Call of Duty but having to make all the noises yourself and post hand-written racist slurs to the other players later. Bond tells Whittaker he’s there for Koskov. He’s informed that he can have him once he returns the opium (not possible as the plane crashed and exploded). Whittaker doesn’t take this news well, and as he’s an American he comes out shooting – drawing weapon after weapon, and even firing a cannon. Bond, however, has a secret weapon that saves the day: his keyring finder. Yes, with just one wolf whistle, it’s all over, and Whittaker lies dead under a statue of Wellington, which would have been a better fit for the ‘he got the boot’ gag, to be honest. Pushkin wanders in with his armed guards and is presented with Koskov, who makes up a story about Whittaker having kidnapped him. Pushkin doesn’t believe this tosh for one minute, and orders his men to take him back to Moscow in a ‘diplomatic bag’ – and we can all imagine how that will pan out.

‘General Gogol, Miss Kara Milovy!’ M announces as he presents her. Gogol compliments her performance and says he has good news. He’s arranged a visa for her, so she can come and go as often as she likes. Sadly Bond couldn’t make the show as he is on assignment abroad. Kara is overcome with sadness and trudges to her dressing room, but there she finds the comforting sight of two glasses of chilled champagne. She smiles, whistles and hears the beep. ‘You didn’t think I’d miss this performance, did you?’ says Bond as they kiss. Thus ends the first Bond of a new era, where the keyring locator is king.

SIXTEEN

LICENCE TO KILL

1989

If the late seventies was all about spaceships and lasers, by the late eighties the overblown action film was king. Drug barons stalked movie culture, gun in one hand, suitcase full of cocaine in the other, and it was only fitting that one should show up as a Bond villain now. The producers wanted to make a darker, edgier film to match their new Bond, and the final product is definitely a tantalising concept: Bond seeks revenge for the murder and torture of friends, and brings down the organisation Yojimbo-style. There is no better driver in an action film than revenge. However, there would be a problem with the final product. Licence to Kill (originally titled Licence Revoked) was to be released in the summer of 1989, possibly the busiest blockbuster jam in history. Bond had to compete with an Indiana Jones sequel, a Ghostbusters sequel, a Star Trek sequel and Batman, the biggest cultural phenomenon since Star Wars. This would be an impossible mission for 007, and one that through no fault of anyone in the production, would be his last for six years.

Much like red wine and fish, the world of 007 weddings and James Bond are not good together and violence and disaster inevitably follow. Quite what possessed Felix Leiter (David Hedison back again) to ask Bond to be his best man is anyone’s guess. Although friends for well over 25 years, the very idea of having James anywhere near a bride is like inviting an unexploded landmine round for dinner. Felix, Bond and Sharkey (a fisherman friend) are in their morning suits on the way to the church when a US Coast Guard helicopter pulls them over. They’ve got a location on Sanchez, and have the green light to bring him in. Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) is a drug cartel boss from the fictional South American country of Isthmus, a sort of Aldi Pablo Escobar, if you will. Public enemy number one, like Greta Garbo or a student, he rarely leaves home. However, in this instance, he’s landed in the Florida Keys to confront his mistress, who has run into the arms of another man. So excited is Felix to finally ‘nail his ass’, he’s quite happy to leave the car that is taking him to his own wedding to get the job done. Bond insists on coming, but ‘strictly as an observer’.

‘What did he promise you? His heart? Give her his heart,’ Sanchez tells his number two, Dario (Benicio Del Toro), who is only too happy to pull out his knife and take the man away. Girlfriend Lupe Lamora (played by Talisa Soto) tells him she’s sorry, but he just won’t listen. He then whips her with what looks like Bigfoot’s penis, showing you the true ice-cold measure of the man.

Felix arrives on the island and goes after Sanchez’s jeep, but what he doesn’t know is that Sanchez has already jumped out and is heading for his light aircraft to fly home. Bond consoles Lupe and asks if she’s OK, but gets short shrift. The engine fires up and Sanchez begins his slow approach onto the runway, waving and smiling at Felix as he goes.

Bond lowers himself down on a line from the helicopter, which may look like an elaborate pitch for his own Japanese gameshow but is actually a cunning plan to get himself onto the tail of the plane and wrap the line around it. Once he has it secured, the helicopter can then haul it away, back to HQ. They just so happen to be above the church that Felix is getting married in, and luckily Bond and Felix are able to float all the way down from the chopper and into the church to begin the service, with the nice visual touch of their parachutes trailing behind them like wedding dresses.

Maurice Binder’s title sequence is an emotional affair. There’s the usual running water, casinos, naked dancers and cameras pointing at the screen, but it has the added poignancy of knowing that we’d never get another. Binder died not long after. His iconic work will never be forgotten. Gladys Knight’s song is a mild photocopy of ‘Goldfinger’, but it still manages to carry a steely menace and charm of its own, matching the dark tone of the film perfectly. The original choice of Patti LaBelle’s ‘If You Asked Me To’ (used over the closing credits) would have been an underwhelming experience in comparison.

DEA agent Ed Killifer (Everett McGill) tells Sanchez he’s facing over 900 years in jail and not even one of his famous million-dollar bribes will get him out of this, so in a move that the kids of today would probably call ‘badass’, Sanchez doubles it to two million to anyone who springs him. The room is aghast. ‘All that scumbag money won’t do you a bit of good here,’ Killifer barks while chomping on a fat cigar, before attacking him and vowing to personally put his ‘ass’ in prison.

Back at the wedding, Bond has been sent to retrieve Felix as it’s time to cut the cake. He catches Felix finalising some business with a woman called Pam, and then looks at her in a way that suggests he too would like to conduct some further business. ‘Switch that thing off,’ Bond says, referring to Felix’s computer. Felix dutifully burns something onto a tiny disk and slips it behind a photo of Della before returning to his wedding. Felix and Della are very excited because they have a present for James, and it isn’t a Hooters voucher; it’s a cigarette lighter (Dalton’s Bond smoked like a chimney) with a beautiful inscription from the happy couple. Bond fires it up to check that it works, and a flame leaps out of it, nearly killing all three of them, suggesting that they might actually have been trying to elaborately kill him and themselves.

There’s panic on the streets of Florida. Panic at the 7 Mile Bridge. Coast Guard helicopters are buzzing around a patch of water and uniformed officers are peering over the side pointing at things. The truck carrying Sanchez has driven off it and dropped to the bottom like a stone. A team of divers arrive to rescue Sanchez from his chains and to help Killifer (who has obviously succumbed to the temptation of $2 million), and the pair are put aboard a mini-sub and taken away from the scene before the Coast Guard can get James Cameron down there.

Bond wishes Felix and Della heartfelt congratulations. He’s had a lovely day, all in all. He got to catch an international drug kingpin, saw a woman he fancied and no doubt had a Sonny Corleone-style knee-trembler with a bridesmaid or three after the reception. As he’s about to drive away, Della throws him her garter, which usually would lead to him thrusting it into his pocket and running to the nearest toilet, but on this occasion causes a brief period of self-reflection and the hint of a smile. ‘He was married once, but it was a long time ago,’ Felix says, with a mouthful of wasps, careful not to tell Della that Bond’s wife was murdered and thus sour the wedding-night rumpo with tales of dead women. However, he may as well have done, because as Felix carries Della into the bedroom Sanchez’s men are waiting for them, and Felix is immediately knocked unconscious.

Drug smuggler Milton Krest (Anthony Zerbe) has the appearance of a man who collects sex cards from phone boxes and a pair of eyes that don’t quite agree with each other. He’s in his office and tells Sanchez he’s uncomfortable with a cop being there. He wants to kill him. He’s worried that Killifer could ‘finger’ him – oh, Milton, don’t flatter yourself.

In a warehouse a hooded man is brought in and hung by the hands over a hatch, and before you ask just what the Elephant Man has done to deserve this, the hood is removed to reveal Felix. Sanchez tells him he’ll be fed to some sharks, which is bad enough; but there’s also worse news as Dario drops the bombshell that he murdered Della – probably horrendously. ‘See you in hell,’ Felix shouts bravely as the sharks close in. ‘There are worse things than dying, hombre,’ Sanchez replies, which is actually a profound philosophical observation, if you think about it.

The next day, Bond arrives at the airport to head to Istanbul for his next mission. Noticing the high security presence, he tentatively asks the check-in clerk what the problem is, obviously worried that the Vice Squad may be closing in on him. He finds out that ‘some big drug dealer has escaped’, so he makes a quick dash for Felix’s house. There he finds a sad but living Della, and Felix, with one leg too few, on the sofa and a witty note pinned to him that reads: HE DISAGREED WITH SOMETHING THAT ATE HIM.

Sharkey arrives on the scene. The attending policeman speculates that it was caused by a chainsaw as Columbians use them on informants, ice sculptures and hedges. Sharkey is not convinced; he knows a shark bite when he sees one. Sharkey and Bond trawl the many warehouses of Florida looking for sharks, Pepe jeans and cheap trainers. Eventually they arrive at the last one, and Bond rings the bell. A miserable guard, who looks like Geoff from Byker Grove, opens the door to tell him they’re closed, and Bond explains that he’s come all the way from London to arrange shipment of a Carcharodon carcharias (aka a great white shark). This is ill advised as everyone knows great white sharks can’t be kept in captivity: they die. Milton Krest tells the guard he can let Bond in, and gives him a tour of his facility. He claims he’s working on a project to feed the Third World with maggot-fed genetically engineered fish. As he leaves, Bond notices something on the floor – Felix’s wedding flower.

Bond and Sharkey return at night, in a rubber dinghy, to check the place out. Bond finds a drawer full of pasta shapes, which the filmmakers obviously thought were good pretend maggots, and I am sad to inform them that they are not; they look like the contents of a bin round the back of a Pizza Hut. Stashed beneath them are many parcels of cocaine – probably big Milky Bars – and as Bond fumbles around in there, he feels a gun at the back of his head. It’s Geoff from Byker Grove. He’s beaten up and thrown in with the maggots. ‘Freeze,’ says Killifer as he emerges from the dark of the warehouse still clutching his suitcase full of cash like it’s the accessory that comes with his action figure. He tells Bond to move over to the trapdoor. However, he and his precious suitcase end up swimming with the sharks.

Bond is summoned to see M to explain why he isn’t in Istanbul, and why he looks so good in that smart but casual shirt-and-suit-jacket combo. He’s told to get on a plane to complete his mission and to leave the Leiter business to the Americans, so he offers his resignation. ‘We’re not a country club, 007!’ M barks like a circus seal before demanding he hand in his gun. ‘A farewell to arms,’ Bond quips before leaping over the balcony and running away. ‘God help you, Commander,’ M murmurs as Bond disappears into the shrubbery like a dogger on a bank holiday.

The Wavekrest is a marine-research vessel located in the Bahamas. It’s dark, and Milton has had way too much to drink, so he decides to go and see Lupe. She’s sitting on a bed watching the worst-sounding western in movie history. He tells her he’s lost a lot of money as the DEA raided his warehouse, and suggests having some sex as a form of cultural exchange programme. Funnily enough, she’s not interested, and tells him to stop peering through the window at her. He seems perplexed. Why wouldn’t she want a weird-looking old bloke with wonky eyes bearing down on her? Before they can explore the thousands of reasons why, his captain tells him there’s something he needs to look at on the monitor. It turns out to be a manta ray. The captain has never seen one before and thought it might be an alien, or MC Hammer out skinny-dipping. Krest tells him it’s just a manta ray and orders the probe to be brought back in, but what he doesn’t know is that beneath that innocent-looking manta ray is James Bond, and he has sneaked aboard.

‘Make a sound, and you’re dead,’ whispers Bond as he holds his hand over Lupe’s mouth and points a knife at her. Lupe recognises him from the island and tells him Sanchez is not aboard, that he should get out. Sharkey’s boat arrives outside the window with a dead Sharkey hanging from a hook. Krest and his men all celebrate, and Mayor Larry Vaughn arrives to congratulate them and announce that the beaches will be open again. Bond isn’t so impressed, and instead harpoons one of the men, offering ‘compliments of Sharkey’ as he tumbles into the sea. He dives in with the body, steals the oxygen tank and hides among the rocks and coral watching the probe. Krest launches his Sentinel probe, which is loaded full of money to be delivered to a waiting sea plane. The exchange is made and Sentinel is brought back in, but they soon discover that Bond has opened it up and is ferociously stabbing all the drugs. Billions of dollars’ worth of cocaine is leaking into the sea and making all the fish frenziedly rearrange their CD collections into alphabetical order. Krest brings the probe to the surface, revealing Bond, and his men begin to fire on him. Bond fires a harpoon into the departing sea plane and is able to water-ski onto it, throw both pilots out and fly away with millions of dollars in cash. Krest watches on with a face that definitely says ‘oh fuck’.

Back in Felix’s study, Bond has broken in and retrieved the disk he saw Felix hide earlier. He loads it into the computer and discovers that Felix was due to meet Pam Bouvier at the Barrelhead Bar in Bimini on Thursday after midnight, which doesn’t sound like Della was going to get much of a honeymoon after all.

Pam is sitting at a table looking pensive as Bond walks into the bar. He tells her Leiter won’t be able to compete in the CIA football tournament later that year and they need to get away. Sadly it’s too late. Dario and a friend join them at the table and begin making threats. Pam is packing heat, though, and a classic bar fight breaks out, like some sort of inevitable cinematic force majeure. The pair escape the bar and jump into Bond’s boat, but not before Dario puts a sneaky bullet into Pam’s back. Happily there’s no harm done as she’s wearing bulletproof gear, a concept Bond is wholly unaware of. Just as they are arguing about professionalism, the boat begins to splutter and make a noise like Granny going upstairs, so Bond begins to tap the dials and displays in the way many people did back then as a sort of futile signal of competence. He tells Pam he’s going after Sanchez on his own, but she insists on coming with him, and to celebrate they launch into some intercourse.

The republic of Isthmus is a man’s world: Top Gear is played on Christmas Day and farts are actual currency. It is absolutely no place for sentiment or morals, so it’s the perfect retirement destination for traffic wardens and Republicans. The bank manager looks like Dick Van Dyke’s stunt double, and is initially not bothered when Bond walks in to announce he’d like to open an account. He soon changes his tune when Bond carts in many suitcases full of money. When Pam enters the room with a new hairdo and smart business dress, Bond turns to see her, then does a great double take that thankfully wasn’t tainted with a slide whistle.

Sanchez sits smugly on a sofa with a lizard on his shoulder. He’s watching Professor Joe Butcher (probably EastEnders’ Pat’s dad), a TV evangelist who is working as cover for the drug deals, sort of like Phillip Schofield doing Red Nose Day for the Mafia. The money is rolling in, and Sanchez’s assistant Truman Lodge is getting very excited about it all. Sanchez asks Lupe if she saw anything on Krest’s boat that was unusual, but she says she didn’t. A call comes in from the casino downstairs: a British guy has just walked in and he’s throwing money around like he’s a Lottery lout. Sanchez sends Lupe down to check things out.

‘It’s a wise gambler who knows when his luck has run out,’ Sanchez says to Bond as he takes a seat in his office. He asks Bond why he has a gun, to which Bond replies that in his business it pays to prepare for the unexpected and that he helps people with problems. Sanchez asks if he’s a problem solver, and Bond replies that he’s ‘more of a problem eliminator’, which brings down the house. Bond pushes the boat out a bit too far with his scary laugh, taking a few seconds to swim out and bring it back in. He tells Sanchez he’s looking for work, that everyone who works for him is shit, and he can do it better. Sanchez tells him he’s got ‘big cojones’, which goes to show just how deeply he looks into potential job applicants, and says he’ll think about it. After Bond leaves, Sanchez tells Heller to look into who this guy is.

In the lift on the way up to their hotel room, Bond asks Pam for a gun. The man on reception has just told him his uncle has checked into his room. Bond knows his uncle can’t be up there, for reasons too numerous to go into. As the room door opens, he pushes with his full weight, knocking the ‘uncle’ to the floor. It’s Q. He’s on leave, so decided to pop round and see how Bond was doing as Moneypenny was worried sick. Bond, for the first of many, many times, tells Q to go home, and Q rightly points out that he’ll need his help and if it wasn’t for Q Branch he’d have been dead years ago. He opens his bag and offers Bond a selection of travel gadgets: an explosive alarm clock, which will serve no purpose in this film, a plastic-explosive toothpaste, a laser-shooting Polaroid camera and a signature gun that doubles as a giant camera. Q plugs a calculator into the gun, and after a few beeps it can only be used by Bond. They decide to call it a night as there’s a long day ahead of them, and Pam agrees, going to bed alone. Bond watches as Q goes into the twin-bedded room and tests the springs. Looks like it’s sex with Q again.

Sanchez is holding a meeting with his Asian investors during which he elicits laughs by pointing at things, sort of like a drug cartel’s answer to Jason Manford. He tells them all about his organisation and its global reach, which is impressive enough to merit a big stick being pointed at a map. He wants them to be part of it all and set up franchises throughout the East at a cost of $100 million each. It’s all going swimmingly until one of the investors asks to see some hardware before he hands over that kind of money – and he’s not talking pornography. Sanchez agrees to take them all to his main distribution centre tomorrow. He then lightens the mood by opening a door to reveal sexy girls, the weakness of every business traveller.

Meanwhile, Bond tells Pam and Q to go home – again – and then sneaks up to the casino roof to abseil down the front and lay some plastic explosives under Sanchez’s armoured-glass window. He takes up position across the street and assembles his signature camera gun. As he watches through the scope, he sees Pam hand an envelope to Heller in the next room. His eyes bulge with rage, even though there could be a perfectly innocent explanation. ‘Watch the birdie, you bassstard,’ he whispers as he activates the charge and the window explodes. He trains the sight on Sanchez’s face and is about to pull the trigger when he is attacked and knocked out by ninjas, which is just typical.

He wakes up tied to a table. Kwang, one of the investors, asks him who ordered the killing of Sanchez. Fallon (MI6) appears and explains that no one did. Bond’s a rogue agent, and he’ll be taking him back to England, one way or another. He pulls out a syringe, but before he can inject him the place explodes. Heller and Sanchez’s army have arrived – somewhat heavy-handedly – with a tank and they kill everyone, except for Bond, who is safely buried under some bodies.

A weird fish-boy statue – absolutely fucking terrifying – is the first thing Bond sees when he wakes up in Sanchez’s guest bedroom. He wanders down to the ground floor and finds Sanchez there to greet him. He seems genuinely pleased to see Bond again, and while he takes a quick call Lupe tells him the Wavekrest is coming later that night.

Bond confesses to Sanchez that he used to be a British agent, and the people he was found with must have recognised him from the casino and were trying to silence him. Bond says they were well briefed and were expecting to be paid a lot of cash by someone arriving in Isthmus that night – a lovely piece of shithousing that we can all get behind by pre-emptively blaming it all on Krest. Sanchez tells Bond to enjoy the house and get some rest while he heads out for a meeting, but Bond has other ideas. With the help of Lupe, he legs it back to the city.

He bursts into the hotel room and confronts Pam. Why was she meeting Heller? She explains that Felix gave her a letter to offer Heller immunity if he retrieved some Stinger missiles from Sanchez and returned them to the US Government, but after the failed assassination he pulled out. She tells him Sanchez has tripled security and they’ll never get another shot at him, and he says they won’t have to, before happily bounding out of the room to tell Q to bring the car round to the front of the hotel, which makes Q’s day and his kindly little face light up. Bond pulls the money from the bank, and they bring it with them to meet Krest’s boat.

Bond dives under the boat with the money, and stashes it all in the decompression chamber before taking cover. Krest tells Sanchez the full story about how the money was taken, but it’s one of those stories that sounds entirely made up when spoken out loud. A minion whispers into Sanchez’s ear that they’ve found the cash, and they all go down to the chamber to look at the contents. Sanchez is not best pleased about the fact that someone would rip him off and then use the money to have him killed. He chucks Krest into the chamber, seals the door and starts the decompression process. Krest puts his face to the round window and holds his ears in pain, like an eighties dad hearing ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ for the first time. Sanchez then makes his head literally explode by cutting the air pipe with an axe. After witnessing this gruesome spectacle, Bond emerges from the sea to meet Q and Pam, and once again tells them to go home. You can’t treat people like this, James. They have feelings and emotions too.

A knock at the door causes Q to drop his suitcases. It’s Lupe. She rushes in to warn them that James is in great danger and that she loves him so much and they must do something. Q reassures her and holds her in his gigantic hands, like a crab trying to eat a stunned exotic bird.

Truman Lodge explains to the group that the cocaine is dissolved in gasoline, making it totally undetectable (and presumably smell and taste like petrol, which sounds like a major flaw). As the tour progresses Sanchez joins it with Dario, who instantly recognises Bond and pulls out a gun. Professor Denzil Dexter from The Fast Show gives a short demonstration on how the innovative cocaine/ petrol plan works, making it sound even more complicated than before, but before he can talk about space bats, Bond headbutts Dario (a classic Dalton move), grabs a beaker of gasoline and throws it across the room. A massive fire starts. Dario and Sanchez decide to torture Bond to find out who he’s working for and put him on a conveyor belt that leads to a cocaine-mincing machine. Bond stalls this by telling Sanchez that Heller will steal the Stinger missiles and Lodge will screw him over for the money, which seems to do the trick. Sanchez leaves Dario to it. As Bond clings to the conveyor belt, Dario perches on the edge to watch Bond die. He looks up with his deep, evil eyes, which have somehow become red, and laughs as Pam arrives on the scene. ‘You’re dead,’ he says in his usual menacing way, not realising she has a gun. She wastes no time in shooting him, and Bond drops him into the mincer.

As the tankers full of petro-Charlie leave the facility, Bond and Pam try to escape, but all exits are blocked by explosions and fire. Luckily for them, Heller’s dead body crashes through a wall on the points of a forklift truck. They race to Pam’s light aircraft to catch up with the convoy, and Bond drops onto the roof of one of the tankers, dodging Sanchez’s bullets, some of which play the Bond theme in ricochet sound effects.

The chase concludes with Bond and Sanchez fighting on a tanker that goes over the edge of a steep road, crashing into pieces as it hits the bottom. Bond crawls from the wreckage and is met with a machete in the face. Sanchez pulls him up onto a rock and tells him he could have had everything. ‘Don’t you want to know why?’ Bond asks as he produces Felix’s lighter, but before Sanchez can read the inscription he goes up in flames.

Lupe is holding a celebratory party at Sanchez’s house, which feels a bit like holding a disco at his grave, but they’ve all earned it. She thanks James for everything and kisses him, which upsets Pam and causes her to run away crying to the swimming pool downstairs. Q tuts disapprovingly. Bond mounts the balcony to tell Lupe she should marry El Presidente before jumping over the side into the pool below. Pam turns around to see what has happened, and Bond pulls her in as he surfaces. Q looks down and sighs, and knocks back a drink.

As the credits roll there is a poignant sense of finality as we say goodbye to the traditions of Maurice Binder and hello to legal wrangles, frustration and bitter disputes, as well as the eventual resignation of the lead. An era of non-interrupted two-year deliveries of Bond movies had well and truly ended, and it would be six long years before Bond would return.

SEVENTEEN

GOLDENEYE

1995

Pierce Brosnan’s face positively glows each time he’s on screen – and by Christ, it’s contagious. The man who lost out in 1987 was able to come back and show the world that this was his calling. Brosnan brought some new things to Bond, as well as some comfortably recognisable old things. He had the smooth but rugged charm of Connery, mixed with the playful, lovable japery of Moore. He hit the ground running, quite literally, and bungee jumped his way into our hearts for ever.

We open at Arkangel Chemical Weapons Facility in the USSR, where a man is running very fast across the top of a dam. He reaches the edge and drops a loop of ropes, clipping one end to the railings and the other to his boot. He takes a moment to gaze upon the hair-raising drop before he jumps, descending in graceful slow motion down the length of the dam in what is surely the best stunt opening since The Spy Who Loved Me. Welcome to the nineties, the home of the EXTREME. And in 1995, the most extreme of all sports was bungee jumping. Everyone was doing it, all the time, in all the places they could, and Bond wanted in on that action.

He reaches the ground, lasers open a hatch and slips into an airshaft, finding himself at a grate above a toilet cubicle. A Russian man sits on the pan and opens his newspaper, only to get the nagging feeling that he’s being watched. As he folds his newspaper, he finds Bond hanging upside down like some kind of well-groomed spider that smells of Lynx Africa and Old Spice. Bond apologises for not knocking before taking the guard out with a single punch. As the door opens, we get the first proper close-up of his face, and he looks glorious, like some kind of genetically engineered leading man with a perfect pout and aerodynamic hair.

Luckily, Bond has played GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64 and knows this facility like the back of his hand. He’s sauntering through the complex when suddenly a gun is thrust in his face, accompanied by a burst of Russian. ‘I’m alone,’ Bond replies through gritted teeth, causing the figure to emerge – but lo, it’s not a Russian guard, it’s his old pal, Alec Trevelyan, aka 006 (Sean Bean). They stalk the corridors and eventually arrive in a room filled with gas canisters. Bond notes that it was all way too easy, and Alec points out that ‘Half of everything is luck, James’ – a statement that comes back to bite him almost immediately when the alarm goes off as he tries to secure the door.

Guards flood in and Alec shoots them down while Bond plants explosives on a six-minute timer. Bond edges around the corner to see 006 on his knees, General Ourumov holding a gun to his temple. ‘Finish the job, James! Blow them all to hell!’ Alec yells. Bond ducks behind a gas canister and changes the timer to three minutes, and 006 shouts, ‘For England, James!’ before being shot in the face. Bond leaps onto a conveyor belt, riding past Bruce Forsyth and a housewife from Bristol trying to memorise what she sees, before opening fire to set the gas canisters rolling onto Ourumov’s men. He then forward-rolls out of the facility and onto the runway, where he sprints for a departing plane. Ourumov tells his men to hold their fire (perhaps he’s charged by the bullet by the Russian army?) and Bond makes it onto the plane, grapples with the pilot, falls back out of the plane, steals a motorbike from a pursuing soldier, races to the end of the clifftop runway and jumps after the pilotless plane, which is now in freefall. Against all laws of physics, he manages to land on the plane, climb into the cockpit and pull it out of a vertical dive with seconds to spare. He then smugly cruises over the facility as the whole place explodes. Phew. What. A. Start.

The opening titles roll. With Maurice Binder having gone to the big gun barrel in the sky, Daniel Kleinman, a veteran director of over a hundred music videos, was tasked with stepping into his shoes – huge shoes, full of naked ladies, lasers and dry ice. The end product is a slick mid-nineties kiss of bright light and arresting Soviet imagery. Tina Turner performs the song, written by Bono and The Edge. While it’s not a classic by any means, it fits the film and titles perfectly.

It’s nine years after the events at Arkangel. Bond is cruising along the roads of Monaco in his DB5, accompanied by Caroline, an MI6 psychologist sent to give him an evaluation (which is like sellotaping bits of steak to someone before sending them into a cave to ask the bear if it’s hungry). She’s not especially enamoured with Bond’s driving technique and offers a note of caution as he zooms around the corner of a particularly steep road. But what Caroline doesn’t realise is that she has just become invisible, because Bond has seen a red Ferrari and the driver is a Sexy Lady. Like countless generations of middle-aged men before and after, he must rise to the challenge and prove his manhood – through a race. He has the last laugh when, after a brief game of cat and mouse, Sexy Lady is sent spinning off the road into a ditch. Caroline demands he pull over at once, presumably so she can make a quick report and have him sectioned. He skids to a halt and opens a hidden hatch to reveal a bottle of champagne and two glasses. Obviously this more than makes up for things and Caroline wilts in the heat of 007’s sexual charisma, collapsing in his arms to be seduced at the side of the road, professional ethics be damned.

Bond emerges from his DB5 outside the Casino Royale in Monte Carlo, sans Caroline. He strides into the casino like a puma in a bow tie, accompanied by the smooth sounds of Eric Serra’s ‘We Share The Same Passions’. He watches the red Ferrari woman clean up at baccarat and then takes the place of the loser. Brosnan utters those few famous words – ‘The name’s Bond, James Bond’ – clearly relishing the moment. ‘Xenia Sergeyevna Onatopp,’ she offers in return, while smoking a cigar, and Bond nearly passes out. He manages to compose himself before telling her that he knows her car’s licence plate is a fake, while also revealing that he’s a commander. This would usually be very impressive, but she’s being escorted by a Canadian admiral. ‘I like a woman who enjoys pulling rank,’ Bond quips.

Later, James watches as Xenia and her admiral board a boat called the Manticore. Because this is the exciting future of tomorrow, 007 is able to take photos and then print and fax them via his car stereo, with added Moneypenny audio transmission. She tells him that Onatopp is an ex-Soviet fighter pilot with connections to the Janus crime syndicate and that the boat is leased to a known Janus front. M has authorised him to check it out, but he’s to make no contact with Xenia without M’s prior approval (a mood-killer if ever there was one).

On the boat, the admiral is frolicking in bed with Xenia and laughing heartily. She straddles him, swishing her hair around and clawing wildly at his bare chest, which appears to both excite and terrify him. Then she suddenly flips position and constricts his trunk between her legs. ‘Xenia . . . I can’t breathe,’ he wheezes, as his life ebbs away (and middle-aged men everywhere decide this is a more than acceptable way to go out). The next morning, Bond covertly boards the Manticore, dressed like he’s just ram-raided Marks & Spencer and grabbed everything from the over-fifties section, and finds the corpse of the admiral in the cupboard (smiling, of course).

On a nearby French naval destroyer, Xenia and an accomplice (using the deceased admiral’s ID) join the celebrations for the launch of an exciting new aircraft: the Eurocopter Tiger helicopter, which is able to withstand electronic interference, radio jamming and electromagnetic radiation. Xenia intercepts the pilots below deck, telling them she is a present from the boys in the barracks. This disappoints them greatly (they would have preferred vouchers), but they’re even more disappointed when she shoots them both. Bond tries to get onto the destroyer but is held back by armed guards and has to watch helplessly as the Tiger is flown away by Xenia and her accomplice.

Space weapons control centre, Severnaya, Russia. Computer programmer Boris Grishenko (Alan Cumming) is spamming fellow programmer Natalya Simonova (Izabella Scorupco) with cartoons of her in a bikini. (Oh, how innocent the people of 1995 thought the internet would be.) To get rid of the image, she has to guess the password from the following clue: ‘They’re right in front of you, and can open very large doors.’ The answer is not ‘the patriarchy’ but is in fact ‘knockers’. Moments later, we’re supposed to believe that this man successfully hacks into the US Department of Justice. But it turns out the Americans are on to him, so he loudly announces that he has ‘spiked’ them. This time, the password clue is ‘You sit on it, but you can’t take it with you,’ which proves that Boris is less a hacker and more a man who does the crosswords on kids’ food menus in pubs.

Boris takes a cigarette break just as the Tiger helicopter lands and Xenia and Ouromov – now revealed as her accomplice – step out. Ouromov tells the staff that he’s there for an unscheduled test of the GoldenEye weapons system, and the keys are duly handed over. As thanks, Xenia machine-guns everyone in the control room while making sex noises, which Ourumov finds either deeply troubling or highly erotic. Once everyone is dead, they point the GoldenEye satellite at the facility. Three fighter jets, responding after one of the scientists managed to activate an alarm, are brought down by a huge electromagnetic pulse as the facility explodes. The Tiger, meanwhile, gets away without a problem.

Bond walks into M’s office to find Moneypenny doing some admin. Samantha Bond’s new incarnation of the character is brilliant: clever and cutting, she’s the perfect foil for Brosnan’s flirtatious 007 (and a nice reminder that we are now in the nineties and it’s no longer OK to sexually harass secretaries). This is also the first appearance of Judi Dench as M, a role she will play with great style and charm for seven films, plus a cameo in Spectre. She instantly establishes her authority with a few icy remarks, showing that she has no time for Bond’s bullshit. M asks if the Severnaya explosion could have been an accident, but Bond points out that the helicopter was the perfect getaway vehicle from the GoldenEye electromagnetic pulse. He surmises that this must have been the work of an insider – you can’t just walk into a place like that. Then, ever the eagle-eyed pervert, he notices a lone figure on the satellite feed from the site. It’s Natalya. Thankfully, as she stumbles through the snow and burned-out buildings, she finds some huskies to take her to safety.

General Ourumov best fits the bill for the Severnaya attack, as he has access to the facility, but M’s analysts have ruled him out: he doesn’t seem to fit the profile of a traitor. Bond, failing to read the temperature in the room, smugly points out that these are the same analysts who messed up spectacularly over the existence of GoldenEye and that the helicopter wasn’t important. Pissed off with his mansplaining, M decides it’s time for some home truths and informs him that she thinks he’s a ‘sexist, misogynist dinosaur’ – a label he seems quite happy with – and ‘a relic of the Cold War’ – which he takes slightly more personally. She tells him to figure out who has taken control of GoldenEye and what they’re planning.

Q presents Bond with his new car, a boring-looking BMW Z3, and tells him he’s particularly proud of the headlights, which have Stinger missiles behind them. Unfortunately, they are never used, and neither are any of the car’s other features. He then shows off an exploding pen which is activated by three swift clicks. As he’s wittering on, a member of his team steps into a phone box (this was a way people used to contact each other before Snapchat) and is immediately suffocated against the glass by a self-inflating pillow.

Bond flies to St Petersburg, where he’s met by his CIA counterpart, Jack Wade (Joe Don Baker), who has no time for spy codes and even less time for ‘stiffass Brits’. He barely lifts his eyes from his paper to give 007 the time of day. Bond shoves a gun into his back while asking to see ‘the rose’ – and before you worry, he is referring to a tattoo on Jack’s arse. Now that they are properly introduced, they can get on with the mission. Wade explains that no one knows very much about the head of the Janus crime syndicate, except that he lives on a Soviet missile train (of course he does). His best idea is to point Bond towards Zukovsky, who may have more information. Zukovsky is an ex-KGB tough guy with a limp, who, it turns out, Bond knows very well, since he gave him the limp.

Natalya blags her way into a computer shop and sends Boris an email, which flashes up on his computer like he’s just won a big yacht (all he needs to do is send his bank details!). He’s excited to hear from her and they arrange to meet the next day – but it’s a trap. Boris, it turns out, has been working for Xenia all this time and she’s there to capture Natalya when she arrives for the meeting.

Zukovsky (Robbie Coltrane) walks through his club, stopping briefly to zip up his mistress’s dress. As he passes a curtain, a hand slides out, holding a gun. The hammer clicks. Zukovsky recognises the sound and observes, ‘Walther PPK, 7.65 mm. Only three men I know use such a gun. I believe I have killed two of them.’ They sit down for a chinwag and Bond says that he wants a meeting with Janus. Zukovsky agrees to set it up, and reveals that Janus is descended from Lienz Cossacks who collaborated with the Nazis during the war and were subsequently persecuted by Stalin (hardly surprising he’s a traitors then).

As he floats around in the small pool of the Grand Hotel, waiting for his meeting with Janus, Bond looks like a perfectly chiselled statue that has somehow toppled into the water and is waiting to be righted by a member of staff. The doors burst open and someone runs in, so 007 exits the pool – showing off his slicked-back hair, tufty chest hair and tiny trunks. He grabs the arm of the intruder and pushes them into the steam room at gunpoint. It’s Xenia – and she looks thrilled. She tells him he won’t need the gun; he says that depends on her idea of safe sex. After a brief grappling match, which includes a lot of aggressive snogging as well as Xenia trying to crush Bond’s pelvis, he breaks her python-like grip by sitting her on hot coals and demands to be taken to Janus.

They arrive in a giant, sprawling junkyard – a metaphor for the Russia of 1995. After knocking out Onatopp, Bond tries to find the mysterious Janus, only to come face to face with a ghost from his past: Alec Trevelyan. Alec, who now has a scar on his face that looks like he’s slept on a creased pillow, reveals that he is the orphaned son of Cossacks who escaped Stalin. Alec is very angry with Bond for setting the timers to three minutes instead of the agreed six. Before Bond can argue that it was Alec’s own stupid fault for pretending to be dead, he’s shot in the neck with a dart.

There’s only one thing worse than waking up in a helicopter that’s about to self-destruct, and that’s being shouted at by a Russian woman while waking up in a helicopter that’s about to self-destruct. Bond takes a few moments to assess the situation (and eye up Natalya, who has been strapped in behind him) before headbutting the control panel (channelling Tim-Bond). He fires the ejector seats as the chopper blows up, ignoring the fact that only an insane person would put ejector seats in a helicopter. Before Bond and Natalya can celebrate being alive, the Russian army arrives and arrests them.

Russian Defence Minister Dimitri Mishkin takes a seat at the interrogation table and asks how they would like to be killed. A bold opening gambit, I trust you’ll agree. Natalya reveals that it was General Ourumov who set off the GoldenEye and killed everyone, and he did it to cover up the fact that there is another GoldenEye satellite that he plans to use, which Mishkin knew nothing about. Speak of the devil and he shall appear – and in this instance also shoot the Defence Minister with Bond’s gun so that he can pin the murder on him and then claim that Bond was killed as he tried to escape. Before Ourumov can carry out the latter part of the plan, Bond whacks him with a chair, grabs Natalya and makes a run for it. Unfortunately, Natalya falls through a section of the metal-grated floor and is captured by Ourumov.

Ourumov downs the contents of a hip flask as they speed away from the government building, and well away from Bond, who is about to be ambushed by Russian soldiers while he hides behind a tank. The car skids past a huge wall, which suddenly explodes as the Bond theme rings out and a tank bursts through the dust and mortar. Watching 007 speed the tank through the streets of St Petersburg is an unmitigated joy, and shows that the filmmakers haven’t forgotten what Bond is all about. Ourumov escapes onto a Soviet missile train and takes Natalya to Alec, who is less than impressed with the fact that James is still alive. He tries the old ‘we used to share everything’ line on Natalya, but she slaps him when he tries to snog her.

The tank waits patiently as the train approaches. Alec gets word and runs to his monitor, muttering, ‘Bond, only Bond,’ while Xenia suddenly becomes very sexually excited about the idea of being derailed (and I start to suspect that she’s in the wrong film). Alec orders the train to plough through the tank, but he’s forgotten that tanks can shoot big explosive shells at things. ‘Why won’t you just be a good boy and die?’ Alec laments as they come to a halt and Bond bursts into the wrecked train compartment, brandishing a gun. He still has one ace up his sleeve, though: Natalya. Ourumov brings her in, holding a gun to her head. Bond tries to play it cool by saying the girl means nothing to him (and, in fairness, he’s only just met her), but it cuts no mustard. Bond kills Ourumov, but Alec manages to escape the train while locking Bond and Natalya inside. He tells Bond the train is rigged with explosives, and he’s giving him the ‘same six minutes’ he gave him nine years ago. (Bond should really explain that he did that because Alec was pretending to be dead, but I suppose he’s beyond reasoning now, like most British people involved in petty disputes over time-keeping.) James gets to work on opening the floor with his laser watch, and Natalya tries to trace Boris via the train’s computer system, which she does by ‘spiking’ him. First, she has to guess his password from earlier. The clue, to remind you, is: ‘You sit on it, but you can’t take it with you.’ Natalya – a highly intelligent computer programmer – comes up with the following guesses:

BUTT

ARSE

BUNS

REAR

Seriously. And after that she’s stuck. She asks Bond and he immediately barks, ‘Chair!’ (If only today’s Russian programmers were as easy to shut down, the world would be a much better place.) Natalya is able to trace Boris to Cuba, which is also where they’ll find Alec, and Bond manages to cut through the floor just before the train explodes.

Cut to a beach in the Caribbean, where we finally see Bond driving the BMW. (Let’s not worry ourselves about how the car miraculously got there.) Don’t worry, though, all that taxpayers’ money is about to be put to good use . . . Oh, wait, no, it’s not. A small plane comes in to land right in front of them. It’s CIA Jack. He trades them the plane and then zooms off in the car. See you later, gadget-filled BMW, we’ll never know how special you might have been . . .

Natalya navigates while Bond pilots the plane over a lake in Cuba. They’re looking for a dish like the one at Severnaya when a rocket flies out and blows a huge hole in the wing. Bond only just manages to crash-land in one piece. As they stumble out of the wreckage and collapse in a heap, Xenia descends via a rope from a helicopter and begins to kick Bond around like a football. After a couple of high boots into low regions, Xenia mounts him and squeezes him between her powerful thighs, telling him that this time the pleasure will be all hers. However, she forgets that she’s wearing a machine gun. Bond fires a few rounds into the chopper, which causes it to bank away, pulling Xenia with it and crushing her to death against a tree. He makes a joke about how she always liked a good squeeze, which is funny because it’s true.

Alec and Boris activate the GoldenEye and input the target as London. While they’re setting up the blast, we see that Bond and Natalya have sneaked into the base. Bond plants some explosives while Natalya gets into a computer room and begins to mess about with the controls. After a brief firefight, which leaves a few holes in the inordinate amount of giant petrol vats in the base, Bond surrenders and is taken to Alec, who knows all about his special bomb-detonator wristwatch and turns it off, but doesn’t realise the pen is also a gadget and leaves it on the desk next to Boris. Alec’s plan is very simple: hack into the computer networks of the London banks, transfer out all the money, then use the GoldenEye to erase any evidence of the transaction (in much the same way as I delete my browser history each time I shut down my computer). Except he will also be deleting everything stored digitally in London: tax records, the stock market, cat videos – everything.

Natalya is found by armed guards, who have the decency to allow her to hit ‘send’ on the thing she was typing before they take her away. She’s brought down to the control room just as Alec is finishing up his monologue about England learning the cost of betrayal, ignoring the fact that we learn that lesson every single year in Eurovision. Boris leaps to his feet, excited to see Natalya, but gets a good slapping for his trouble, causing him to drop the pen that he’s been clicking incessantly and pick up Bond’s by accident.

Alec tells Boris to check the systems, as Natalya was mucking about with the mainframe, but Boris reassures him that she doesn’t have the access. He is soon proved incredibly wrong (as most misogynists are eventually) by the deafening sound of the alarm. The retro-rockets on the GoldenEye satellite are firing. Natalya has programmed it to descend to Earth and burn up somewhere over the Atlantic – and to make matters worse, she’s changed the access codes. Boris begins feverishly typing while clicking the pen, but he’s having no joy whatsoever. He stands, clicks the pen three times and demands Natalya give him the codes. Bond quickly flips his hand, sending the pen into the petrol tanks above and causing the entire room to explode, probably killing loads of innocent boffins who were out there on a research grant.

Boris is left typing into a flaming computer, still confident that he can do it. Bond races to the dish and plunges a pole into the gears of its mechanism, causing the antenna to malfunction and Boris to shit his pants. Alec catches up with James and they have one of the greatest close-quarters fights since the train-carriage scene in From Russia with Love, with ferocious punches being thrown in a blood-and-sawdust fight scene. They spill out onto an access ladder, with Alec temporarily getting the better of Bond and attempting to throttle him. He looks up as his escape helicopter arrives, and to his dismay sees that Natalya has a gun pointed at the pilot’s head. It’s just the distraction Bond needs to headbutt Alec and send him flying over the edge of the platform. He grabs his foot and their eyes meet for one last time. ‘For England, James?’ Alec asks, as he lifts his bloodied head. ‘No, for me,’ Bond replies, and he lets go and watches his old friend fall hundreds of feet to the ground. Bond leaps onto the skids of the helicopter as the entire dish explodes and collapses on top of Alec, who was miraculously still alive.

Boris stands amidst the wreckage of the control room. He’s survived, against all the odds, again. He surveys the damage, debris and death around him and beams a wide smile. ‘YES! I am invincible!’ he cries at the top of his lungs, not realising that behind him, for some reason, are many giant vats of liquid nitrogen which all explode at once, turning him into an ice lolly.

The helicopter drops Bond and Natalya on a patch of grass, leaving them to embrace and roll around as if they haven’t a care in the world. Natalya asks if someone might be watching, and James says no way – only for Jack Wade to appear. It’s the perfect moment for a 007 wisecrack: ‘Is this supposed to be your idea of coming through in a clinch?’ (Wink wink.) Wade tells him that he was the back-up plan and signals for his men to stand up. They all pop up out of the grass in perfect disguises, like dogging detectives. Wade suggests Bond finish ‘debriefing’ Natalya back at Guantanamo, which suggests that, rather than sex, she’s in for a night of waterboarding, audio torture and electrocution. Bond lifts her into his arms and asks, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’

EIGHTEEN

TOMORROW NEVER DIES

1997

Pierce comes striding into the gun barrel like a sassy, sexy gazelle. The barrel is sleek, cool and shiny and, for me, is the best one of the lot.

We begin at a terrorist arms bazaar, which is basically a car-boot sale for people who want to blow stuff up. We’re told it’s a ‘terrorist supermarket’ – a sort of Aldi-Qaeda, if you will. Henry Gupta (Ricky Jay), a man who looks like he lives under a bridge and sleeps on cardboard, has purchased an American satellite encoder. We’re informed that Gupta ‘practically invented techno-terrorism’ (a branch of Euro house that never really took off), but he now sells his politics for cash. Gupta will use the encoder to mess with GPS – the promised technological future that Max Headroom and Games Master had promised us for years has well and truly arrived. Hey, stupid people from the past, bin all your Betamax players, Filofaxes and hairspray, this is 1997 and people have mobile phones, fax machines, car phones and GPS, making this less a Bond film and more an episode of Tomorrow’s World gone ROGUE. The encoder is packed in a lovely red display case alongside a stick with a series of numbers on it. This stick, in the wrong hands, has the potential to destroy the world. A bit.

MI6 Chief of Staff Charles Robinson (Colin Salmon) is observing matters via a video link from the Ministry of Defence in London, firing out exposition for the benefit of Judi Dench’s M. General Bukharin (Terence Rigby), a Russian, is also keeping an eye on the evil jumble sale, showing that Anglo-Russian relationships are in a good place right now. Incidentally, playing a Russian general in the eighties and nineties seems like a fairly easy acting gig. All you had to do was occasionally mention Chernobyl, say things like, ‘X will make Y look like picnic’, and occasionally drop in the word ‘borscht’ during conversations, regardless of context.

Today’s surveillance mission is being supervised by Admiral Roebuck, played by Geoffrey Palmer (with a face like the bulldog in the Churchill Insurance ads). He’s teamed up with Judi Dench once again after playing her husband in As Time Goes By, a very popular sitcom about a charming couple with hilarious middle-class problems. Yes, quite. Roebuck and Bukharin decide that they’ve seen enough of the explosions supermarket and he notifies the HMS Chester to fire a missile on the arms bazaar, which is obviously a marvellous idea.

The missile is launched and Roebuck and co. are happy with their work, probably looking forward to the table they’ve booked at a carvery. However, before celebratory Kit-Kats and champagne can be dished out, Robinson receives a note of caution from ‘White Knight’ – the agent on the ground bringing us these pictures. One of the planes (which until now has been hidden from view behind a van) is carrying nuclear warheads.

Quick as a flash, Roebuck tries to cancel the missile, but they can’t, it’s too late – which is similar to when you buy something from Amazon when you’re drunk and try to cancel it the next day – a seemingly impossible task. Everyone in the room watches on helplessly as the missile hurtles towards boom town. Bukharin offers that ‘There’s enough plutonium to make Chernobyl look like picnic’ (see!). It would seem that there is literally no one who can avert this disaster.

But we’re forgetting that White Knight is on the scene. And as luck would have it, White Knight is James Bond – and he has a plan. In what is clearly a part of the script written by a self-righteous ex-smoker, Bond punches a man who asks for a light and declares it a ‘filthy habit’. He then sets about beating up and shooting everyone at the bazaar, which feels a bit off, really. There’s no way a terror organisation would send their top muscle to what is effectively a sales conference, so he’s basically attacking mid-level sales reps who didn’t want to be there anyway. Bond jumps into the plane with the warheads, knocks out the co-pilot and, after gunning down an area the size of Bristol, prepares for take-off just as the missile arrives.

The entire bizarre is engulfed in explosions and the video feed to London is lost. Heads go down all around the room as they entertain the idea that they may have just accidentally detonated a nuclear bomb, which is just the worst feeling in the world. Meanwhile, back up in the sky, Bond’s co-pilot has woken up and decided to strangle him with an audio lead, which leads to some excellent Pierce Brosnan-related strangle-acting. After skilfully avoiding a missile from another plane that is following them, Bond sends the co-pilot shooting up via the ejector seat into the pursuing fighter, which immediately explodes. I can only assume that the pilot must have spontaneously combusted or had live grenades smuggled in his pants. Bond radios into M’s briefing asking where the Admiral would like his bombs delivered – and I am assuming he’s not talking in a rap sense.

Sheryl Crow’s title song wraps very nicely around another set of beautiful title images; however, her voice feels like it has a ceiling and spends the choruses pressed uncomfortably up against it like a Q technician in a phone box. David G. Arnold brought KD Lang and a song called ‘Surrender’ to the table for the opening sequence (the melody of which is used all the way through as part of the score), but I’m guessing that Crow was such a big name at the time they plumped for her instead. ‘Surrender’ gets a full play in the end credits, and in all honesty it’s probably a better fit there.

The HMS Devonshire alarm has sounded as it’s been ‘overflown’ and there’s panic on board. The Chinese MiG fighter jets that have just performed the fly-by inform the Devonshire that it’s strayed into Chinese territorial waters. The officer in command, who is definitely Tony Hadley from Spandau Ballet, appeals for an update from his men, after which he informs the MiGs that they are in international waters and if they are attacked, they will defend themselves. Just to be safe, he asks his men to double-check their position again. The answer confirms that, according to the satellite, they are firmly in international waters and the MiGs should piss off. However, unbeknownst to the crew of the Devonshire, something is lurking in the dark, prowling the surface of the water like Duncan Goodhew in a trench coat. It’s a stealth boat and it’s got an underwater drill which it unleashes on the warship. As the drill approaches, the crew of the Devonshire mistake it for a torpedo dropped by one of the MiGs. The drill begins to rip a hole through the ship and Gerard Butler tells the captain that things are very bad. As the ship begins to sink, the captain sends a message to the admiralty saying they’ve been torpedoed by Chinese MiGs and gives their position, before the crew begin to abandon ship in moody slow motion, like John Woo directing a christening. The stealth boat then fires a missile at the fighter jets and blows one out of the sky to complete the pantomime.

The stealth boat crawls towards the survivors clinging to life in the water. The door to the dark behemoth slides open and Stamper (Götz Otto) walks out brandishing a machine gun. Stamper is the henchman of the piece and he looks exactly like Ivan Drago from Rocky IV if he joined Blur. He guns down all the swimmers, as his men dive down to the sunken ship and retrieve one of its missiles.

‘Good morning, my Golden Retrievers,’ Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) huskily barks as he strides into his video room. ‘What kind of havoc shall we in the Carver Media Group create in the world today?’ he adds, and one cannot help but hate him already. In his hand is a palm-activated controller that he taps in the most annoying fashion, allowing him to flick between screens at great speed. It becomes irritating within one second and by the fifth second you’re begging someone to come and help you hold him down so you can shove the pad up his arse. There’s some clumsy satire on Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, before Gupta arrives and tells Carver that Stamper has an update for him, so he switches to his frequency and hears that there were seventeen survivors from the Devonshire, and that he has footage of them being shot which, he is told, is quite excellent – Stamper obviously being an ex-media studies student. Carver is delighted and taps his fingers on the pad again to call up his cronies. He tells them the news that a war may be about to start, ordering them to run the story, as well as ‘TV, radio, magazine stories, books and films’. If I’d been one of his thirsty cabal, I’d be asking at this point if he wants a book or a film to be made in one night and if he understands how logistically difficult that would be. ‘There’s no news like bad news,’ says Carver as he clutches his remote control to his chest – and you want him dead already.

Oxford University: a world-renowned and respected seat of learning, where some of the very brightest lights in the world have studied under the expert tutelage of well-respected lecturers. Today, however, is a dark day for the entire faculty as Bond is in bed with a Danish lecturer making jokes about tonguing her while nibbling at her shoulder, a scene that would have been wholly improved with the casting of James Robertson Justice as the lecturer. Suddenly there’s a ringing sound and Bond looks around to answer it. Is it his watch? His shoe? His trousers? No, it’s a mobile phone and he’s arrived in the 21st century. It’s Moneypenny and she says he’s needed at the Ministry of Defence in 30 minutes, so he says goodbye to her in Danish then continues snogging the lecturer, so Moneypenny tells him he’s a ‘cunning linguist’, a line that sounds like it’s come straight from a Loaded magazine feature about Stanley Unwin.

Admiral Roebuck is livid about the fate of the Devonshire. GPS signals confirmed that the ship was in international waters and GPS signals do not lie (he’s obviously never used a TomTom). M informs him that their Singapore station picked up a mysterious signal on the GPS frequency that could have sent the ship off course, so she suggests an investigation before sending the entire fleet to blow things up. However, Roebuck is desperate to send the fleet to recover the wreck (and to blow things up), adding that they’ll be in position in 48 hours. The Minister of Defence (Julian Fellowes) isn’t happy about this as he’s worried about the press getting hold of the story, but Bond arrives just in time to show them all a copy of Elliot Carver’s newspaper Tomorrow, which has to be the worst name for a publication in fictional newspaper history. The paper has the full story, and even some key details that the Ministry of Defence didn’t have, which proves that Carver hasn’t really thought this through properly and may not be the genius he thinks he is. The Minister says that, in light of this newspaper story, the fleet will have to be sent, but gives M 48 hours to investigate before stomping away to spend the next 20 years writing about posh people and their servants.

M and Bond speed away in a police convoy, and Bond tells her that he called a contact in Vietnam who told him that the bodies of the sailors were only found three hours ago, suggesting someone at Tomorrow knew about the attack before the Vietnamese Government. M then tells him what she couldn’t have told him in the room with the Minister (for some reason) – the GPS signal came from one of Carver’s satellites. Bond will need to go to Hamburg to investigate as Carver is holding a party to celebrate the launch of a new satellite, which gives him the power to broadcast to everyone on Earth – except the Chinese, who have refused broadcast rights. She reminds Bond that he used to have a relationship with Carver’s wife, Paris (which, surprisingly for Bond, he seems cagey talking about). M asks him to ‘pump’ Paris for information and teenage boy viewers everywhere snort.

As the plane touches down in Hamburg, Bond comes face to face with Q, looking like a Jim Henson puppet, who is in disguise as an Avis car-rental staff member. He takes Bond on a tour of his gadgets and his ‘beautiful new car’, which is nothing of the sort, but instead a very boring slab of BMW saloon car. Rather than being a sexy, alluring, aspirational dream machine, it resembles something you’d buy because it has decent boot space. It has one exciting feature, however – it can operate, via Bond’s new mobile phone (which also serves as a highly advanced fingerprint scanner and a 20,000-volt security system), as a remote control car. Q tries to demonstrate how it works, but seeing as it requires the lightest of touches to operate it and he has a pair of spam mountains for hands, his attempt doesn’t go very well, so Bond takes over and is immediately able to drive it perfectly, like my kids playing Mario Kart.

It’s Carver’s swanky launch party and he’s holding court with some guests, telling them there’s no truth in the rumour that he started running stories about mad cow disease because ‘Sir Angus Black, the great British beef baron, lost £10,000 to me in a game of poker and refused to pay up’, which is a contender for worst line of dialogue in movie history. He then compounds this with the hilarious kicker: ‘Moreover, there’s even less truth to the rumour that I took 100 million francs from the French Government to keep the stories running for another year.’ I mean, in terms of satire, it’s hardly Chris Morris, but it gets a laugh from his sycophantic guests anyway. Bond arrives disguised as a banker and, with his typical diligence about protecting his identity, introduces himself to Carver as ‘Bond, James Bond’; almost immediately, however, he’s overshadowed by the arrival of Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) from the New China News Agency, which reports exclusively about ceramics. Carver is enchanted by Lin and says he admires her initiative when she confesses to sneaking in, mentioning that she should come and work for his Beijing bureau, even though, as she points out, he hasn’t got one (it’s a very strange chat-up line).

Paris Carver (Teri Hatcher) stands on the mezzanine watching the busy party below. She looks bored and disinterested in everything that’s happening around her, like someone has told her the Twilight saga is about to be shown. Her mood is about to change, though, as Bond approaches and tells her he always wondered how he’d feel if he saw her again, so she greets him with a mighty slap, as apparently his last words were, ‘I’ll be right back’. I like to imagine he was doing a very bad Schwarzenegger impression when he said it. Elliot appears with Lin and asks how Paris and Bond know each other. Paris says Bond dated her roommate in Zurich, which sounds as convincing as him being a banker. Bond asks Carver if his satellites could manipulate people, information or boats and, at this point, he may as well just tell him he’s a spy. Carver says Bond has a very vivid imagination and that he should perhaps commission him to write a book, to which Bond replies that he’d be ‘lost at sea’, proving once and for all that this spying lark is easy if you just make no effort to stick to your cover. As Carver leaves to begin his presentation to the world, he asks Stamper to take care of his banker problem.

Bond is shoved into a sound-proofed studio and beaten up by five burly middle-aged men. They want to know why he is so interested in Mr Carver (I’m assuming they’ve done this to every guest there that night), and they’re having a field day throwing him around the room. They’re about to hit him with a bat when he manages to get the better of them, and within seconds they’re all unconscious on the floor. He watches Carver on the television talk about how he’ll bring the world the news without fear or favour, but very soon, like everyone watching Carver for more than a second, Bond’s had enough and pulls the power on the entire station, ruining Carver’s live launch and causing him to get very angry.

Back in his hotel room, Bond sits alone drinking neat vodka and playing with the silencer on his pistol. For a moment it looks like he’s about to shoot himself, which just goes to show what prolonged exposure to Elliot Carver’s wheezy bullshit can do for you. He watches as Paris lets herself in and tells him that Carver is ‘on to him’, which is a huge surprise seeing as he just beat up five of his men and turned off his live world broadcast. He tells her to go home and that he didn’t ask her to get involved in this, except that by just turning up he’s specifically involved her in everything. She says she used to look in the papers every day for his obituary, which is a nice way of saying you hope someone dies. He tells her he’s sorry he keeps disappointing her and then throws his glass to the floor, but as it’s a carpeted room it makes no sound, and they passionately embrace.

Gupta has found some information for Carver. He hacked into the bank Bond says he works for and went through his records, which are so perfect he concludes that he must be a government agent. This explains why Nick Leason got away with his dodgy deals for so long – if he’d have been perfect, they’d have been on to him immediately. Gupta also has a recording of the conversation Paris and Bond were having on the mezzanine earlier about him sleeping with a gun under his pillow, which displeases Elliot immensely. He tells Gupta to arrange an appointment for his wife with the doctor, and he doesn’t mean Dr John, which would have been a thoughtful gift.

Paris gets dressed and tells Bond she has to go. He says she should stay with him as he can get her out of the country in four hours, which is not much of a boast, really. She tells him she has to go home as no one can protect her from Carver. She suggests Bond drops his investigation, but as he won’t, she tells him that Carver has a secret lab on the top floor of his building that Bond can access via an emergency hatch on the roof.

As Gupta exits his office and complains to his guards that he hates travelling, Bond skulks down through the hatch and breaks into Gupta’s office, using his mobile phone to electrocute the lock. There’s something about Gupta’s office that seems so utterly out of character: it’s clean, sterile and minimalist; there are no bottles of alcohol, newspapers, kebab wrappers or takeaway boxes. However, when Bond breaks open the safe, it’s packed full of props that are well within Gupta’s wheelhouse: loads of porn mags, bundles of cash, heroin and cocaine, and a GPS encoder. He pockets the decoder and is about to leave without anyone knowing he was there, when he bumps into Wai Lin, who is also breaking into the lab, but who manages to set off the alarm when doing it. Bond races away while being shot at from all angles. Lin casually abseils down the side of the atrium and is seemingly invisible even though she’s moving so slowly in a straight line that you’d think shooting her would be easy. After beating up some guards, and throwing one of them into a newspaper press, Bond runs out of the building and away from danger.

When he reaches his hotel room the TV is playing a newsflash announcing the death of Paris Carver and as he reaches the bed he finds her body. As he makes strange growling noises and weirdly caresses her corpse, the news announces that she was found with an unidentified man who appeared to have shot himself. Dr Kaufman (a film-stealing Vincent Schiavelli) appears with a gun drawn and tells Bond to drop his weapon and sit on the bed. Kaufman withdraws the cassette from the VHS player and tells Bond that the story is a pre-record that will be broadcast in an hour. Kaufman introduces himself as an outstanding pistol marksman, who could shoot Bond from Stuttgart and make it look like suicide – but before he can prove it, he hears from Stamper that his men are having trouble breaking into Bond’s shit car to retrieve the encoder. He tells Bond he will have to tell him how to open it or he’ll torture him. Bond hands Kaufman his mobile phone and tells him which buttons unlock the car, but when Kaufman presses them, he’s electrocuted. Bond forces Kaufman’s gun into his face and kills him, which, looking on the positive side, means they can still run that VHS on the news. When he reaches his car, it’s flanked by middle-aged men, like Mumford and Sons are playing in it, so he decides it’s time to unleash the remote control. The car zooms off and he dives through a back window into the passenger seats as the baddies chase him through the multi-storey car park. The sequence ends with Bond jumping out of the car just before he launches it off the roof and into a branch of Avis, probably killing everyone in it, and making this the first time in the entire franchise that the destruction of a Bond car leads to a mere shrug.

On a US air base in the South China Sea, Bond steps off a helicopter in full naval uniform, which is always a treat, with the GPS encoder. Jack Wade (Joe Don Baker), his CIA buddy from GoldenEye, is there to meet him with a calibration unit. Once the unit is connected to the GPS encoder they can figure out exactly where the Devonshire was when she sank. Bond then asks Wade for a small favour of a HALO (High Altitude, Low Opening) jump to drop him over the wreckage. As an aside, stuntman B. J. Worth (as alluded to before, he really should be a Bond love interest) had to do the jump 80 times for the filming of this sequence.

Bond lands in the water and dives down to the wreck of the Devonshire. Inside he finds a missile is missing – and bumps into Lin, who he bumps into so often she may as well be a dodgem car. They head to the surface and exchange some mild banter, before discovering that the ship she used to sail to the wreck has been taken over by Stamper and his men, who are now pointing guns at them. They escort them to a helicopter to go and see Carver.

Bond and Lin arrive, handcuffed together, in Carver’s Saigon office, where they pass a man who Lin recognises as General Chang (Philip Kwok) of the People’s Liberation Army. Carver is in his office tippy-typing away on that awful controller in that way actors who have never typed anything before often do, with such wild abandon it looks like they’re being mildly electrocuted. He’s writing Bond’s obituary for the newspaper and we learn that Lin works for the Chinese Secret Service. Bond tries to style it by pretending that he and Lin have been working together for months, but Carver’s not buying it and instead shows them the headlines that are busy ramping up the war tension, before leaving them to Stamper to be tortured. Stamper was a student of the late Dr Kaufman and is well versed in the ancient art of Chinese Chakra torture, not to be confused, of course, with the ancient art of Chaka Khan. But before Stamper can get the chance to sing ‘I’m Every Woman’, Bond grabs a gun and shoots up the place, before he and Lin leap out of the window and use a giant picture of Carver’s face to get them down to the ground.

After an exciting motorbike chase, Bond and Lin have a shower together in the middle of the street, and Lin manages to pick her side of handcuffs and then cuff Bond to a pipe, allowing her to slip away back to her HQ. When she gets there, she’s ambushed by a bunch of goons, allowing us to see just how brilliant she is at martial arts as she takes them all out in a nicely choreographed scene.

Bond arrives as the dust settles, and he and Lin decide to work together to stop World War III. Bond examines a gun one of the assailants was carrying and declares it to be standard Chinese Army-issue – suggesting that General Chan sent them to kill her. She tells him some stealth material was found missing from one of Chan’s bases and she followed a lead to Carver in Hamburg, where they thought he may be building a stealth plane – but Bond realises that the material must have been for a stealth boat, as that’s the only way they could get that close to the Devonshire without being spotted (although surely the point of stealth anything is that you don’t get spotted?). Bond suspects that Carver will use the boat to get near the British fleet before firing the stolen missile into China, thus starting a war – which seems an extreme way to boost newspaper circulation, and makes me wonder why Carver hasn’t just considered getting someone in to do some really good cartoons for him. They decide to warn both their governments, and Lin pushes a button with opens up the entire room into a command centre, in much the same way they do in the opening titles of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. Bond, being a pushy sort, insists on sending the messages while Lin sorts the equipment, but when he sees the keyboard is entirely in Chinese, he suggests they swap (so much for that first from Cambridge in ‘Oriental Languages’ he boasted about in You Only Live Twice). It’s here that Pierce Brosnan is suddenly possessed by the ghost of Frankie Howerd, and as he touches a statue of a Chinese dragon that breathes fire, he steps back and says, ‘Ooh, very novel’, in a way that the late Mr Howerd would have been proud of.

Lin says that according to her computer there are only four areas where Carver could dock the boat, so Bond suggests running a cross-check on those areas for anything suspicious, and I would love to know how that check would work, and whether it would just come back and say, ‘There were some lads hanging around by the swans on Thursday’. Nevertheless, she finds it based on ‘four missing boats and three unexplained drownings’, and they head to Ha Long Bay, which sounds like a porn star.

They arrive at the last cove in the bay just in time to meet the stealth boat as it emerges from the dark, so they speed over in their dinghy to meet it and plant bombs all around the outside. Inside the boat, Carver is informed that they are in position between the fleets, so he suggests firing a missile at both, to wind them up, saying that the media will give objective coverage, even though there doesn’t seem to be any media covering this. He’s about to get all frothy, wheezy and excited again, when he notices Lin on the CCTV and sends Stamper out to get her. After she’s grabbed, Bond kills a guard then holds the body out from where he’s hiding. Thinking it’s Bond, Stamper shoots the body and Bond throws the corpse into the water. Stamper falls for the whole charade, the great boob, and reports back to Carver that Bond’s dead, earning an annoying ‘delicious’ comment. Lin’s brought before Carver and he tells her that in nine minutes the MiGs will fire on the British fleet and she kicks out at him. Carver reacts to this by jumping around like a weird arsehole and making Bruce Lee noises, before commenting ‘pathetic’, like he has any kind of moral high-ground.

M bursts into the Minister of Defence’s meeting while brandishing a piece of paper like Neville Chamberlain. She shows them 007’s message that has also been confirmed by her opposite number in China. Carver and his stealth boat are responsible for setting both sides off against each other. An urgent message is then sent to a British naval warship the HMS Bedford telling them to try to locate a boat that is invisible to radar. When the captain tells his crew about it, they all must think he’s fucking lost it.

Bond, meanwhile, has been sneaking around the stealth boat, killing guards and helping himself to objects from the stationery cupboards in order to build a bomb, which he places right next to the very handy, and very explosive, canister he’s found on a high level of the boat. After a brief monologing break, Carver checks in with Gupta about launching the missile but finds Bond on the other end of the line; he wants to trade Gupta for Lin. Carver asks Gupta if the missile is ready to launch and he says all he need do is press the button and Beijing disappears, so Carver shoots him. Carver laughs, telling Bond he has a back-up plan, and that in exchange for helping General Chang rise to the highest office in China, Carver Media Group will have exclusive broadcasting rights in China for 100 years. Bond laughs and says he has a back-up plan too – and detonates his bomb, which blows a big hole in the boat that makes it visible on radar. Carver tells his men to put the fire out and Stamper to ‘kill those bastards’, which isn’t a quote that will live on in infamy.

The boat roars into life to escape the scene. The HMS Bedford has heard back from the Chinese counterpart who tells them they also have the boat on radar, but it’s all theirs to destroy, so they announce they will do it the ‘old-fashioned’ way, which doesn’t mean putting on giant hats and dying of scurvy, but instead using their big guns to take it down by sight. Lin, meanwhile, shoots the engine room to pieces and brings the boat to a standstill, making it a sitting target. Carver still wants the missile launched, which at this point seems utterly pointless as everyone knows he’s behind it all, but in much the same way that everyone knows Putin is behind the fresh hell that is modern Western politics, he doesn’t appear to be bothered. Stamper is the end-of-level boss of this section and he wanders along a gangway brandishing a giant machine gun and launching grenades at Bond – not a terribly smart idea on a boat, but never mind – while Bond runs, ducks and dives out of the way.

The Bedford blows another big hole in the stealth boat and most of the crew abandon ship. Bond slowly removes himself from under some rubble as Stamper stomps off to take out Lin. Bond stumbles to the control room and shoots the guards there before Carver springs out of nowhere and hits Bond on the back. Carver tells him it’s too late, the missile is fully programmed and can’t be stopped. Bond has some breaking news for him, however, and throws Carver into a reactivated sea-drill, whereupon there should be mass celebration like at the end of Return of the Jedi, with the Ewoks singing and dancing and the tapping keyboard is smashed repeatedly on Carver’s dead face.

Bond turns his attention to the missile, which is minutes from launching, but as he’s trying to deactivate it, Stamper arrives with Lin hanging from a chain above the water, which is a weirdly complicated coercion tactic. Surely holding a gun to her head would be just as effective? She throws Bond the detonators she had in her pocket and tells him to use them to blow up the bomb, so Stamper drops her into the sea and sets about beating up Bond, telling him he owes him an unpleasant death – but before he can do so, Bond drops the missile onto his leg, trapping him underneath it, and leaps into the sea to save Lin (and avoid being blown up).

The missile explodes, taking Stamper with it, while Bond gives some much needed air to Lin via sexy kissing and frees her from her chains so they can both swim to safety amongst the wreckage.

Back at MI6, M receives word that Carver went down with the ship and Bond made it, so she tells Moneypenny to release a statement saying that Carver is missing presumed drowned while he was on a cruise, with local authorities believing he committed suicide, and then walks away chuckling – about suicide. Meanwhile the HMS Bedford cruises through the wreckage with a searchlight piercing the darkness. A voice shouts through a PA system looking for Commander Bond and Colonel Lin, but they’re having no luck as the two agents are hiding in the wrecked stealth boat. Bond suggests they stay undercover, so they kiss once again and lie back down to avoid any searchlights shining on his bare arse going up and down like a nodding dog, which is definitely for the best.

The film ends with a heartfelt message of love for Albert R. ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, who sadly passed away during the post-production of GoldenEye, and without whom the adventures of 007 would not have been as endearingly realised as they were. He was a truly beloved figure in cinema and one who all Bond fans should remember dearly as the man with the golden heart, who kept things charming and fun for so many years.

NINETEEN

THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH

1999

One of my favourite facts about The World Is Not Enough is that one of the rumoured titles was Bond 2000. I cannot even begin to think of a title that would have been more embarrassing than that – and I’ve really tried (except maybe James Bond: Global Hypercolor). Nothing has aged worse than the late nineties obsession with the millennium. There was a compulsive hysteria as the last months of the 20th century ticked down, mostly from people who had no idea about technology and thought computers would take over and make all the road signs fight like in Superman III. However, when the year 2000 finally arrived, absolutely nothing happened because really clever people had ensured nothing would happen and, more importantly, absolutely no one gave a toss. It was possibly the most underwhelming cultural moment in modern history – and this was before Avatar came out. Tragically The World Is Not Enough is littered with references to the borefest that was the millennium: the dome, the bug, bad sunglasses and the birth of reality TV. We begin with the longest pre-credits sequence in Bond history, a fact that was forever bandied around with a real sense of pride, rather than confusion – like buying a pair of trousers from a tailor, only for the tailor to announce, with a wide smile on his face, ‘You’re in luck, these are the longest trousers in trouser history!’

Looking sharper than a set of steak knives, a bespectacled Brosnan saunters through the streets of Bilbao and into a Swiss banker’s office. How do we know this is a Swiss banker? Because it’s mentioned in about 400 times in the next scene. Bond is there to retrieve some money from the banker (Patrick Malahide) and ask some questions about who killed an MI6 agent, while obviously mentioning once again that he’s dealing with a Swiss banker. He is offered a cigar by ‘Cigar Girl’ (Maria Grazia Cucinotta), and makes a joke about her figures being ‘well rounded’.

The banker will not talk and Bond is being threatened by his muscle-men, so he removes his glasses and unleashes a gadget that’s up there with some of the most pointless: a gun that explodes. Q was obviously having a fallow period of creativity that week. It was either the exploding gun or the flame-throwing food-processor.

The gun explodes, the room is shaken, and as the smoke clears he pulls the Swiss banker to his feet and demands the information. Just who killed the MI6 agent? And did he think the exploding gun was a good idea, as he and some of the guys at Q Branch think it was perhaps a bit shit. However, before the banker can pass comment, he is comedically killed via a flying dagger in the back. Bond rushes out of the door and sees Cigar Girl making a break for it, however, before he can give chase, he hears footsteps heading up the stairs, so he bolts the door and asseses his options. Judging by the sound of the sirens, the police are on the way and it’s not a good look to be caught in a locked room full of dead people. As he tries the window mechanism he hears the click of a gun being cocked and turns to see one of the banker’s men standing with a gun trained on him. The red laser-sight of a sniper rifle suddenly appears on the bad guy’s chest and the pop of a bullet pierces the air. The guard is down and, as if things couldn’t be stressful enough, there is now knocking at the door. This is becoming like the world’s most complicated escape-room experience ever. Bond’s ingenuity flashes into action and he uses the window cord as an escape rope, tying one end to the last unconscious guard and the other to his own belt. He pushes the glass out of the window with a briefcase and jumps down towards the street, pulling the sleeping guard towards the wall. The guard tries to stop his inevitable fate (much like Simon Cowell with latter-day X-Factor), but it’s no good. Bond reaches the street, undoes the line and goes about his day while more police cars arrive and the Bond theme trills in the background.

Back at MI6, Bond feeds the money from the briefcase into a big scanner, for some reason, and then visits Miss Moneypenny to give her a cigar tube. He suggests that she utilise it inappropriately and she has the presence of mind to put it in the bin. M buzzes through on the intercom to ask Bond to stop sexually harassing her secretary for a minute and to come and meet her best friend, Sir Robert King – the man who owned the money Bond retrieved in Bilbao. King exchanges pleasantries and then leaves to get his money back.

King and M read law at Oxford together, but Bond casts a mild aspersion on King’s reputation by suggesting that while he looks to be a nice guy on the surface, he actually buys stolen reports for $3 million, so is also a bit of a prick. They go over the classified stolen report from the Russian Atomic Energy Department and Bond fixes himself a whisky with some ice. King was led to believe it was a secret report that would identify the identity of the terrorists who had been attacking his oil pipeline. Bond suggests that while this is all very interesting (it isn’t), it doesn’t explain why he was allowed to leave the banker’s office alive. But before he can speculate on that further, the ice-cubes he handled when making his drink have begun to fizz and he recognises the smell. No, it’s not SodaStream, it’s explosives that were obviously all over the money somehow. ‘KING! THE MONEY!’ Bond barks as he races out of M’s office, and M immediately knows what he’s talking about, whereas any normal person would have assumed he was talking about the Elvis Presley estate and its current financial situation.

Bond reaches King just as his lapel pin ignites and he explodes in a ball of fire. The alarm begins to ring out as scraps of money rain down with water from the sprinklers, and Bond is once again met with the familiar laser-sight of a rifle. Cigar Girl is outside MI6 on a boat in the middle of the Thames and she’s pointing a rifle into a blown-out hole in the wall, which sort of suggests she didn’t have much faith in the large amount of explosives that would kill King. Isn’t the point of planting a bomb that you don’t have to be there?

Bond rushes into Q’s lab and leaps into a tiny black boat. Q isn’t happy about it and begins to wave his gigantic hands in protest. The boat shoots out of MI6, lands on the Thames and chases after Cigar Girl’s speedboat. An over-cast, grim-looking London provides the backdrop to an exciting speedboat chase, which sort of feels like a meeting of incredible incongruity.

There then follows a rather drawn-out chase on the Thames, with the occasional explosion, submersion, and the guys from the highly popular Traffic Wardens reality TV show getting drenched. Surely there were better reality stars around in 1999? Could we not have had a scene of Pierce fighting Maureen from Driving School with her husband shouting ‘Woah! Woah! Woah!’ every now and then? The fight could have finished with Bond dropping a joke about her ‘having a blind spot’ for him, or something.

The chase culminates with a beaching at the Millennium Dome, a symbol of the new and exciting century. Little did Bond, or Cigar Girl, know that inside that Dome was absolutely fuck-all of interest, which is a stark contrast to the 21st century itself, during which seemingly everything that could possibly happen has happened, and it’s only nineteen years old. Cigar Girl makes a break for it by commandeering a hot-air balloon. Now fans of the Police Academy franchise will know that hot-air balloons do not make for a very thrilling or practical escape vehicle. They’re slow, lumbering and can be shot down. Bond manages to grasp onto a rope hanging down from the balloon and tries to bargain with Cigar Girl as she realises the game is up. The balloon is going nowhere fast and police helicopters are gathering in her airspace. She points a gun at the gas tank. Bond pleads for her not to do it and says he can protect her, ‘Not from HIM!’ she says, as she pulls the trigger, blowing up the balloon in a flaming inferno and sending Bond tumbling down the Millennium Dome (tickets still available), where he eventually gets a grip on a guy line tether, hurting his shoulder in the process.

The opening credits begin with the silhouette of an injured Bond wandering away from the Millennium Dome. It’s very oil-themed, with ladies covered in it, suggestive pumps pumping it and water mixed in it, and kind of feels like title sequence director Daniel Kleinman dropped some acid to kill time during that interminable pre-credits sequence.

After King’s funeral in Scotland, Chief of Staff Bill Tanner (Michael Kitchen) briefs the MI6 agents about the attack. The money was dipped in a fertiliser bomb and the water on Bond’s hand started a chemical reaction. The lapel pin King was wearing acted as a radio transmitter that triggered the blast. Charles Robinson (Colin Salmon), the Deputy Chief of Staff, speculates that it must have been someone close to King and the only lead ‘committed suicide on that balloon’, a line that when quoted out of context hits a high level of absurdity. M tells the agents to find whoever did this and bring them to justice. Bond is not offered a briefing document as he’s off the active-duty list, which begs the question of why Bond was at the funeral, never mind in the room for the briefing. It’s not like Bond knew Sir Robert King; he’d only met him seconds before he died. I’ve never caused a man to explode, but if I did deliver the device that blew a man up, I probably wouldn’t attend his funeral.

Bond is told that he will need to be cleared by medical before he can be placed back on the active-duty roster, so he goes to see Dr Warmflash (Serena Scott Thomas), who just happens to be a saucy lady and not a middle-aged bearded man. She informs him that he has a dislocated collar bone and if the damaged tendons snap, he’ll be out of action for weeks. Bond informs Warmflash that he needs a clean bill of health and shags her to get it – a scene that plays out as more Jackie Treehorn than Ian Fleming.

Q is busy in his workshop, sitting at a computer looking bewildered – probably due to late nineties search engines – and generally looks like he’s being held together by bits of wire. He’s very upset with Bond as he wrecked his fishing boat – and while I’m sure Q enjoys fishing, and I can imagine him strangling many a stickleback to death in his pincer-like hands, I have a great deal of trouble imagining him being able to get into a small boat.

Q’s replacement enters and is referred to as ‘R’. He’s played by John Cleese, a casting that on paper sounds perfect, but in reality is not. Our ‘new Q’ shows Bond his new BMW Z8, which once again looks very underwhelming and once again confirms that the BMW deal was a real stinker aesthetically. 007 is handed a pair of X-ray specs and a fancy coat that turns into a giant golf ball should you need it to, which is then demonstrated for our total lack of pleasure. Amongst the comedy-muffling noises coming from John Cleese’s wallet, Bond asks Q if he’s really retiring, which seems a stupid question to ask a man of 109. Of course he’s retiring, James, he’s Facebook mates with Moses. Q doesn’t even hesitate, and without skipping a beat slips in his last ‘now pay attention, 007’ before leaving us for ever. He reminds Bond that he always told him two things:

1) ‘Never let them see you bleed’ – a statement I cannot imagine Q saying even if you gave a million Qs a million typewriters and a million years.

2) ‘Always have an escape plan’ – now this sounds like something our beloved Q would say, especially as he was forever building shit gadgets that necessitated urgent escpape plans.

Q then mournfully descends into the floor like some sort of mawkish ghost on his way to haunt someone. To be honest, though, as last appearances of beloved characters go, it’s all rather nicely done.

Bond is in the archives reading all about Sir Robert’s daughter, Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), who he was perving on at the funeral. She was kidnapped a few years before and the BBC’s Martin Lewis informs us that she escaped after shooting dead two of her kidnappers. Bond watches the footage of Elektra retelling the incident and touches her teary, paused face on the screen with the perfect amount of weird creepiness. He then lingers over the $5 million ransom and does a quick exchange rate calculation. Mmm, it’s the exact amount of money he recovered from the Swiss banker. As he tries to access Elektra’s file, the computer begins to bark out ‘LEVEL ONE CLEARANCE REQUIRED’ at an annoying volume. How does one go about turning that off, exactly? Would one have to switch it all off at the mains and restart? It doesn’t look like it wants to stop any time soon.

Bond bursts in on M having a chat with the MI6 top brass and mentions Elektra’s kidnapping. He brought in the money in that killed King. M suggests he doesn’t make it personal, which seems rather hypocritical seeing as it’s her friend who exploded. Bond fires back with a bit of cheek and points out that she’s the only one who could seal Elektra’s file. M isn’t happy with the insubordination and clears the room. She reveals that after Elektra was kidnapped, Robert King asked her for help. She told King not to pay the ransom as she doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, which seems a bit rum, considering. Bond points out that M used the girl as bait and that the money in the suitcase was the exact amount of the ransom. ‘It’s a message,’ he says. ‘Your terrorist is back’ (which sounds like a great name for a sitcom starring Liza Goddard and Gerry Adams).

The 1999 computer fires up a giant hologram image of Robert Carlyle’s floating computer head, like something out of Lawnmower Man. He is called ‘Renard’, and he is an anarchist and evil terrorist who is responsible for the kidnap of Elektra. ‘His only goal is chaos,’ says Tanner, recalling Carlyle’s previous incarnation as Begbie in Trainspotting when he threw the pint glass into the crowd at a pub.

After speaking to King, M sent 009 to kill Renard, who duly obliged by putting a bullet in his head – the only problem being he didn’t die. The bullet is stuck in his brain, slowly killing him and making him do films like Eragon. Dr Warmflash emerges from the darkness of the room like Gary Oldman’s Dracula and informs everyone that the doctor who saved him couldn’t get the bullet out, so Renard killed him too, which is not traditionally how you deal with medical practitioners, kids. The deeper the bullet goes, the stronger he gets. He can push himself harder than any normal man and feels no pain. However, he has also lost the sense of touch and smell, which means he would be terrible at cooking you dinner. Can you imagine all the bits of finger you’d find in your already disgusting-tasting casserole? The bullet will kill him eventually, but he will grow stronger every day until he dies.

M points out that Renard has now humiliated MI6 and killed Sir Robert, so he’s had his revenge, but Bond informs M that there’s still one person he hasn’t killed: Elektra. M says Bond must go and warn her and that Molly Warmflash has passed him for active duty, noting ‘exceptional stamina’ in her report. She may as well have written, ‘I have had sex with James Bond and I am ashamed’. Moneypenny slut-shames her as she walks out of the room with a withering put-down, and it goes a bit Mean Girls for a moment.

Bond arrives at Elektra’s pipeline site in Azerbaijan. He’s met by Elektra’s Chief of Security, Davidoff (Ulrich Thomsen), who is presumably the same Davidoff that brought us the ‘Cool Water’ range of aftershaves. I bet he scrubs up nicely. Davidoff tells Bond they’re having problems with the villagers and that he has told Elektra to stay away for her own safety, but right on cue she arrives in a helicopter and resolves the entire situation. The villagers wildly celebrate and Elektra introduces herself to Bond. She recognises him from the funeral and asks if he knew her father. Bond says he only met him once, which should lead to her asking him why he was at the funeral then. Bond warns Elektra that her life is in danger but she laughs it off, explaining that pretty much everyone wants her dead because of the oil. She says she won’t rely on MI6 as they were rubbish when she was kidnapped and they blew up her dad, which, to be honest, seems fair enough. Elektra says she needs to go skiing to check on the pipeline and Bond muscles in on her trip as he may be able to have sex with something.

Elektra shows Bond the two ends of the pipeline that are nestled between surrounding peaks and declares that the pipe is not just her father’s legacy, but her family’s legacy to the world (someone has Daddy issues). Suddenly they are attacked by some men in Parahawks (essentially flying lawnmowers), who begin dropping grenades indiscriminately for no real reason. Bond bests them all in a fairly routine and mundane manner, but in doing so causes an avalanche. Luckily for Elektra, he has his golf-ball jacket which protects them both from the oncoming snow. Elektra panics inside the golf ball, as any woman with sense would do when trapped with a strange man who has done nothing but drop innuendos since they met. Bond reassures her that he’ll try not to shag her on this occasion and then cuts a hole in the golf-ball to let in some air, as it probably stinks of Lynx Java.

One of the many highlights of GoldenEye was Robbie Coltrane’s highly memorable turn as Valentin Zhukovsky. Though he only had two scenes in the film, most people walked away with the song of his performance still singing in their ears. The idea of bringing him back in this film is a good one, but it’s a big shame that he’s written as some sort of Laurel and Hardy stooge. Zhukovsky now owns a flash casino in Baku and Bond enters it looking for answers. He poses at the bar and puts on theglasses that Q gave him earlier, those X-ray specs that can only see guns, knives, bras and pants. The perfect gift for the world-travelling pervert, and Pierce’s face looks every inch like a teenager first discovering pornography as he walks through the room gawping at bums and boobs. Zhukovsky is in his office feeding caviar to a pair of sexy ladies – Nina (Daisy Beaumont) and Verushka (Nina Muschallik) – a sight that gets unfortunately seared into the memory, like a Jabba the Hutt food-porn parody. Bond informs Zhukovsky that they need to talk and the girls need to go. ‘Bull, give them an inch,’ Zhukovsky instructs his henchman Bullion (Goldie), which one assumes is meant to be a fun way of telling Bullion to pay the women, but conjures up all sorts of horrible mental images about the size of Bull’s penis.

Bond shows Zhukovsky the insignia he removed from one of the flying lawnmowers that attacked Elektra earlier that day. He confirms that they’re ‘Russian Special Services Atomic Energy Anti-Terrorist Unit’ – aka the founding members of the So Solid Crew. Bond reveals that he knows Renard is behind it, while Zhukovsky spots Elektra walking into his casino on CCTV and raises a smile. It would seem she is not as worried by the threat of imminent murder by a terrorist as she should be.

Bond chastises her for not being safely at home doing the ironing. They all head into the private gaming room and Elektra says that she would like to play a simple one-card game, high-draw, for $1 million. Bond looks on like a disapproving dad, and orders the dealer to bury the top three cards, as he does with most of his dates. He tells Elektra that she doesn’t need to do this, to which she replies, ‘There’s no point in living, if you can’t feel alive’ – tell that to Robert De Niro in Awakenings. Elektra loses and hands the money over as Bond looks on with the face of a man who’s just witnessed a dog burp the national anthem. Elektra turns to him and asks if he wants to come back to her place, and he essentially looks both ways before whispering, ‘Yeah, all right.’

Meanwhile, at the Devil’s Breath (which sounds like the morning after a vicious curry), Renard emerges from the darkness of a cave. What he was doing in there we will never know, but the mind boggles. He begins to deliver the history of the Devil’s Breat as if he works for the National Trust and is looking after a tour party from Penge and says he’s displeased with the failure of the flying lawnmower attack from earlier in the day. Davidoff, it turns out, arranged it along with the other man at the meeting, Dr Arkov (Jeff Nuttall), who supplied the weapons and the Parahawks. Renard asks Arkov if everything is ready for the next day. Arkov says that he has the necessary papers and the plane is ready, but he has doubts about the mission. He says the Parahawks were ‘supposed to be returned’, an amazing fact that sums up the cheapskate villains in this film. They basically rented the vehicles they sent to kill James Bond. Renard is unimpressed with Arkov’s cowardice and kills him. After making Davidoff hold a burning coal, he tells him to take Arkov’s place and ID on the mission, and try not be late. Say what you want about Renard, yes he’s a terrorist, but his sense of punctuality should be applauded.

A bottle of Bollinger sits opened in a nest of ice perched beside a busy bed. Its sheets are crumpled and worn. A hand reaches out to grab some ice, only for it to be stopped by another. It’s Bond and Elektra, pre-coitus, pre-regrets. She persists and takes a shard of ice, running it up Bond’s arm and stopping at his shoulder. She notes that it looks painful and they begin to do some weird kissing and grappling as the camera fades away. On returning to the scene, it looks like the Riverdance cast have visited the bed. Sheets are scattered, dressing gowns strewn, and the Bollinger and ice have been thrown all over the floor. Bond then brings out his sensual pillow-talk and asks her how she survived a brutal kidnapping. She asks how he survives. ‘I take pleasure in great beauty,’ he mutters, which is essentially an admission that he likes to perv on people.

It’s dark at the King Industries offices. Bond ducks into a doorway and retrieves a credit card that turns into a skeleton key. A car pulls up outside and Davidoff steps out. He heads into the office and Bond takes the opportunity to search Davidoff’s car, where he finds Arkov’s body. Davidoff returns and drives to an airfield where he unfurls the sheet in his boot to find Bond lying where Arkov was. Bond kicks Davidoff in the face and shoots him twice in the chest. He snatches the ID pass from Davidoff’s lapel and, in an act of ultimate insouciance, dumps the body in a skip – the lads at Biffa won’t like that.

‘Let’s go, it’s getting late,’ an armed goon announces as he arrives through the trees. Bond turns to greet him and is asked where Davidoff is. ‘Buried with work,’ Bond says in his comedy Russian accent, when he really should say, ‘I’ve just murdered him and put him in a bin.’

As the plane makes its descent to its destination, Bond is handed a uniform and told to get ready, and to ensure that he has his ID, so he goes into the toilet and removes his photo from a Universal Exports ID card and puts it on top of Davidoff’s. Bond and his new motley crew of baddies arrive in a jeep. They are greeted by Colonel Akakievich (Claude-Oliver Rudolph) who welcomes Dr Arkov to Kazakhstan. ‘I am a keen admirer of your research,’ he says, which is a line that you only hear in films. It’s here that Bond realises he has to properly pretend to be a Russian doctor, so he puts his hands behind his back in an attempt to act dignified and begins talking like a cartoon vampire. ‘I go where the work takes me,’ he says, like some kind of Transylvanian decorator.

We meet Dr Christmas Jones (Denise Richards), who we are told is a nuclear physicist in charge of decommissioning old Soviet nuclear warheads. She strides over to Bond and gives him a whole load of sass, telling him her name and that he shouldn’t bother making any jokes as she’s heard them all. ‘I don’t know any doctor jokes,’ Bond says in his best Bela Lugosi. You do have to stand and applaud the brass balls on the writers to call a character ‘Christmas Jones’ just to pay off a very cheap orgasm joke in the last act of the film. I bet there were high-fives all round and a sense of relief that they didn’t go with ‘Professor Easter Spunkontits’.

Bond descends into some underground tunnels where he finds Renard tootling around on a cherrypicker while some of his men fiddle around with a warhead beneath him. Renard is about to leave the cherrypicker when a gun is thrust into his face. Bond has his man. He reveals that Davidoff is dead and that he will be next. Renard replies that he’s already dead and that Bond should be grateful as he spared his life at the Swiss banker’s office. ‘I couldn’t kill you,’ says Renard with great relish. ‘You were working for me. You delivered the money, killed King and now you’ve brought me the plane.’ Bond puts him in the execution position and fixes his silencer while telling Renard he feels nothing about killing him. ‘There’s no point living if you can’t feel alive,’ says Renard as Bond gets fire behind the eyes, but before Bond can ask any further questions, Jones and the colonel arrive from the surface. Jones points out he can’t be Arkov as Arkov is 63 years old – but I have to say, if you don’t look too closely, Brosnan could be 63. Colonel Akakievich makes Bond drop his weapon and while Bond tries to tell him that Renard and the other men are imposters trying to steal the warhead, he notices one of Renard’s men remove a data card from the bomb.

‘You could have had me,’ Renard says to a surrendered Bond, ‘but I knew you couldn’t shoulder the responsibility,’ and he sadistically squeezes the injury. Renard tells the colonel to get moving, but he refuses as there are too many new faces around the place (including Renard’s) and he is growing suspicious, so Renard machine-guns him to death. A firefight ensues between the colonel’s men and Renard’s and Bond chases Renard all the way to the elevator, but he escapes. Jones says it’s not the end of the world as they can track the warhead’s signal with the internal locator card. Bond produces it from his pocket, having retrieved it from one of Renard’s men. This might be a problem.

M arrives at the King HQ in a helicopter looking cross. She demands an update from Bond and he gives her the locator card and explains that they can’t track the missing warhead. He also tells her that he thinks Elektra is behind everything. M asks why she would kill her own father and attack her own pipeline, to which Bond offers a very clear and concise: ‘I don’t know.’

Suddenly the screens all light up in the situation room. A cleaning robot-rig-thing has been sent through the pipeline and refuses to be deactivated. The bomb must be onboard and it’s heading for the oil terminal, where it will do the most damage and destroy the only source of oil for the West’s reserves over the next century – allegedly. Bond announces he’s going to stop the rig and, with the help of Christmas Jones, deactivate the warhead, so Robinson gets them both on his chopper (stop it, I didn’t mean that). They fly out to another rig, climb inside the pipeline and set off after it. Somehow they quickly catch up and find that the bomb has been tampered with. Half the plutonium is missing, the screw heads have been stripped (by a pervert from Screwfix) and it won’t go nuclear (interesting that they can conduct conversations in a massive pipeline onboard a roller-skate going at 60 mph). Bond tells her to let it blow up and they jump off the rig just as the pipeline goes up in flames.

‘The bomb was a dud,’ says Elektra’s werewolf guard, Gabor (John Seru), as everyone in the situation room watches the rigs in the pipeline computer screen fade to black. The explosion took out a 50-foot section of the pipeline and it looks like Bond is dead, so Elektra offers sympathies and hands over her father’s lapel pin. ‘It’s very valuable. I couldn’t let it explode it with the rest of him,’ Elektra reveals as M is taken away. ‘He often spoke of how compassionately you advised him on the best course of action during my kidnapping.’ Bond, for once, is right – Elektra is behind everything and this is all part of an elaborate revenge mission.

Bond and Jones emerge from the wreckage of the pipeline and he explains that as they are now ‘dead’ they can investigate Elektra (by revealing they aren’t dead to everyone they meet). The explosion covers up the theft of the plutonium and makes her look innocent. Jones says that they need to get the plutonium back or someone is going to have her ass, to which Bond orgasms in his MI6-issue pants.

Renard arrives at Elektra’s home from home by the sea in Istanbul and they embrace and exchange gifts. Renard has brought her half a ball of plutonium, which he asks her to weigh in her hand like a GP giving a cough test, while Elektra shows him M in a dungeon, who Renard can now have his revenge on for the bullet in his skull. Elektra tells M she’s going to take back her mother’s empire stoeln by her father, and says MI6 will leave M to rot, just as they did to her when she was kidnapped. Renard places a clock on a stool and tells M that at noon the following day, her time will be up – she, all the people in Istanbul (nearly 16 million people, fact fans) and ‘the bright, starry, oil-driven future of the West’ will be blown up. M remembers that Bond gave her the locater card from the missile and begins to formulate ideas for escape, probably wondering if she can build a rudimentary nuclear device by utilising the items in the room in much the same way the A-Team used to do.

Renard and Elektra have a cuddle in bed together. He mentions how nice she feels, and Elektra asks how he would know, which upsets him. He asks if she’s upset about Bond, and then asks if he was a good lover, which she doesn’t really try to deny, so Renard punches a table in fury and gets glass all over his hand. She brings some ice from the Bollinger perch to soothe him, but he feels nothing, so she then gets him to work her unmentionables, which is very much not for bank holiday tea-time viewing.

Zhukovsky arrives at his Caspian Sea caviar factory, presumably to count the eggs, and spots that the door is unlocked. There’s Christmas Jones in his office in a sexy dress! She’s obviously there to have sex with him – which suggests that this happens a lot. Bond appears to reveal to everyone that he isn’t dead (and Bullion has already spotted his stupid BMW and phoned it in to Elektra). He starts to ask Zhukovsky why Elektra gave him a million dollars via her rubbish gambling at the casino (which Bond now realises was intentional), when they’re interrupted by some helicopters with saws attached to them. There then follows a rather insipid action sequence where Bond destroys all the choppers and gets his BMW sliced in half, and Zhukovsky falls into a vat of caviar. As the dust settles, Bond grills him for information while he wallows in the black goo and Zhukovsky reveals that the money was for his nephew who is in the navy and is smuggling machinery for Elektra in Istanbul.

Zhukovsky takes Bond and Jones to an ex-KGB hideout in Istanbul which is now used by the Federal Security Beureau – ‘Same old friendly service with a new name,’ he quips. The FSB are trying to trace his nephew’s sub, but are so far getting no reply. They discover that it’s a nuclear-class submarine and Jones concludes that Renard is going to use the plutonium to cause a giant meltdown in the sub’s reactor, which will destroy Istanbul in what is looking like a catastrophic accident. All the oil from the existing pipelines in the Caspian Sea is shipped across the Black Sea to Istanbul – with the city destroyed and the Bosporus contaminated for decades, the only pipeline for transporting all the oil in the future would be via the King pipeline.

Meanwhile, M in her cage has managed to link up the clock with the location card, turning it into a beacon, which Zhukovsky’s men pick up. Bond is able to pinpoint exactly where she is, just as Bullion leaves a bomb and runs away, blowing the room up.

Elektra stomps into her living room to find Bond being held by her henchmen. She orders Christmas to be sent to Renard, and just you wait until the Daily Mail hear about a French woman messing with Christmas. ‘I could have given you the world,’ Elektra says, ‘The world is not enough,’ Bond retorts, which is fine, but a Dalton-esque ‘Piss off’ would have been better. Elektra straps Bond into a torture chair device, which is accompanied by Brosnan’s excellent grunting acting, like a 94-year-old man putting on skinny jeans.

She begins a monologue about how she turned Renard, not the other way around, and how she used her sexuality as a weapon, in much the same way Colin Baker did when he was Doctor Who. She asks Bond if he knows what happens when a man is strangled, which frankly is probably the last thing on his mind at that moment as she straddles him. Just as it looks as if he’s heading for his last erection, Zhukovsky and his men arrive and a short firefight ensues. Zhukovsky is shot by Elektra, but before he dies, he shoots the bracelet holding Bond’s arm in the torture machine, freeing him to kill Elektra’s werewolf guard. She makes a break for it up the stairs and Bond gives chase, stopping briefly to release M. When he reaches the summit he finds Elektra in her bedroom and at gunpoint orders her to stop the submarine and call off Renard. She picks up the walkie-talkie and tells Bond he’d never kill her as he’d miss her too much, and she shouts at Renard to dive, so Bond shoots her in cold blood. ‘I never miss,’ he says, as he lowers his pistol. A shocking moment in Bond lore – especially as it’s followed moments later with him creepily fondling her corpse while M watches on, something he’s clearly got a thing for doing, having done similar in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Tomorrow Never Dies.

Bond takes to the balcony and dives down to the water to single-handedly intercept the submarine. There then follows a climactic action sequence that does very little to excite. He rescues Jones and stops Renard, shooting the latter in the chest with a plutonium rod, which sounds like a niche form of pornography.

Bond and Jones escape and are rescued by a passing tourist boat. Meanwhile, at the Scottish MI6 HQ (not sure why they’re all still there), they’re searching high and low for Bond and Jones. Well, they’re still in Turkey and the sole reason for this is so that Bond can say, ‘I always wanted to have Christmas in Turkey,’ a line that makes eyes not so much roll, as spin like a Catherine wheel. Q has located Bond’s BMW (the one that was sawn in half about half an hour ago) and they go to thermal imaging in order to locate them. They find Bond in bed with Jones, and not only are they doing it, but their bodies are ‘getting redder’.

‘007!’ M proclaims in shock and horror, as he presumably pumps away for England in yet another sorry chapter of M being forced to watch this sort of thing. Q closes down the feed and blames it on a ‘premature form of the millennium bug’, before wandering off to the sound of the 1999 audience laughing about the impending technological doom that genuinely wasn’t heading their way. ‘I thought Christmas only came once a year,’ Bond murmurs as they kiss – and with that lame wisecrack, Bond says farewell to the 20th century.

TWENTY

DIE ANOTHER DAY

2002

Bond has made many the grand entrance in his life, but needlessly surfing into a location is the most midlife-crisis of them all. There’s really no need to enter North Korea via surfboard, but it’s the choice he’s made, and he arrives with his two ‘compadres’ (as I am sure he would call them), looking every inch like a Top Gear Christmas Special. They plant a tiny umbrella satellite on the beach and hijack a helicopter that’s due to go to the baddies’ location. Bond snatches a pair of sunglasses right off a bad guy’s face – a moment that is fully explained in the commentary by Pierce Brosnan as he reveals, somewhat exclusively, that they are actually his sunglasses in real life, making a fool of all of us who assumed that they were, in fact, props. Bond takes possession of a suitcase full of diamonds that the sunglasses man was holding diligently, placing a Plasticine bomb underneath the jewels and smiling to himself – probably remembering that the sunglasses nestling on his face are actually his own and not props.

Meanwhile, at a North Korean base, Colonel Moon (Will Yun Lee) is toying with irony as he kicks a punchbag that turns out to contain his anger-management therapist. A helicopter approaches the base with Bond onboard, the suitcase packed full of C4 in his lap. Colonel Moon watches the helicopter land and readies his uniform, probably still revelling in the great gag he just performed. He walks out to meet Bond and his suitcase while his number two, Zao (Rick Yune), quickly snaps a picture of Bond via his exciting Sony mobile phone, and rather than the image being teeny-tiny and blurred and a total mess as it would have been in 2002, it’s so perfect that he’s able to send the picture off to an unknown contact for information. Moon greets Bond, telling him he studied at Oxford and Harvard and got an A. Bond compliments him on his balls, as most men would be scared to trade in African conflict diamonds since the UN embargoed them. Moon clearly loves this (being a badass is cool) and asks to see the diamonds, but Bond asks to see the weapons first, which are brought in via hovercraft. Moon explains that this is the perfect method of transport to get through the minefield in the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. As Zao is checking over the diamonds, he receives a picture message confirming that the delivery man is in fact James Bond 007, and he somehow doesn’t have to wait an hour for it to download. Upon hearing this, Moon decides to demonstrate a new tank-buster he has by blowing up Bond’s helicopter and revealing that he knows who he is. But just as he’s about to kill Bond, Moon gets word that his dad is coming home. Panic sets in as he clearly doesn’t want his dad to find the mess he’s left the house in. Bond is put before a firing squad, but just as the trigger is about to be pulled, he twists his watch, detonating the C4 and blowing up the firing squad. Zao shouts from the floor, his face covered in diamonds, as Bond jumps aboard a hovercraft and glides away at speed, blowing more things up as he goes, which will make Moon’s dad livid. He catches up with Moon and they have a long fight on the hovercraft, which eventually shoots off the side of a waterfall, just as Bond jumps clear, leaving him having to face Moon’s dad (Kenneth Tsang). ‘My son is dead,’ says General Moon to Bond, before shouting orders for him to be taken away.

And so begins a long, horrible torture sequence – by which I mean the Madonna song, which feels like it was co-written by Jive Bunny. The images in the title sequence make up for it though with Bond being dipped in and out of ice, electrocuted, burned with fire, stung with scorpions and, worst of all, made to listen to lyrics such as ‘Sigmund Freud? Analyse this’.

Fourteen months later, and Bond is sitting in a prison cell looking like Charles Manson after his arrest. The door swings open and he’s taken to see General Moon, who tells him that he’s still really, really angry with him for murdering his son, but does concede that his son’s Western education had corrupted him. The General has discovered that his son had an ally in the West. ‘Who was it?’ he asks. ‘Who made him betray his country and his name?’ Bond says he has no idea, but it was probably the same person who betrayed him. He’s then sent across a bridge while armed guards point guns at him. An American voice tells him to keep walking and, as he does so, Zao emerges from the fog and walks past him, still with diamonds in his face, obviously a fan of Paul Simon. Bond realises he’s being traded and tells Zao he’ll get him one day, to which Zao essentially replies, ‘Not if I see you first.’ As Bond stumbles to the far side of the bridge he’s grabbed by spacemen and injected with a giant syringe.

He wakes up in a hospital bed within a sealed cell. M greets him from behind a glass partition and implies that she wishes he was still in Korea. Switching him for Zao was way too high a price, which is nice of her. Bond tells her that he didn’t ask to be traded/ born and that he’d rather be in prison as well if it meant Zao wasn’t free – and she’s not his real mum, anyway. M tells him an American agent was assassinated after his name was leaked from the prison – as Bond was the only inmate, the Americans think he cracked and gave up the name and they felt they had no choice but to get him out of there in case he revealed any more information – because, as we all know, when you get to Bond’s age, if you start leaking you can’t stop. Bond tells her that he’s going to find whoever set him up, but M tells him he’s no use to anyone and that he’s going to the Falklands to be anally probed by experts.

Later that evening, Bond uses the extreme tantric technique he picked up from Sting to stop his heart and cause a major panic as doctors rush to his aid. He rises from his deathbed and electrocutes them with a pair of heart paddles, before jumping over the side of the boat he’s being held on and escaping into the night.

He walks up to the front desk of the Yacht Club, Hong Kong, looking like a tramp who’s fallen in your pond and asks for his usual suite, a tailor, champagne and some food, which is all fine as the hotel manager, Mr Chang (Ho Yi), is very happy to see him again. In his suite, Bond stands in front of the mirror shaving the last of his beard away, having obviously also given himself a very good haircut earlier. A masseuse arrives, which presumably makes his day as he has fourteen months’ worth backed up. She tells him to get on the bed and he begins to kiss her neck and act like a sex offender. She tells him she’s not that kind of masseuse and he says he isn’t that kind of customer, before throwing an ashtray through the mirror and exposing Chang with a video camera – good to see Bond’s learned something since From Russia with Love. He says he’s always known Chang was part of Chinese Intelligence and presents him with a deal: Zao killed three Chinese agents; if Chang can get Bond into North Korea, he’ll assassinate Zao for him. So Chang makes a call and gives Bond a new passport and a ticket to Havana, Cuba, where Zao is currently hiding.

Bond arrives in Havana looking very much like a Terminator that’s been sent on a Saga holiday, in flowery shirt, white vest and sunglasses. He meets Chinese sleeper-agent Raoul (Emilio Echevarría) at a cigar factory. He tells Bond that Zao is on an island called Los Organos, at a clinic run by a Dr Alvarez (Simón Andreu) who leads the field in gene therapy.

Bond wanders around Raoul’s office and picks up a book: it’s The Collins Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, the very book that Ian Fleming used to name his lead character. His schoolboy notebooks were presumably used to name all his female leads. As this is the twentieth Bond film, they decided it would be ‘fun’ to insert some meta-references by way of a tribute and they are littered everywhere.

As Bond orders a mojito at the hotel bar he notices a rude South African, Mr Krug, being handed his papers for the Alvarez Clinic by a waiter. Krug demands more girls be sent up to his room and threatens to shoot the waiter in the balls if he doesn’t. Bond draws a pair of binoculars to his eyes and observes the clinic – just across the sea from the hotel bar he’s standing in – but is instantly distracted by a woman (Halle Berry) bursting from the water in an orange bikini à la Honey Ryder doing a George at ASDA advert. He stands smoking a thin cigar while she wanders into the bar and towels herself down. He offers her a mojito and even takes the time to present himself as a hipster by pronouncing it like he works in a Shoreditch bar. She introduces herself as Giacinta Johnson, but that her friends call her ‘Jinx’. Bond replies by saying that his friends call him James Bond, which sort of feels like a desperate attempt to cash in on her joke. She expands on her ‘Jinx’ story by telling him that she was born on Friday the 13th, and none of her relationships seem to last, to which Bond explains that he knows the feeling, though doesn’t mention the dead wife in the hope of getting a sympathy shag, so good on him. He tells her he’s an ornithologist and after some brief flirtatious banter about what predators do when the sun comes down, they go to bed and conduct a sex scene that is very nearly 200% super-hardcore cyber sex. There’s rutting, grunting, licking and huffing, culminating with Jinx mounting Bond and eating some fruit with a knife, like some sort of greengrocer’s federation financed a Basic Instinct remake.

In the morning, Bond wakes to find she’s gone and he watches from his window as she takes a boat to Los Organos. Bond does what any man would do in this position and goes to a rude South African’s room to thump him in the face, steal his clinic and documents and put his unconscious body in a wheelchair to take on the boat to the island. Once they arrive, he ditches the arsehole and finds a secret door into a hall of mirrors. Jinx, meanwhile, is having a consultation with a doctor about having ‘DNA replacement therapy’, which involves killing off the bone marrow and then pumping in the new DNA, which conjures images of Mr DNA from Jurassic Park taking over your body while reassuring you in his smooth Texas drawl that everything’s going to be all right. However, before the doctor can talk about ‘working on her’ further, Jinx shoots him dead, torches her file, hacks into his computer and then plans a bomb.

Bond, meanwhile, has found Zao, who is presumably having his DNA expunged while in a deep trance. The diamonds are still embedded in his handsome, scary face and he is now bright white, like some sort of hungover vampire. Bond wakes him up and they fight so much the room goes on fire and Zao gets away, but not before Bond snags his cool bullet necklace. Jinx gives chase to Zao, who is running topless to a waiting helicopter, but all of her shots miss him as the helicopter flies away. A pair of armed guards arrive to arrest her, but she loses them by doing a backwards CGI dive off a cliff into the sea below – from a height that would definitely have killed her – and boards a waiting speedboat. It’s a horrible-looking sequence (like most of the action scenes in this film). The guards then run off, inexplicably leaving Bond behind to examine Zao’s necklace, which he opens up to find is full of diamonds.

Back at Raoul’s cigar joint, Bond checks the diamonds over and confirms they’re African conflict diamonds and there’s a ‘GG’ marking on them from the Graves Corporation in Iceland (not the supermarket chain). A man called Gustav Graves discovered diamonds in Iceland a year or so ago that are amazingly identical to African conflict diamonds, which all seems like a very interesting coincidence, or ‘ironic’ as Alanis Morissette would say.

Buckingham Palace. The press are assembled for a major event. They wander round aimlessly asking one another when it will start, with one even complaining to Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike) that her man isn’t going to make it. However, the journalist is soon proved wrong as ‘her man’ leaps out of a helicopter and skydives down towards the ground with a Union Jack parachute, all to the tune of The Clash’s ‘London Calling’, which feels like an odd thing to pop up in a Bond film, considering when it came out Bond was still wearing flared trousers. It’s Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens), a man who has seemingly popped up out of nowhere as a diamond salesman, but is now somehow receiving a knighthood from the Queen. He lands among the press pack and declares that it’s a wonderful day to become a knight, telling them that he’s proud of his adopted nation, even though he’s played by Toby Stephens and sounds as posh as a Harrods caviar spoon, so I’m not sure exactly where he’s supposed to be from. They then ask him all sorts of awful questions about being an ‘adrenaline junkie’, not needing sleep and how he’s been training for a place on the British Olympic fencing team, rather than asking him who he is and why the fuck he’s being knighted. He’s then whisked away to the palace – for what we are never told, though I am guessing it’s not for services to screenplays. As the car drives into the palace, Bond watches from within the press pack and looks like he’s eaten some bad eggs.

Blades Club, London, a fencing club that appears to double as a vampire-killing organisation. Graves is practising furiously when Bond arrives in full fencing gear to observe. He greets Verity (Madonna), who is an instructor there and is to line-readings what meteorites were to the dinosaurs. She tells him her protégée, Miranda Frost, is the best blade in the club and that she took the gold in Sydney but is now training Graves, who is only interested in cash. She asks if Bond would like to meet him, and Bond is very happy to do so. After Bond drops his trademark introduction, Graves asks if he fancies a bet on a thousand a point, best of three hits, which Bond readily accepts. However, the happy posho-fencing duel soon turns into a full-blooded violent sword fight with actual broadswords and blood, where, rather than win points, it would appear they are trying to hack each other’s heads off. In the end, Bond wins and Graves seems deeply entertained by the whole thing, paying him by cheque and inviting him to Iceland for his ‘Icarus’ demonstration, which, on the face of it, suggests he might be running around in a pair of wax wings, but I think it’s more complicated than that. Bond then tries to chat up Frost, suggesting they have sex in Iceland, but she gives him a shoulder so cold you could kill a brass monkey on it. As Bond recovers from the jilting, he receives a mysterious package from a former celebrity show jumper, Oliver Skeete, that informs him he is to meet M at once.

Bond goes through a door under the Embankment and meets M in Vauxhall Cross, an abandoned London Underground station. She tells him she’s suspicious of Graves and his backstory is dubious: an orphan working in a diamond mine, learns engineering, makes a huge find in Iceland and earns a knighthood. Bond tells her it all stinks and that Graves’ company is purely a front for laundering African conflict diamonds. M says that Bond has become useful again and agrees that he should get on with his job.

Back at MI6, Bond is in his office cleaning his gun when the building is suddenly overrun by terrorists who shoot the place up and take M hostage. So Bond, obviously having watched the film Speed a few times, shoots M and then shoots the bad guy, causing this incredibly pointless simulation to end, and Q (John Cleese) to retrieve the VR goggles from his face. As they walk through the lab, we see that it’s full of Q Branch’s greatest hits, from the Octopussy crocodile to the Thunderball jetpack. Bond to fiddles with most of it and is generally annoying. Q then unveils his new gadgets: a ring that can use high frequencies to break any glass, a new watch and his new car: the Aston Martin Vanquish, or ‘Vanish’ – yes, the invisible car that many Bond fans consider to be the worst thing to ever appear in the films, but is in actual fact just a really fun idea based on modern technology and no more ridiculous than a Lotus submarine or a ski-pole gun. The only problem with it, really, is that it’s been cursed by association with this film.

Miranda Frost is called into M’s office to reveal that she is actually working undercover for MI6. Asked what she knows about Bond, she says, ‘He’ll light fuses on any explosive situation and be a danger to himself and others,’ which sounds like she’s read it off the back of the VHS of this movie. M reminds her that she volunteered for the operation to investigate Graves, but in three months has disappointingly turned up no new information. Frost says she thinks he’s clean, but M tells her Bond disagrees, so she is sending them both to Iceland to delve a little deeper into Graves’ affairs.

Iceland, land of ice, snow, Kjötsúpa, Plokkfiskur and the unwarranted slow-motion crash zoom. The Vanquish drives up to Graves’ Ice Palace, which looks like something that Walt Disney sketched just as he died as somewhere nice to keep his head. As the car pulls up, Bond is greeted by Graves’ muscle (Lawrence Makoare), who introduces himself with the line, ‘I’m Mr Kil,’ which Bond comments is a name to die for, and yes, it appears that he’s called Mr Kil solely so they can use that joke. Before he can dig deeper into gags about death, however, Bond is distracted by Gustav Graves trying to break the land speed record – and I wish I was joking about that. As he pulls up in the rocket car, his personal scientist, Vladimir Popov (Michael Gorevoy), comes running over to tell him he did over 300 mph and that it’s a new personal best – but Graves isn’t interested in any of that and instead complains that one of his engines cut out. He asks Bond if he enjoyed watching his run and mentions that it’s only by being on the edge that we really know who we are. He uses Donald Campbell as an example – who Bond rightly points out was killed ‘living on the edge’ – which is like using Jim Morrison to sell a bath. They wander through the interior of the Ice Palace, which looks like a corporate launch for a teenage vodka, and Graves tells Bond that because he doesn’t sleep, he lives his dreams, which sounds like his dialogue is being written by an Apprentice candidate.

Nightfall. An ominous-looking car pulls up outside Graves’ quarters and an ominous-looking figure steps out. Graves is lying down, wearing a mask that looks like a Jean-Michel Jarre show, that he calls his ‘dream machine’, which I am sure was a David Essex film. The figure lifts the mask, causing Graves to wake up. The figure pulls the hood of his coat down – it’s Zao, still with his diamond-encrusted face, and they talk Korean to each other. Big reveal: Gustav Graves is actually Colonel Moon. They laugh about how Bond doesn’t know who he really is and talk about how Moon’s father still mourns his death, but he’ll soon cheer up when he hears his son is a knight of the realm for no particular reason.

The hotel bar is full of beautiful people drinking champagne and cocktails. Bond bumps into Frost and Jinx, who both make jokes about his sexual prowess while he coyly watches, fully erect. Frost tells them the presentation is about to begin, so they all wander outside and watch as Graves takes the stage to present ‘Project Icarus’, which isn’t a new man fragrance but a space laser that harnesses the power of the sun, turning it into a super-laser-beam which will, apparently, bring light and warmth to the darkest parts of the world and not incinerate anyone. He turns the satellite on and pours sunlight onto the presentation, but rather than a warm soak of sunshine, it looks like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion and it’s a real mystery that everyone’s faces don’t melt off.

Bond watches from inside his invisible car as Popov and Mr Kil take the Icarus control panel inside Graves’ compound. He decides to investigate. He peers through the window for a moment and immediately sets off the alarm when he’s caught by a guard, because he’s such a good spy he’s literally standing at a window dressed in a tuxedo peeking in. As he runs away from the searching guards, he’s pulled behind a car by Frost. He accuses her of playing hard to get and she accuses him of being obsessed with sex and then they sloppily kiss, which sounds like someone handling a wet eel. When the coast is clear they run off together, strip naked and get into a giant ice swan bed. He slides a gun under the pillow and they begin to make weird noises.

A rooftop hatch is blown open and a grappling rope is attached to the hole. Jinx cocks her pistol and descends down the line and into Graves’ lair, following the glowing light of a throbbing dream machine (should have been a Marc Bolan lyric, that one). She lifts the mask to find Zao inside catching forty winks and slowly points a gun in his face. However, the gloved hand of Graves reaches in from out of shot, grips her shoulder and pumps enough electricity through her to power a milk float. Graves watches her twitch, with a smile that makes him look like he’s being fellated by the floaty lady ghost in the dream bit in Ghostbusters. When she comes to she’s strapped to a strange table attached to a robot arm. Mr Kil flips her around while Zao tries to interrogate her. Each time she gives a wrong answer, he grabs her boob and electrocutes her, like some sort of perverted Spider-Man villain. But Jinx is too tough and even drops in a ‘yo momma’ line to give Zao the ultimate in sass and us a small taste of what the proposed spin-off Jinx film would have been like (shit).

Bond’s laser-watch cuts a giant opening in the ice, making this the biggest ice-hole since Gustav Graves was last on screen, and jumps in to swim through the cold water. He emerges and walks in on Mr Kil as he’s about to kill Jinx. They fight while hundreds of lasers suddenly turn on and begin to fill the room like a Pink Floyd concert choreographed by Steps. After a few punches and forward tuck-and-rolls, Kil has a laser shot through his mouth and drops dead. Jinx then reveals, as Bond unties her, that she works for the NSA and she’ s on his side. When she mentions that Zao is there too, Bond suddenly realises what’s going on – Graves is Colonel Moon!

‘So you live to die another day,’ Bond says as Graves enters his quarters. Graves laughs that it took him so long to realise and talks about how he modelled the look and personality of Gustav Graves on James Bond, with his swagger, smug face, small penis and shit jokes. Bond seems deeply flattered by this, but is probably a bit weirded out, like those people who spend £30,000 to look like David Beckham only to end up looking like some sort of weird ham mannequin. However, before Bond can ask how Graves got a knighthood, Frost enters with a gun and points it at Graves. Bond tells Graves that he’s really up shit creek now, so Graves asks him if he ever found out who betrayed him. Bond says it’s only a matter of time, just as Frost turns the gun on him. She was the mole all along, right under his nose, and she took the bullets out of his gun when they were having sex so he couldn’t shoot her in the face (that will teach him to pay more attention to his partner next time). Bond warns them that someone will come after him, but Graves bats that away by saying that Jinx is soon to meet an end of her own, pointing out that ice palaces can be very treacherous places, like he’s selling insurance to a confused old lady.

Bond uses his sound ring (no, not his arse) to shatter the glass floor and he escapes on foot from Graves’ men, jumps in the rocket car and somehow records a faster speed than Graves managed earlier (again, this actually happens). Graves decides this will be an ideal time to show his new guests – some Korean generals to whom he is yet to reveal his true identity – how powerful the Icarus weapon can be. The satellite adjusts itself and forms into a deadly gun barrel and, after a brief power-up, shoots a deadly laser-beam down onto the ice to chase Bond, sort of like using a magnifying glass on a hot day to chase an ant, only this ant is in a rocket car attempting to beat the land-speed record. As the deadly rays chase Bond across the ice, he fires a grappling rope and flops the car off a cliff, thus leading to the best computer graphics a Commodore 64 has ever been able to commit to screen. Graves uses the ray of Icarus to slice through the cliff face, causing Bond and his car to plunge down to the water and inevitable death. However, Bond has a trick up his sleeve, which is to leap inside a PlayStation 1 game, like Tron, and surf his way over the poorly rendered waves and dodge badly realised icebergs until he reaches safety by exiting the Master Control Programme and returning to reality just in time to steal a passing snowmobile and race back to the Ice Palace.

Using a remote control, he reverses the invisible car up to where he’s hiding and slips inside quietly to use a heat-detecting radar to trace Jinx. However, before he can find her, a snowmobile crashes into the invisible car and gives his position away. Zao jumps into his own souped-up vehicle (a bright green convertible with a machine gun strapped to the top and equipped with rockets that fire out the front and side) and a chase across the ice ensues, accompanied by some of the most egregious examples of slow-motion crash zooms ever committed to screen.

Jinx is still trapped in a room at the Ice Palace and can’t get out. She tries smashing things into the walls, pulling out the wiring and kicking things, but none of it works. What she should do, of course, is use the complimentary hair dryer that all hotel rooms have and melt her way out. Talking of melting, Graves decides that he’ll turn Icarus on the Ice Palace to drown Jinx and everyone inside (obviously worried about those TripAdvisor reviews).

Bond and Zao drive into the dissolving palace and continue their chase, but Bond is too wily for Zao and switches on his invisibility, which causes Zao so much confusion that he plunges his car off a mezzanine floor and into the meltwater below. Jinx is very nearly dead when Bond rescues her from the hotel room, so he drives her outside, killing Zao properly on the way, and dumps her body into a hot spring, bringing her back to life. Graves meanwhile, has boarded a giant plane, ordered Popov to build him a super-hero suit and flown away with the North Koreans.

M is livid with Damien Falco (Michael Madsen), Jinx’s boss at the NSA. Not only did he not mention that he had an agent in the field, he also failed to mention that Miranda Frost was on the same fencing team as Colonel Moon at Harvard, and, lastly, he can’t act. Graves is now on a North Korean air base and can’t be touched as no one can go there – no one, that is, except Bond and Jinx, who are flown over the base and then dropped down on two tiny planes that look like GI Joe toys. Via the power of more horrible computer effects, they land in North Korea without anyone detecting them. Falco, meanwhile, has a secret plan to launch a missile at Icarus, but it does zero damage. Graves is taking off on another plane, but Bond and Jinx manage to jump aboard just as the plane takes off and venture inside.

Colonel Moon’s father is brought to the bridge of the computer aeroplane and watches as Graves turns around dressed like Robocop with cataracts. His special robot suit allows him to electrocute people as well as control Icarus from a control panel on his wrist and the mind boggles over the number of AA batteries it must need. He introduces himself to the general, and quotes one of his favourite sayings back at him, ‘You get nothing for a pair in this game,’ but still the general has no idea who he is, or how he got a knighthood, until it eventually clicks when he engages in a re-creation of the Lionel Ritchie ‘Hello’ music video, by touching a statue’s face, then touching Graves’ face. The general asks him what he’s done to himself, and why the ginger hair? Graves tells his father to watch as he turns on Icarus and burns the demilitarised zone, destroying all the mines and clearing a path for the North Koreans to attack the south. His dad is less than impressed, though, and points a gun at him, which is a kind of extreme parenting that even Supernanny would wince at.

Jinx sneaks and fights her way into the cockpit, taking control of the plane, then Bond creeps onto the bridge, just in time to watch Graves electrocute his father and then shoot him. Bond lines up the perfect shot to kill Graves, but a guard grabs his arm at the last second, causing his bullet to pierce (pun intended) a window and send everyone flying out like drunk Superman. Jinx fights to right the cartoon plane as it plunges to the ground and manages to straighten it just in time for Miranda Frost to put a sword to her throat and tell her to put the plane on autopilot. Bond and Graves roll around and fight on the bridge, occasionally grabbing each other’s faces in slow motion and grunting, while Frost and Jinx fight with swords, the former boasting to the latter that she can read her every move, before being stabbed with a copy of The Art of War (an essential reading item in every dojo) with a knife stuck through it. This affords Jinx the chance to drop the erudite pun ‘read this, bitch’, which I think is Oscar Wilde. Graves electrocutes Bond and knocks him to the floor, then begins the usual baddie monologue about facing destiny and how Bond can’t kill his dreams. He forgets, though, during all this talking, that 007 is a wily old fox. While he’s jabbering on, Bond pulls the ripcord on Graves’ parachute, sending him flying out of the hole in the plane. Graves just manages to grab the edge and clings on with one hand. Bond tells Graves it’s time to face gravity (not one of his best jokes) as he pushes the electricity button on his suit, forcing him to let go of the cartoon plane and shoot off into its cartoon engine. With the control suit destroyed, Icarus switches off and Bond and Jinx jump into a cartoon helicopter in the plane’s hold, managing to escape from the disintegrating plane just before it hits the ground.

It’s night-time at MI6 and Moneypenny is writing up a report to the world’s media to say that the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea is reporting that an observation plane was lost and that ‘fiery graves are feared’, which I think is a WWE wrestler. Bond enters her office and softly says her name. They stand and watch each other for a moment and then begin to kiss passionately, even throwing everything from her desk in order to do some top-level coitus. However, it quickly transpires that Moneypenny is using Q’s virtual reality goggles to have a pervy fantasy. What a tragic end for a very good Moneypenny, beginning as a smart, feisty equal and ending as a pitiful gamer.

The real Bond, meanwhile, is in bed with Jinx on a mountaintop shack, making jokes about putting things in and not pulling them out, which, it transpires, is him stuffing diamonds into her bellybutton. She giggles as he kisses her neck and then the audience screams as a remix of Madonna’s ‘Die Another Day’ starts, which sounds like the loading screen for a PS1 driving game.

This is the end of the road for Pierce Brosnan as James Bond and it’s a very sad way for him to go. From the heights of GoldenEye to the lows of this film feels very much like a once-great power salesman now going door to door selling mop-heads. The only real positives that can be drawn from Die Another Day are that it’s not as awful as most remember and that John Cleese would never be back as Q. Farewell, Pierce, we (mostly) had a blast.

TWENTY-ONE

CASINO ROYALE

2006

It’s easy to forget that part of the world lost its collective mind when Daniel Craig was announced as James Bond. On the one hand, you had people (and I was one of them) who were tentatively excited about the prospect, despite the fact that Craig looked more like Red Grant in From Russia with Love than 007. On the other, there existed an entire substratum of fans who busied themselves with starting ‘Too Blond for Bond’ groups in protest.

When Craig was unveiled at his press conference (via Royal Marine speedboat), his casting was met with scepticism. He had bad hair (which I’m sure he would be the first to admit) and hadn’t yet turned himself into a solid slab of muscle. The jury was most definitely out. But all that changed upon the release of the teaser trailer almost a year later. Viewers watched open-mouthed as the blond beefcake kicked seven shades of shit out of his opponents, drove a tractor through a building site (cooler than it sounds) and emerged from the sea in a pair of tiny blue trunks in a nod to the famous Ursula Andress scene (and the significantly less famous Halle Berry version). And then the film came out and blew everyone away. It had everything: heart-pounding action, well-developed characters and a theme that blasted the cobwebs off the entire franchise. Not to mention 007’s signature charm. The final product was glamorous and gritty.

In the opening scene, shot entirely in black and white, we find ourselves in snowy Prague, late at night. An unknown man lets himself into an empty office building, moving with the furtive air of someone who has something to hide. In his office, he finds that his safe is open. A voice comes from the shadows: ‘M really doesn’t mind you earning a little money on the side, Dryden. She’d just prefer it if it wasn’t selling secrets.’

It’s James Bond, but not the one we’ve known for 20 films. This incarnation is young, cocky and ambitious. He’s yet to gain his 00 status, which takes two kills. Dryden knows this, and he isn’t worried. He pulls his gun and is about to fire when he realises Bond has taken his bullets. Sensing the game is up, he asks how his contact died. ‘Not well,’ Bond says (which feels like a bit of an understatement as we watch a flashback of him viciously beating the man to death in a toilet). Dryden tells him the second kill is much easier, which Bond proves by shooting him in the face.

Back in the bathroom flashback, as Dryden’s contact summons up the last of his energy for a final attack, Bond picks up a gun from the floor and shoots him – the moment framed by the iconic gun barrel. Red blood drips down the screen and we move into colour and a new era of Bond. Daniel Kleinman’s incredible opening credits show Bond earning his 00 status amid stunning playing card-inspired graphics while Chris Cornell sings ‘You Know My Name’ – a gritty rock song with emotional depth that perfectly captures the unique qualities of our new 007.

Mbale, Uganda. A convoy of jeeps pulls into a rebel army camp. Out steps Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), provider of banking services to terrorists around the world (which might seem like a risky endeavour now, but remember, this was a couple of years before the financial crisis when risk was the name of the banking game). He’s here for a meeting with Steven Obanno (Isaach de Bankolé), a high-ranking member of the Lord’s Resistance Army. He promises Obanno that he will look after his cash, then immediately runs off to put it all on a company called ‘Skyfleet’ to fail (please see previous note on attitudes to risk).

Meanwhile, in Madagascar, a large crowd is watching a mongoose fight a snake. Bets are being taken; everyone is shouting. Mollaka, a bombmaker covered in scars (which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in his workmanship), gets a text on his phone which simply reads ‘Ellipsis’. As he leaves to go about his business, he notices Carter, an MI6 agent, with his finger in his ear. He is either communicating with other agents or attempting to reach perfect pitch while singing (it’s the former, but if he had any sense of initiative, he would have styled it out as the latter). As Mollaka makes his escape, Carter unfortunately flails and falls over. Thankfully, Bond is there to leap into action, and thus unfolds what is surely one of the greatest on-foot chase sequences in cinema. This new iteration of the character is perfectly introduced by acting as a literal battering ram. While Mollaka (Sébastien Foucan, the founcer of freerunning) vaults up, over and around everything in his path, Bond bursts through walls and breaks machines in order to catch his quarry.

The bombmaker seeks asylum in the Nambutu embassy, but he doesn’t count on Bond following him in like a bad smell and shoving his head in a bag while shooting his way into the back garden. Unfortunately, he’s immediately surrounded by armed and angry-looking guards, so he drops the gun and hands the bomber over (with the look of disgust usually reserved for a bad substitute item in a Tesco home delivery). Mollaka looks smug for a moment as he walks back to the embassy, but Bond immediately wipes that look off his face by shooting him dead (he had a secret second gun – very clever) and then firing at a gas canister to cause an explosion. When the air clears and the debris settles, Bond – along with Mollaka’s backpack – is gone.

Le Chiffre’s girlfriend, soaked from a long swim in the sea, climbs aboard her boyfriend’s yacht, walking past a game of poker in full swing. Le Chiffre tends to his eye as it weeps blood (must be a hefty hankie bill). Watching on is Madame Wu, played by Tsai Chin, whom we previously saw in You Only Live Twice as Ling, the woman who flipped Bond into the Murphy bed. Le Chiffre wins the game easily, but then he receives the bad news about the death of his bomber and takes a frustrated puff of his inhaler. Ellipsis only has 36 hours left, so alternative arrangements must be made . . .

As M exits the lift into her swanky London flat, she spies a young intruder. It’s Bond, mucking around with a deck of cards, having just used her laptop to trace the Ellipsis text, which was sent from the Ocean Club in Nassau. She gives him a bollocking about murdering the bombmaker (the story made the front pages of the press and caused a bit of a stink in Whitehall) and tells him to take his ego out of the equation (spoiler alert: he doesn’t).

The excitement spikes as Bond arrives in the Bahamas, cruising along the sexy roads of Nassau in his even sexier . . . Ford Mondeo. After causing a distraction by intentionally crashing the car of a German tourist who mistook him for the hotel valet, Bond sneaks into the security room and admires the extensive range of Sony products (the Sony advertising in this film borders on the ridiculous; I am surprised that the real bad guy of this film isn’t in fact a Sony marketing executive). He is able to get an image of the exact moment the Ellipsis text was sent and identifies the sender as Alex Dimitrios, so he rents an ocean view villa next door to his. (I smell a sitcom!)

After a long flight and some light espionage, there’s no better way to relax than a swim in the ocean. Bond emerges from the water like Lord Sex of Atlantis and stands to reveal a chiselled body of pure beef (and those tiny blue shorts – worthy of endless Diet Coke breaks). On the white sand, Solange, Dimitrios’s girlfriend, dismounts a horse, and he throws her a daft smile. Invigorated by this cheeky flirtation with the girlfriend of an international criminal, Bond heads back to his villa and logs into the MI6 database (using M’s access) to check out Dimitrios and his known associates, one of whom is . . . Le Chiffre. (Back at MI6, Villiers – a joint Miss Moneypenny/Bill Tanner replacement in this film – is monitoring live and feeding back to M, so it’s a good thing that Bond didn’t google ‘Russian wives’.)

At the Ocean Club that night, Bond joins a poker game with Dimitrios and plays well. So well, in fact, that a car is now part of the prize money, and we’re not talking a The Price is Right-style Austin Montego, but an Aston Martin DB5. Dimitrios lays down his cards – two Kings, which the dealer helpfully explains makes him a winner. However, Bond has two Aces, which can’t be beaten. Bond takes the car key and asks for the valet ticket. Then, to add further salt to the wound, he invites Solange back to his for a drink – in his newly acquired DB5. (He’s probably arranged for Dimitrios’s grandparents’ graves to be bulldozed too.)

Dimitrios’s night is going from bad to worse. His girlfriend has disappeared into the night with a sexy poker-playing beefcake, and now he’s about to get a bollocking from his boss. He boards Le Chiffre’s yacht and tells him that none of what happened was his fault, really – all he did was recommend the bomber, and how was he supposed to know the guy was under surveillance by MI6? Luckily, he has another man who can do the job, and he’ll go to Miami to meet him at once.

Meanwhile, Bond has a conundrum: he’s staying in a villa on the hotel grounds, but he also really wants to impress Solange with his driving skills. He compromises by zooming round the hotel roundabout really fast in the DB5, which Solange thinks is hilarious (in a good way). Back at Bond’s villa, they move on from teenage-style driving to teenage-style snogging on the floor, but they’re interrupted when Solange’s phone rings. Dimitrios tells her he’s on the last plane to Miami and won’t be back until tomorrow. When Solange heads for the bathroom, Bond takes his cue and buggers off, but he feels bad for depriving her of a night of 007 passion and orders her some Beluga caviar and a bottle of chilled Bollinger La Grand Année to make up for it (he certainly has a high opinion of himself).

Body Worlds in Miami is a world-famous exhibit from Dr Gunther von Hagens, a man obsessed with the inner workings of the human body, and who has conducted a live and in-depth autopsy on British television (he could almost be a Bond villain in his own right). Dimitrios checks in a black bag and heads into the exhibit, unaware that Bond is right behind him. The room is full of preserved bodies, muscle and sinew on full display. Some are playing cards, some are riding similarly preserved horses and some are posed in gymnastic shapes. Dimitrios places the token for the bag on a poker table and then, having realised he was being tailed, appears behind Bond, holding a knife to his back. The two men end up grappling over the weapon (keeping things as low-key as possible amidst the crowd but making up for it with some intense manly eye contact). Bond wins, plunges the blade into Dimitrios’s side and leaves him for dead. He uses his phone to call the new bomber and then follows him to the airport.

Dodging past Richard Branson – beautifully playing the part of ‘man being casually body-searched at airport’ – Bond follows the bomber, but loses him as he ducks through a security door. He’s on the phone to M to ask for help when he realises something: ‘Ellipsis’ is the code for the security door (not the name of a nightclub in Surrey). He hangs up just as Villiers tells M that the Skyfleet plane, the largest aeroplane in the world, is being unveiled at Miami International Airport. This may be significant.

The bomber activates the sprinklers and sounds the alarm. People exit the building in panic, soaked in water and stumbling around. M tells Bond about Skyfleet just as he sees the bomber drive off in a police car, and so begins a beautifully choreographed chase sequence, with wonderful shades of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Licence to Kill thrown in. At one point, Bond rolls out of the way of two trucks, narrowly avoiding being crushed – a moment that, in the trailer, made this film look 300% more exciting. He eventually saves the day by managing to get on board the bullet-riddled fuel truck and stopping it from reaching the Skyfleet plane – but is immediately arrested for his trouble, leaving the mad bomber to watch all this and then blow himself up (Bond hooked the bomb to his belt while he wasn’t looking – always fun).

Back in Nassau, Solange is dead. M takes Bond to view her body, wrapped up in a hammock, and tells him she was tortured before being killed. Bond is decidedly un-arsed about seeing her dead body and coldly reassures M that she had no intel on him. M explains that Dimitrios was a middleman who could get weapons for anyone with money, and had for years been linked to Le Chiffre. She tells him that, immediately after 9/11, someone made a fortune in the resulting stock market crash, and that someone has just lost $100 million on investments that banked on the Skyfleet share price plummeting. M’s hunch is that it’s Le Chiffre. Turns out he’s set up a high-stakes poker game at Casino Royale in Montenegro, with prize money of $150 million, to win it back (which is a bit like crashing your mate’s speedboat and then going on Bullseye to try and win him another). M tells Bond she’s putting him in the game, as she’s been told he’s the best poker player in the service.

On the train to Montenegro, Bond is joined by Vesper ‘I’m the money’ Lynd (played by the sublime Eva Green). She’s an agent for Her Majesty’s Treasury, sent to oversee Bond’s use of the government funds he has been supplied with for the poker buy-in. There’s immediate tension between the two, both sexual and adversarial. After a short chat about the plan – or lack thereof, considering it’s basically ‘play poker’ – they begin to psychoanalyse one another in a glorious mental jousting match, which ends with the incredibly bright Vesper giving James a real roasting.

In Montenegro, they go over their cover stories. Bond is a professional gambler by the name of Arlington Beech, and Vesper’s new moniker is apparently Stephanie Broadchest (which might have been her actual Bond girl name, if this had been filmed in 1964). She’s playing the part of Bond’s girlfriend, but he reassures her she’s not his type. Because she’s smart? Vesper wonders. ‘Single,’ he quips.

When they arrive at the hotel, he immediately dumps the cover story, checking in as James Bond and telling the receptionist that Vesper is from the Treasury. He tells Vesper that Le Chiffre will already know who he is, but she isn’t convinced by his braggadocious tactics. She gets in the elevator and tells Bond to take the next one, as there isn’t room for both her and his ego. (He should have listened to M.)

Bond is given a package by the hotel receptionist that contains a car key. He goes out to the car park to find a gorgeous Aston Martin DBS V12. A special glove box contains a defibrillator and some syringes and a space gun equipped with a silencer. Bond slips the gun into the package that held the key and then heads back to the hotel.

A short time later, Bond and Vesper meet up with René Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini), a local MI6 operative who has been keeping tabs on Le Chiffre. He has to break the news that he is the only operative in the area, so if things go wrong, there will be no cavalry to come to Bond’s aid. Considering the money MI6 and the Treasury are pouring into this investigation, it feels a bit shit of them not to have provided more back-up, but I suppose that’s government budget cuts for you.

The poker players mingle in the bar, and Le Chiffre sizes up Bond with a handshake. Then the game begins. Bond quickly discovers Le Chiffre’s tell, and after using Vesper as a sexy distraction, he tries to disrupt his rhythm by loudly ordering a drink, which causes lots of other players to do the same. An official announces that they’ve been playing for four hours, and a break is called. Bond is able to place a bug inside Le Chiffre’s inhaler (surely a choking hazard) just before he’s informed that his girlfriend needs to speak to him urgently. Bond and Vesper follow on behind, pretending they’re going upstairs to have sex.

When Le Chiffre gets to his room, it’s an ambush by a machete-wielding Obanno and his men, demanding their money. After being throttled and beaten up, Le Chiffre tells Obanno about his foolproof plan to win the money back in the poker game, which the warlord seems to readily accept. Bond and Vesper, meanwhile, have been eavesdropping in the hall and must hide before Obanno catches them. In a classic 007 move (that is, one that perfectly blends subterfuge with sleaze) Bond starts snogging Vesper – the perfect hotel-hallway camouflage. Unfortunately, Obanno’s henchman notices Bond’s earpiece. The scene that follows is one of graceful and measured savagery, stylishly choreographed and directed, as Bond and Obanno battle level by level down the staircase. It ends with a terrified Vesper intervening to save Bond’s life and then watching as Bond strangles the life out of the warlord. Bond tells her to go and get Mathis while he stashes the bodies in a cupboard, like Tarantino doing Narnia.

There are many differences between traditional Bond and 21st-century Bond, but one of the key changes has been showing that he can be hurt. The trend at the time, seen in contemporary films such as Batman Begins and the Bourne series, was for raw honesty, and it was therefore essential that audiences be shown every detail of what made their hero tick. So, with that in mind, we see Bond tending to his wounds, washing the blood from his hands and comforting a traumatised Vesper as she cries in the shower.

Back at the card table, things are going well for Bond. Mathis is telling Vesper what is happening, like someone at the cinema with a toddler, when they notice Le Chiffre’s tell once again, which means he must be bluffing. He goes all in and Bond follows suit. The only problem is that Le Chiffre wasn’t bluffing. He walks away, smiling like the asthmatic cat that got the cream, while Bond is left to contemplate how massively he has just fucked up. He demands that Vesper give him more money, but she refuses, saying he is reckless and arrogant and his ego is out of control. In return, he calls her an idiot and decides to prove Vesper wrong by following Le Chiffre and stabbing him with a dinner knife. Luckily for him, he’s stopped by an American player from the table – our old CIA friend, Felix Leiter (played here by a magnificent Jeffrey Wright) – who offers Bond the money to buy back in. He agrees that Bond can beat Le Chiffre, as long as the CIA get him afterwards (with MI6 maybe seeing him at weekends).

Back at the card table, Bond starts to get the better of Le Chiffre again. Valenka (Ivana Miličević), Le Chiffre’s girlfriend, slips a phial of poison into Bond’s cocktail just before the waitress takes it to the table. Bond takes a great swig of the drink while giving Vesper the stink-eye (which she returns with interest as the sexual tension between them ramps up another notch), but almost immediately starts to feel unwell. His gaze flicks from Le Chiffre’s self-satisfied face to the glass and he realises what’s happened. He excuses himself from the table and rushes out of the casino. Stumbling across the busy road outside, wild-eyed, sweating and out of control, he bumps into a passing scooter and then slams into a braking car. He tries to vomit up the poison but it’s already worked its way into his system. Only his car can save him now. He calls MI6 and is talked through the process of using a defibrillator on himself. He nearly dies, but Vesper arrives at the last moment to save his life. Much to Le Chiffre’s chagrin, he arrives back at the table and (never one to miss the opportunity for a good old-fashioned pun) announces that the last hand nearly killed him.

Le Chiffre raises the stakes to $12 million. The room is thick with tension; Vesper can barely watch. There’s now $150 million in the pot. Each member of the table shows their cards in turn. Each has a hand that on any normal day would win, but this is no normal day. Bond beats them all with a straight flush, causing Le Chiffre to storm off in a rage and applause to break out around the room.

Bond rushes out of the hotel just in time to see Vesper being bundled into the back of a car and driven away in a hurry. He sprints to the DBS and gives chase at high speed – a chase that is brought to a catastrophic halt when he suddenly comes across a tied-up Vesper in the middle of the road and swerves to avoid her. He’s pulled from the wreckage of his car and dumped on the grass by Le Chiffre’s men, who cut the tracking beacon from his arm while Le Chiffre explains that Mathis is his friend.

Bond is taken to an abandoned ship, stripped and tied to a chair with its seat cut out. Vesper’s screams echo from elsewhere, and for the first time in his short career, Bond looks worried. Le Chiffre compliments Bond on his body before lightly whipping his balls with a rope (a service that would probably cost a great deal of money in other circumstances). He wants the password for the winnings, but Bond isn’t talking. No matter what Le Chiffre does to him, he’ll never get the password (though he hasn’t tried extreme tickling). Le Chiffre kicks the chair over and is about to cut off Bond’s balls when a man bursts in brandishing a gun. It’s the guy who set up the meeting with Obanno, and he has clearly had enough of Le Chiffre. He tells him trust is more important than money and shoots him in the head.

Bond convalesces in a special bed-chair (presumably built for people with massive, aching balls). Mathis asks if he has any information that can help unravel the events of that night, but Bond remembers Le Chiffre’s comment about Mathis and remains tight-lipped. Within seconds the treacherous Mathis is grabbed by MI6 heavies and taken away.

Vesper and Bond are now properly in love (she has officially removed her Facebook status of ‘it’s complicated’). Bond is very happy about this; as at one point it seemed like she loathed him and everything he stood for. Mr Mendel, a Swiss banker responsible for all monetary transactions during and after tournaments at Casino Royale, arrives at the clinic to ask Bond to withdraw the winnings and put them into his account. Bond asks Vesper to do it for him, explaining that the password was her name all along (aww).

There’s only one place to go when you are very much in love and have a boat, and if Skegness is full then Venice will have to do. While Vesper awkwardly steers their boat, Bond gets out his Sony laptop and types up his resignation to MI6 (cutting ties in that way most people do with their friends when they first fall in love, and without even giving a notice period either).

After a romp in bed, Vesper tells Bond she needs to get to the bank to get some cash to tide them over. As they head their separate ways, Bond gets a call from M, telling him the Treasury would like to know if he’s ever going to deposit the winnings. He realises Vesper has betrayed him and runs through Piazza San Marco to find her meeting her contact, Adolph Gettler (Richard Sammel). He comes under heavy machine gunfire as the bad guys, with Vesper, retreat into a house under repair. Bond storms in and shoots the airbags in the floor that are holding the entire house afloat. Vesper becomes trapped in a lift which plummets beneath the water as the house sinks. Bond tries to rescue her but can’t get the lift open. It’s too late anyway, as she’s decided that she can’t live with what she’s done, and after kissing his hand, she pushes herself to the back of the submerged lift and screams out her last breath. He brings her body to the surface, but as hard as he tries, nothing can be done. As he cries over her body, the gunman who earlier took out Le Chiffre retrieves the case of money from the water and walks away from the scene.

M explains that Vesper had a boyfriend who was kidnapped by Le Chiffre’s organisation. She was being blackmailed to act as a double agent, but she must have made a deal to spare Bond’s life on the night of her kidnapping. M asks if he needs some time, but he insists he doesn’t – ‘job’s done, the bitch is dead’. He checks over Vesper’s belongings and finds her phone, which contains a message for his attention: the phone number of a ‘Mr White’ (but not Barry, more’s the pity).

The doors open to a palatial Italian mansion as a luxury Jaguar purrs down the gravelled driveway. A man steps out and looks over the vast lake in front of the house, watching the sunlight glinting on the water. His phone rings. The voice on the other end of the line asks if he’s Mr White, and tells him they need to talk. As he asks who’s calling, a bullet rips through his knee and sends him crashing to the ground. He crawls towards the doorstep of his house, eventually meeting a pair of smart shoes as the Bond theme rumbles like distant thunder. ‘The name’s Bond, James Bond.’ The music explodes into life as the screen cuts to black. And so begins the era of a Bond who is haunted by his past and depressed about his future.

TWENTY-TWO

QUANTUM OF SOLACE

2008

Is Quantum of Solace a good film? No. It’s unsatisfying, vague and not fun to watch, but it exists, and sadly we can’t ignore it.

The film opens on the steely expanse of Lake Garda, Italy. The camera skates along the water, moving towards the steep mountains at the shore, interspersed with blurred close-ups of a speeding car. Everything is silent; we hear only the low hum of the score firing up. As the music reaches a crescendo, the sound bursts into life and Bond’s Aston Martin roars through a narrow tunnel, pursued by faceless bad guys in Alfa Romeos. Bond makes short work of his pursuers and pulls into a tunnel. He opens the boot to reveal the captured Mr White (how he isn’t covered in his own sick after all that is a mystery to me), and we realise we’ve picked up where Casino Royale left off.

The credits are a step into the unknown. No Binder, Brownjohn or Kleinman here, but a company called MK12 (who also handled the Minority Report-style computer interfaces, and the end gun-barrel work). The sequence is interesting, and certainly conjures up Bond credits of old; the distinctive typefaces bring to mind You Only Live Twice, with a bit of Dr. No thrown in for good measure. The song – ‘Another Way To Die’ by Jack White and Alicia Keys – maintains the tone established in Casino Royale. Daniel Craig’s 007 is raw and rebellious.

In Siena, Italy, Mr White is shoved into a chair while Bond greets M’s bodyguard, Mitchell (Glenn Foster), and helps himself to a strong drink. M is looking out of a window in a gloomy way, as if she’s recently got into Morrissey and vodka. She points out that the Americans won’t be pleased about all this – they wanted Le Chiffre alive. Bond retorts, ‘If they wanted his soul, they should have made a deal with a priest,’ a line that has the capacity to curl the toes from 300 yards. It turns out that the body of Vesper’s boyfriend’s recently washed up on a beach in Ibiza, with his wallet and ID in his pocket – which Bond thinks is a bit convenient. Two steps ahead, M’s already had a DNA test run on a lock of his hair that was found in Vesper’s apartment (the script creaks audibly when that line slides out). It’s not him. M is worried that Bond will seek revenge for Vesper’s death, and asks if she can trust him. Bond pushes the not-bothered button with full force, pretending he didn’t even like Vesper that much anyway, while secretly swiping a photo of her from M’s file.

Mitchell returns from ‘checking the perimeter’ and tells M the coast is clear, so they begin the interrogation of Mr White. White laughs heartily about the fact that MI6 knows absolutely nothing about his organisation (apparently, they have ‘people everywhere’). M snaps back with ‘We’re quick learners’, but surely regrets her confidence when it’s revealed only seconds later that Mitchell is a double agent. Thus begins an overly convoluted foot chase that, while giving you time to enjoy the sludgy-brown colour palette of the film, ultimately ends in a CGI rope-swinging session in the dome of an old Italian building. Bond kills Mitchell and returns to find White is gone. All that is left is a small puddle of blood (and possibly some sick).

Back at MI6, M and Bond meet with Bill Tanner (Rory Kinnear), who gives them a short breakdown on Mitchell, with the surprising detail that he gave generously to charity (presumably he didn’t like to talk about it). They are then bothered by a treasury agent (Rufus Wright) who wants to talk about some money found in Mitchell’s flat – tagged bills that were introduced into Le Chiffre’s money-laundering operation and are connected to the account of a ‘Mr Slate’ in Haiti. As the treasury agent explains the situation, there follows a scene of computer effects so confusing that you wonder if it’s an extreme form of performance art. To cut a long story short, Slate is staying at a hotel and they even have the room number.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Bond arrives in a taxi, wearing sunglasses that are too small for his face. He walks into the Hotel Dessalines and up to Slate’s room, where a fight breaks out that looks like it’s been lifted wholesale from a Jason Bourne film, but with the added coldness of killing Slate via ‘bleeding him out’ with knife to the neck and thigh. These kind of fight scenes were novel at the time, but they then turned up in every film going, diluting the shock value.

Bond spends a moment cleaning himself up, steals Slate’s coat and heads to reception. Pretending to be Slate, he collects a briefcase that was earlier delivered to the hotel (Michael G. Wilson cameo here, fact fans). Outside the hotel, a Ford Ka (which sounds like it’s rocket-powered) zooms up and a woman (Olga Kurylenko) orders him to get in. As they zip through the streets of Port-au-Prince, it becomes clear that the woman was expecting to meet with a geologist and is confused by hunky 007. Bond opens up the suitcase, which contains only a sheaf of blank paper, a gun and a photo of the woman. Awkward . . . She takes a shot at him and kicks him out of the car.

M calls Bond for an update, and he has to admit that, rather than pumping Slate for information, he has committed yet another murder. Oops. (This seems like a theme that will need to be resolved.) Bond follows the woman to the docks, where she confronts the villain of the piece, Dominic Greene (played by the brilliant Mathieu Amalric, who is utterly wasted in this film), who seems to be endlessly stamping receipts

We learn that the woman is named Camille and she is Greene’s girlfriend. Camille reveals that she knows he wanted her killed, but he tries to smooth-talk his way out of it. He also employs the wildly controversial tactic of showing her a corpse that he has floating in his dock. It’s the real geologist. It’s around now that we meet Greene’s mysterious henchman, Elvis (Anatole Taubman), who looks like the oddball love child of Diamonds Are Forever’s Mr Wint and Mr Kidd.

Greene suspects Camille is only with him because she wants to get to General Medrano, an evil Bolivian general who murdered her family. Medrano is at that very moment heading over to Greene’s place for a meeting, and Camille’s eyes light up at the possibility of revenge.

Bond hands his Universal Exports business card to the man at the gate and watches as Elvis makes a call that he is then able to trace with his futuristic-space-phone.

Greene promises that he and his mysterious organisation can put Medrano (Joaquín Cosío) in charge within a week, and have already begun destabilising the government, which is very impressive and makes me wish Greene had been involved with Brexit. All they ask in return for this coup is a patch of ‘worthless desert’. Medrano tells Greene that they won’t find oil there, and that others have tried, to which Greene smugly keeps his own counsel. He then introduces Medrano to Camille as a ‘deal sweetener’ that he should ‘drop over the side when he’s done’. What a delightful boyfriend he is.

Medrano and his guards grab Camille and board his speedboat. Bond has seen enough and he draws upon his many years of watching Junior Kickstart to ride his motorbike all over some boats before eventually stealing one to give chase. He rams into Medrano’s vessel and jumps onboard. During the chaos, Camille is able to draw her secret gun and at last take revenge for her dead family, however, at the last second, Bond ‘rescues’ her and throws her onboard his newly stolen boat, which she doesn’t thank him for. There then follows a boat chase sequence that is so badly and confusingly edited that I challenge anyone to explain to me exactly what happens. It’s like Picasso painting Nascar, and it’s a relief when it ends. All I can tell you is that during the mess Camille is knocked out by a flying boat, and Bond does the descent thing by leaving her unconscious body with some random men, who I dearly hope are trustworthy and woke.

Bond asks M to do a name check on Dominic Greene. He’s the CEO of Greene Planet – a company that has been buying up lots of land to use as ecological preserves (and provincial Winter Wonderlands where they glue antlers onto cows). M tells him off again for murdering Mr Slate, who really sounds like a neighbour from a seventies sitcom, and then asks to speak to the Americans regarding Greene. She’s put through to Gregory Beam (David Harbour), the section chief of the CIA’s South American branch, who says that the CIA have no interest in Greene, which tells M all she needs to know. They obviously have interest in him, or she wouldn’t have been put through to someone as high up as Beam.

She is proven to be right as, at that very moment, Greene boards his jet and meets up with Gregory Beam, as well as a rather grumpy Felix Leiter. Beam seems very happy to do business with Greene, as long as he gets a taste, which is exactly what happened when Kraft took over Cadbury’s, while Felix seems very unhappy to be anywhere near them, in the same way I am with the general public. Greene tells Beam that he has a pest who is bothering him, and shows him Bond’s picture. Felix claims to not know who it is, however, Beam immediately gives him up, so Greene asks him to get rid of Bond, and he says that that won’t be a problem, much to Felix’s chagrin. Once Greene is out of the way, Beam questions Felix’s loyalty, in the same way Topman did in the nineties when I maxed out my store card.

In Austria, Bond follows the trace he has on his phone and arrives at an opera just as Greene and his entourage do. He slips in through the artists’ entrance (not for the first time) and sets about stealing a tuxedo while immediately noticing that some guests are being handed special Tosca party bags. Bond beats a man unconscious and steals his bag to see what’s in it. Inside, along with the usual promotional items, there is a ‘Q’ emblem badge and an earpiece, as well as a denim-strapped watch, a Curly-Wurly and a copy of the Daily Express.

Greene takes his seat in his private booth to watch the opera, while Bond heads to the rafters so he can spy on the audience, and definitely ogle women. The bad guys are holding a meeting by talking to each other out loud via their earpieces, which goes to show how evil they are, as they are perfectly happy to chat during a performance.

Bond interjects and suggests they all find a better place to meet, like a scout hut or church hall, and then begins to take pictures of spooked members as they walk away from the meeting (Mr White, very coolly, stays where he is). He sends the pictures to a stunned Tanner at MI6, then fights his way out of the venue. It’s at this point that the music of Tosca takes over the soundtrack completely, and it certainly makes for a very memorable sequence as Bond comes face to face with Greene and his men and shoots and fights his way out in near total silence except for the music. He seeks refuge on the roof and encounters a British mercenary. The Brit is unwilling to cooperate and sadly is dropped off the building in a throwback to a similar scene in The Spy Who Loved Me. Tragically the mercenary lands on Greene’s bonnet, and his men finish him off – not like that, though it would improve the film greatly.

Meanwhile, back at MI6, Tanner has a whole feast of names to be getting into from Bond, and calls M. She is running a bath, and is sent the names on her special waterproof bathroom computer. M is briefed on who was at the opera, and one of them was Guy Haines, a special adviser to the Prime Minister; the man who Bond pushed off the roof was Haines’ bodyguard and a member of Special Branch. The news from Tanner is that Bond killed the bodyguard, which we know of course to be nonsense – although that fall could well have killed him and certainly led to his death. Semantics, semantics. M phones Bond and asks him to come in for a debrief. She accuses him of shooting someone, whereupon Bond replies that he tried not to (also, at this point, he should have pointed out that he killed loads of people after the opera, but I’m not sure that would have helped matters). Bond says he can’t come in as he needs to find the man who tried to kill her (who he’s already killed). M orders a restriction on his passport, the cancellation of all his cards and the batteries to be taken out of his Xbox controller.

Talamone, Italy. Bond is in a speedboat, zooming across the waves, soaking up the sun in his tiny sunglasses, looking for all the world like he’s advertising P&O Cruises, but instead he’s heading to see René Mathis, the man who at the end of Casino Royale we thought was a bad guy, but is now, conveniently, a good guy. He asks if Bond is there to apologise, which of course he isn’t: he’s there to take him out of his cosy retirement in the sun and get him murdered, a stunt even Richard Burton in The Wild Geese would think twice about pulling. Bond needs Mathis’s help to get a passport and a new credit card as, apparently, he is the only man he can trust. Mathis has contacts in Bolivia as he was stationed there for seven years, so Bond asks him to come with him (hope you enjoyed your retirement, René).

On the flight to Bolivia we meet the real Bond buried under the surface of this rugged, tough exterior: a really boring mope. He’s perched at the bar unpacking all his woes to poor Mathis, who was probably sold the adventure of a lifetime, but has ended up in the airborne branch of the Samaritans. A few hours ago, he was sunning himself in Italy, and now he’s stuck with the world’s most depressing spy at 30,000 feet along with, I might add, the world’s most smug bartender.

They land in Bolivia and are immediately greeted by consulate agent Fields (Gemma Arterton), who has been instructed to make them go home at once. She also won’t reveal her first name, because it’s ‘Strawberry’. I’d probably keep that hidden too, especially if I were her sister ‘The Killing’. Bond is told that the next plane is in the morning, so they ‘have all night’. They all get into a taxi being driven by a guy who’s building his part, and head to a scummy hotel that Bond has no interest in staying in. Fields explains that their cover story is teachers on sabbatical. So Bond takes them to a very plush hotel and informs the man on reception that they are teachers on sabbatical who have just won the Lottery – a line that I always enjoy when I see it sneak out of this house-fire of a script, which, by the way, was finished off by Craig and director Mark Forster due to the writers’ strike of that year. And it shows. Often excruciatingly.

Mathis arrives to tell a topless Bond he’s invited to the Greene Planet party, an event that sounds like the desperate attempt of a dying garden centre to attract kids to buy wheelbarrows. Mathis can’t make it as he’s having a drink with his friend, the Colonel of Police, but he’ll see him there later. Bond goes back to attend to Fields in the bedroom – and yes, they’ve ‘done it’. She’s angry that she’s allowed herself to sleep with him, and he attempts to cheer her up by telling her they’re going to a party, which I’m not sure is the best idea. It’s disappointing that the writers didn’t bring their sexy-name jokes to the table and give us some ‘outstanding in his field’ or ‘doing some field work’ type gags.

The party looks absolutely shit. There’s a DJ playing a record that makes no sound, nibbles that look rancid and a load of suits waving cash at the bar. It’s just crying out for ‘The Birdie Song’ to liven it up. Greene gives a speech about how the planet has been damaged by man, and tells everyone about the Tierra Project, an eco-park he is developing that will fix the world, which sounds like Blobbyland. Bond and Fields watch in the audience with suitable disdain on their faces, as if Greene’s just announced they’re all going to watch Eurovision.

While Greene mingles with his guests, he doesn’t notice Camille step into his conversation and make things very awkward by revealing some key facts about some of the land he has been buying up. He makes his excuses and drags her away. He’s about to drop her over the side of a balcony when Bond intervenes. Greene, unwilling to make more of a scene in front of his potential investors, lets them go, but not before he calls them both ‘damaged goods’. Meow. Bond asks Camille to show him Greene’s Tierra Project, and they set off in the car. It’s not long before they are pulled over by the Bolivian police and asked to open the boot. When Bond opens it, he finds Mathis in there, heavily beaten and looking a bit put out – this may have been a beating by corrupt police, or a surprise birthday stunt that’s gone horribly wrong. The policeman asks Bond to bring Mathis out, and as he does so they open fire, shooting poor Mathis twice in the back. Bond kills both policemen and tends to René as he lies dying in the street. He then literally adds insult to injury by telling Mathis his cover name is shit, and Mathis decides to spend his last seconds on Earth making everything more boring by telling Bond to forgive Vesper and move on. As he dies, Bond steals his money, and then dumps his dead body in a bin. I suppose time is tight.

Bond and Camille arrive at an airstrip and exchange their fancy car for an old aeroplane. After a brief chat in the clouds, where we find out Camille is Bolivian Secret Service, and that M likes to think she is Bond’s mum, they are attacked by a Bolivian fighter jet and filled full of holes. Once again, there follows an action sequence that’s not particularly well filmed or edited. God alone knows what is happening, and boy does it go on and on. It’s like two ghosts endlessly playing tennis, with no real end in sight, as the fighter jet chases them through ravines and around mountain peaks as it tries to bring them down. Eventually Bond and Camille bail out with one parachute and the film commits the cardinal sin of having a Bond sky-diving sequence all done with CGI, which is pretty sad. Bond is a franchise famous for pretty sky-diving sequences and real air-stunt work, so to cheat like this seems very lazy (and recalls the worst of Die Another Day). They pull the cord at the last possible second, which I am assuming would have killed them both instantly in real life, and land inside a sinkhole.

In the dark of the hole they have a mind-numbing conversation about Camille’s past and how Medrano murdered her family and set her house on fire. Bond apologises for pulling her off the boat when she had the shot that she’d waited years to have, then drones on about Vesper interminably, before they leave the sinkhole and stumble upon a massive dam of water, which makes Bond realise that Greene isn’t after oil or diamonds – he’s after the water. He’s creating a drought, and potentially releasing his own brand of mineral water. It’s quite a clever scheme, but as far as baddie-plots in Bond movies go, it’s astonishingly dull.

They arrive back at Bond’s hotel to find that his ‘wife’ has left a note for him. It says ‘Run!’, which can either mean she is warning him about danger, or that it’s about time Bond stood for some sort of political office. Of course it means there’s danger, and when Bond gets to his room, he’s confronted by M and various members of MI6. He tells her there’s no oil, but she points to Fields, who’s lying dead on the bed, covered head to toe in it (a nod to Jill Masterton being painted in gold in Goldfinger). Bond misses a chance here by not making an oil fields joke, but you could argue it isn’t really the time or the place. M asks why he got Fields involved as she was just supposed to send him home, to which Bond should ask why she sent someone who worked in an office collecting reports to look after him, especially when she knows exactly what he’s like. M tells him he’s removed from duty and suspended pending an investigation, but he doesn’t go quietly. He beats up the guards escorting him to the lift and, on the way out, swings past M and tells her he’ll sort it. Bizarrely, she seems reassured by this turn of events.

Felix arrives at the bar where Bond is supping on a bottle of beer, alone again, having presumably told everyone in the pub all about Vesper already. Felix tells him Medrano can’t stage his planned coup to take control of the government until he pays off the army and police chief, and that Greene’s bringing him the money to a hotel in the desert. He also warns Bond that he only has 30 seconds to escape before armed CIA agents raid the bar. Bond thanks Felix and scuttles off into the night.

At Perla de las Dunas, the hotel in the desert, Medrano and his men are waiting for Greene to arrive. The police colonel (Fernando Guillén Cuervo) begins to tell Medrano about how the hotel runs on extremely hazardous fuel cells, and is essentially made of cardboard, and petrol, and bombs, and fire. But there’s nothing to worry about.

There are times and places for emotional pep-talks: corporate away-days after your team have built a tower out of balloons, or just before the awkward group-lunch buffet. However, never do it when you’re about to storm a hotel full of armed men in the middle of the desert, as this is really no time to hear an emotional monologue about killing people. Concentrate on the task at hand, James.

Greene arrives with his usual convoy and hands over the suitcase to Medrano with a warning that if he doesn’t sign the contract to pay his organisation to be utility provider (yes, this really is the evil plot), then he’ll cut off his testicles and put them in his mouth – which is something even Lord Sugar wouldn’t sanction. Medrano begrudgingly signs, and heads to his suite to pester a female staff member.

The colonel makes his way out of the hotel. Just as his car is about to leave, Bond springs from nowhere and shoots him dead, in revenge for Mathis. The car reverses back into the garage and hits the first of many highly explosive fuel cells. After Bond engages in a firefight (shooting baddies, not actually fighting flames), Camille gets into Medrano’s room and they too begin to fight. Elvis is killed via another exploding fuel cell, and Greene tries to run away from the fireball behind him. There is just no way this hotel would pass even the most basic Health & Safety checks. I mean, who was the architect? Beavis – his only stipulation being ‘Fire! Fire!’?

Bond catches up with Greene and beats the shit out of him in seconds. Camille, on the other hand, is struggling with Medrano. After a long fight, and some further explosions, she’s finally able to shoot him dead. Bond finds her traumatised in the burning hotel room, obviously anticipating Bond talking about Vesper again soon. He manages to shoot out an exposed fuel cell (thank the Lord for the highly flammable fuel cells) which blows a hole in the wall and allows them to escape.

Bond drives Greene out into the middle of the desert and throws him out of the boot. It becomes clear that Greene has spilled his guts about Quantum, the criminal organisation behind Le Chiffre in Casino Royale and Greene and his cronies in this movie, and that he’s asked to be let go. Bond tells him that his friends probably know he’s told Bond everything and are almost certainly going to be looking for him. He throws Greene a can of motor oil and says that he’ll probably drink it after about 20 miles of walking. Bond then gets back in his car and drives off, leaving Mathieu Amalric alone in the desert to reflect on exactly what the point of this film is and why he’s in it.

Camille and Bond say their goodbyes at the train station. She thanks him for his help, and asks if the dead will sleep now, to which Bond responds that he doesn’t think the dead care about vengeance. Camille says she wishes she could set him free – and so do we, love, so do we; Jesus Christ, we’ve got two more films of this mood. There’s a brief kiss, but nothing sexy, and she walks away.

Kazan, Russia. A happy couple tumble into their flat and switch on the lights. Bond is in the living room, gun in hand, and orders them both to sit down. It turns out the happy man in this couple is Vesper’s ex-boyfriend. The woman works in Canadian Intelligence and is wearing the same necklace Vesper had. Bond tells her she needs to contact her people and tell them to check their seals as they have a leak. She leaves quietly and thanks Bond on the way out. The boyfriend asks Bond to make it quick, but he doesn’t listen and they head out of the flat where Bond hands him over to MI6. M is impressed that he didn’t kill him, and tells Bond that Greene was found dead in the middle of the Bolivian desert with two bullets in his head and a stomach full of motor oil. She tells him she needs him back, and he says he never left, just before walking away and leaving.

There then follows a very hurried gun barrel, as if Bond really needs a piss, and the reassuring message that he will return – hopefully in a film written by proper screenwriters.

TWENTY-THREE

SKYFALL

2012

Skyfall is the Bond film that most aptly conveys the feeling of reaching middle age. Whereas other Bond films concern themselves with globe-trotting, womanising, snappy-dressing and pun-workshopping, Skyfall is very much a warning delivered by a man who’s fallen through the floor of 40 and doesn’t like where he’s landed. There’s no sexy aftershave, cocktails or late nights – it’s now a world of going grey, love handles and three-day hangovers. The Bond we met just two films ago was a virile shagger who ran through walls and took chances. This Bond has the resigned look of a man who knows the horrors of taking a sofa to the dump on a Sunday followed by a trip to IKEA. He’s lost his sparkle and, in terms of a midlife crises, this must be the fastest turnaround since Richard Hammond nearly died in a supersonic rocket-car. While Hammond went in a different direction (decking himself out in beaded wrist bracelets, ten pages of the Gap catalogue and growing a goatee), Bond just became unbearable to be around. Yes, we get it: you feel old and M&S jumpers look more and more enticing each time you pass the window, but could you get back to being an exciting, sexy spy, please?

Once again, there is no gun barrel and we have to content ourselves with a patch of blur instead, which slowly focuses into Daniel Craig’s angry eyes. He wanders into a hotel room with his gun drawn. We see immediately that an agent is ‘down’ (not depressed ‘down’, though that will come later) and Bond requests immediate medical attention for his dying comrade. M, who is on a comm-link, asks Bond if the laptop is secure, and he sees that the hard drive is missing. He races outside and jumps into Eve’s (Naomie Harris) Land Rover, and they chase a black Audi as it speeds through the streets of Istanbul. After a brief shootout at a market, Bond and Patrice (Ola Rapace), the mercenary who stole the hard drive, begin a motorcycle chase along rooftops and over a bridge onto a train. Eve, meanwhile, gives chase in the car while giving M updates and product placement messages. After utilising a digger to rip open the train and jump inside – after which we get a lovely Bond moment of adjusting his cuffs as he lands – Bond catches Patrice on top of the train. They begin to wrestle, with Eve forced to drive on ahead and set up a sniper rifle in order to take down the mercenary.

The train shoots out of the tunnel with Bond and Patrice still grappling on the roof as it careers over the Varda Viaduct. Eve tells M she may have a shot, but warns that it isn’t clean as Bond is in the way and there’s a tunnel ahead so it’s the last chance she’ll have. M tells her to take the shot . . . Bond is hit and he plummets off the train into the water far below, while Patrice and the hard-drive shoot back into a tunnel and escape. Insert very long sad trombone noise here.

Daniel Kleinman is back and shows us what we’ve been missing with this beautiful work of art of an opening credit sequence. Bond is dragged into his own personal abyss to face his demons and his own mortality, very much a theme of the film, and one that is explored in glorious detail. While being very much a classic Kleinman, it also has exquisite shades of Maurice Binder, which should bring a smile to even the most hardened Bond-purist’s face. There’s psychedelia, magic eye and lava lamps raining from the sky, as well as a brief glimpse of the villain, hiding in the past. The song is just perfect, from the deeply ominous opening and closing notes to the sumptuous vocals of Adele bringing the appropriate mood and balance to proceedings. This is the altogether Barry-esque feel that’s been missing from Bond for quite a few films now. A dream of a sequence, which was literally the point.

The Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes), tells M that the Prime Minister is concerned, and not because Bond jumped out of a helicopter with the Queen at the 2012 Olympics, but because that laptop hard drive contained the identities of every NATO agent in the field, a sort of Who’s Who of Our Spies, and it’s not exactly brilliant that it’s out there. He tells M it’s time to think about ‘retirement planning’ and that once her current post is finished, she’ll be awarded with a GCMG, which I think is a type of narcotic. She tells him she’ll leave when the job’s done and that she’s not interested in dignity – and anyone who saw Die Another Day can attest to that.

Bill Tanner gets a call from Q Branch and notifies M that someone is trying to decrypt the hard drive. It’s coming from within MI6 – and not only that, it’s coming from M’s office computer. They try to shut it down, and it sends out a very awkward, mid-nineties computer hacker flash animation telling M to ‘think on her sins’, so we know for sure the hacker probably has a pallid complexion and a goatee beard. They reach Vauxhall Bridge but there’s a blockage in the road, and as M storms out to shout at the policeman, her office within MI6 explodes.

In an isolated beach hut James Bond is snogging a woman against the wall, and relaxing with a cooling bottle of Heineken beer. He’s lost the swagger and cocky sheen of bullish arrogance, and looks haunted by mortality and morose thoughts of the past. He spends his evenings conducting drinking games in beachfront bars with computer-generated scorpions while easily pleased locals watch on and celebrate. It isn’t enough, though; he’s lacking the sense of purpose and drive that alcohol can never replace – unless you work in marketing for a booze company, obviously. As he soaks in an empty bar with his first drink of the day, he sees the news about MI6 on CNN and that feeling comes back.

M returns to her empty house after burying many MI6 colleagues. It’s been a bad day so she pours herself a drink and is startled by a figure lurking in the dark. It’s Bond. She asks him where the hell he’s been, and he tells her he’s been enjoying death, like a teenager who’s just discovered Sylvia Plath. He tells her he’s reporting for duty, but wants to know why she didn’t trust him to finish the job with Patrice. She tells him she made a judgement call in order to save the lives of the agents in the field. She’s a badass, but you can tell she’s pleased to see him, which is sweet. She says that if he’s coming back he’ll need to be debriefed and declared fit for active service, which in old Bond films would mean shagging at least three people, but in the 21st century calls for proper physical and psych evaluation, so it looks like Bond’s penis won’t be needed for a while.

MI6 have taken up new digs under Smithfield Market in London, which Tanner explains were apparently part of Churchill’s bunker, so there’s probably a ton of booze and amphetamines hidden down there. He then decides it’s an amazing idea to debrief Bond while he carries out his active service tests – running on a treadmill, doing sit-ups and chin-ups and generally doing loads of things that look knackering – then wonders why Bond seems disengaged and would prefer to carry on the chat another time. There’s a nice moment when Tanner leaves the room and Bond is able to show how bloody exhausting he’s finding the tests.

After completing his shooting test, where he misses practically everything on the target, he’s booked in for his psych evaluation and takes a seat in an interview room. The test takes the form of word association, which sounds fun, but really isn’t if you’re trying to pretend you’re not suffering from PTSD after being shot off a train on a high bridge – so there’s no way he can say ‘boobs’ or ‘penis’ for a laugh. Though he does call M a bitch as he gets into the swing of it, which is amusing, he’s utterly derailed by the mention of ‘Skyfall’. The colour drains from his face and the evaluator repeats it once again. ‘Done,’ he says as he walks out of the room, which Mallory, watching from behind the glass, notes is fine and not a problem at all. Back in his quarters, Bond cuts into the bullet wound he received from Patrice and pulls out a bullet fragment, which he takes to Tanner to analyse for M’s eyes only.

Mallory asks Bond a significant question as he’s about to leave the room. Why not stay dead? He had the perfect chance to walk away and disappear, just like Elvis did. He points out that spying is a young man’s game and there’s no shame in admitting that. M interjects and tells Mallory that, as she is still in charge and because Bond has passed all his tests – just about – he’s ready. Mallory leaves, but not before accusing her of being sentimental and telling Bond not to cock it all up – which really should have been a penis joke, but isn’t. Tanner comes back with the results of the shrapnel – it’s a depleted uranium shell, hard-to-get military grade, and only used by a select few, with Patrice being one of them. The CIA have informed MI6 that Patrice is going to be in Shanghai in two days’ time. M tells Bond to go there, track him down, and find out who has the list, then find out what his ideal Sunday is, if he likes chicken, what his favourite bedside reading is, and how often he watches the opening titles on Netflix shows. Then, and only then, kill him. As Bond leaves Tanner comments to M that he didn’t know he’d passed the tests, and she confirms he didn’t, so they may as well send any old sod.

The Fighting Temeraire by J.M.W. Turner is a famous painting depicting a distinguished warship that served in the Battle of Trafalgar being sadly taken away for the inevitable decommissioning. Bond sits and contemplates it with grey stubble dusting his chin and a melancholic look in his eyes. While we can all get behind the allegorical sentiment in the scene, it feels a little rich considering just two films ago Bond was a young, virile pup, full of spunk, muscles and bravado, who is now going all Grandad from Bread and preparing for the scrapheap. It makes me wonder if we’re all supposed to forget the invigorating reboot that occurred in Casino Royale, and just pretend that this is the same old Bond we watched for years – which would make a lot more sense in this context. However, before we can read too much into it, he’s joined on the bench in the National Gallery by what looks like one of Dexter Fletcher’s Press Gang, who comments that the painting makes him feel sad. Bond is mildly fazed by this young weirdo, who probably has a flask of weak herbal tea, and makes his excuses, before being called back by his new Quartermaster. Bond tells him he looks too young and has spots, but Q fires back, telling him he can do more damage on his laptop in his pyjamas, before his first cup of Earl Grey, then Bond can do in a year in the field, and I am guessing he’s talking about watching pornography. That Earl Grey line would make me walk out, but Bond is made of sterner stuff and hangs around to find out what gadgets this new Q has for him – but he may as well not have bothered as all he has to offer in terms of innovation is a gun that is set only to recognise his palm print – which old Q invented in Licence to Kill – and a radio transmitter. If I were Bond, I’d be asking what he does all day if he can’t stop hackers getting into M’s computer and invents things that have already been invented by his department. He tells Bond that they don’t really go in for exploding pens any more, and you know what, Q, maybe you should, and maybe you should pay real tribute to the old Q and invest in a pair of gigantic wobbly rubber hands.

Shanghai. (It’s from here on in that Thomas Newman’s score starts to wonderfully sizzle, soar and come to life, making the whole film feel like old Bond, and about bloody time.) Bond has located Patrice and is following him to his next mission through the cool blue streets of Shanghai. They arrive at an office building and Bond watches as Patrice shoots a guard and gets in a lift – which Bond grapples onto as it rises (just like Sean did at the Whyte House in Diamonds Are Forever). When they arrive at the desired floor, the audience gets to bathe in opulent Roger Deakins photography, which is pure visual grandeur, with beautiful flashing neon colour scoring everything as far as the eye can see and reflecting off every glass surface around. In the building opposite, a man is shown into a room by a beautiful woman and two goons. A Modigliani painting is unveiled for him. Patrice then puts a bullet in the back of the man’s head, which doesn’t surprise the woman or the goons, who drag the man’s body away as Bond attacks Patrice. They begin a wonderful fight, silhouetted against a huge digital image of a blue jellyfish. After dropping Patrice out of a window to his death, Bond looks up to see the woman staring back at him, unmoved by what she has just seen. She walks away and Bond searches Patrice’s personal effects, finding a token for a casino in Macau.

As Bond enters the casino by boat, through a gaping neon dragon, Newman’s score echoes the Adele song. For that perfect moment we have what makes Bond so great: the music, the grand setting, the tux. He walks into the casino and notices that they have a CGI komodo dragon. He cashes in the chip and is handed a suitcase with four million euros in it, which will keep him in chips and mayonnaise for a while. The woman he saw in the previous scene then appears and introduces herself as Sévérine (Bérénice Marlohe). He tells her he wants to meet her employer, which fills her with fear. This can mean only one thing: she works for Sports Direct. She tells him he knows nothing of fear as she’s spent many days stacking Lonsdale trainers and Slazenger tracksuits into those giant mugs. He reassures her by telling her he can kill her boss if he gets to him, which she believes. She tells him that when she leaves the guards will try to kill him, but if he survives, she’s on a boat called the Chimera in the North Harbour, and to bring a bottle and some dip. The guards attack, and as the fight progresses, Bond and the final guard fall down into the dragon pit, where the guard tries to shoot Bond with his own gun. That fails because it doesn’t recognise his palm print. This guard is then attacked by a dragon and pulled screaming into the darkness. Another dragon comes running out to join the frenzy, and in a reference to Live and Let Die, Bond stands on its back to climb his way out of danger.

Sévérine abandons hope of Bond joining her on the boat and takes a shower, only to be immediately joined by a naked 007, who is assuming a lot as she may just have wanted to be friends. As morning breaks, the Chimera heads towards an island and Bond joins Sévérine on the deck where they take turns looking apprehensive and moody. The island itself is a ghost town and appears to have been abandoned for many, many years, though I bet it’s still got a fully functioning branch of Costa and a tattoo parlour.

Bond is escorted off the boat by armed guards and to led a room full of stripped-down computers (the kind of room a robot would probably find very sexy), where he’s tied to a chair. Suddenly, a lift cranks into life and begins to descend, reaching the ground floor with a thud. The doors open and out walks Silva (Javier Bardem), who introduces himself and tells a very long story about cannibal rats in a barrel as a form of allegory about what M has done to them both. Silva, who looks like a nightclub owner from Rotherham in 1988, turns out to have worked for M in Hong Kong from 1986 to 1997, and has an issue with her methods while also seeming to have disturbing mother fantasies about her. He tells Bond that M lied to him, and will always lie to him, which he denies, so Silva reads him the real results of the psych evaluation, which confirm he failed and strongly suggest he be suspended from duty (and undoubtedly report that he’s riddled with every sexually transmitted disease known to science). Silva tells him they are the last two rats and they will either have to eat each other or eat the world (I’m not even going to begin to analyse this). During his playful speech he caresses Bond’s legs, suggesting that there’s a first time for everything, which Bond counters by telling him this isn’t his first time – perhaps an allusion to what Sean’s Bond and Bernard Lee’s M got up to on that trip to Tokyo mentioned in From Russia with Love.

Silva tells Bond he has the world at his fingertips, and by using computers he can do anything he wants, like destabilising the markets, rigging elections, making gifs and putting together a more convincing paragliding sequence for Die Another Day. All he has to do is point and click, but Bond isn’t interested and essentially calls him a nerd. So Silva takes him outside to show him a tied-up Sévérine and forces him to shoot a glass of Scotch from her head to prove he still has his skills, in much the same way Paul Daniels would if you wanted to be in Wizbit. Bond misses, so Silva steps in and kills her, but the smile is soon wiped from his face when Bond kills all his men and brings a fleet of helicopters down to pick them up via his radio transmitter.

M walks into the over-elaborate room containing the single glass box holding Silva – very Hannibal Lecter – and he tells her that he was kept in a room with no air for five months and tortured – presumably as a Radio 1 DJ. He’s shaken by her lack of remorse and tells her she was the one who betrayed him, and after all the torture he tried to kill himself with a cyanide capsule, but it didn’t work; instead it melted his face and burned out his insides. There’s a gruesome – yet nicely executed – moment when Silva removes his dentures to show his blackened, burned mouth and collapsed cheekbone. Unmoved, M tells Bond that Silva’s real name is Tiago Rodriguez and that he was a brilliant agent, but had started acting beyond his brief and hacked the Chinese. With the handover of Hong Kong coming up, she gave him to the Chinese in exchange for six captured agents and a peaceful transition.

Bond heads down to the lab, where Q is working on getting inside Silva’s computer. Silva has installed fail-safe programmes that will delete the hard drive if certain files are accessed, but Bond’s in luck as Q apparently invented them all, which definitely sounds like a lie. Inside the computer is an ‘obfuscated code’ to conceal the true purpose of something, and each time Q tries to gain access it changes. Q is constantly typing, of course, because that’s how computers work in the 21st century, and while he’s clanking away, Bond spots the word ‘Granborough’ within the code. It’s an old tube station that’s been closed for years. He tells Q to ‘use that as a key’, which at this point seems like they are trying to out-bullshit one another. Amazingly, the code unravels to reveal a subterranean map of London, and all the doors in the lab begin to open, which utterly perplexes Q, the cleverest man in the room who invented all the fail-safe programmes. Moments later, however, Q realises Silva’s computer has hacked into their system because he plugged it into their network – and Q realises he could probably use an exploding pen about now. If the doors are opening there they’re presumably opening everywhere – including Silva’s Hannibal Lecter cell.

Bond races out of the room and discovers that Silva has gone into the tunnels below, so he gives chase and ends up in the underground. Q tells him that this escape must have been years in the planning and that he wanted to be captured, just like the Joker in The Dark Knight and Loki in The Avengers. Silva boards a tube train dressed as a policeman and Bond knows exactly where he’s going: he’s heading for M, who is at an inquest regarding the exposed agents. Bond catches Silva just as he’s climbing a ladder to escape from a tunnel beneath Embankment. He pays back Bond’s line about the radio from earlier and triggers an explosion, which is quickly followed by a tube train ploughing through the hole in the wall. Rest assured, he had hours’ worth of small-talk lined up in case there were the inevitable signalling-fault delays.

At the inquest, M is wrapping things up by reading a piece of her late husband’s favourite poem, and oh, it’s so unfortunate that her late husband wasn’t a fan of ‘Rapper’s Delight’, as I would pay good money to hear Dench read that out. Suddenly, Silva bursts in with his men and starts shooting everyone, including Mallory, who takes a bullet to the shoulder. Bond arrives just in time to shoot out the fire extinguishers, blinding the room, and gets M out of there.

Bond opens the doors to a lock-up and walks inside. As the light flickers on, M is bemused by the sight of the iconic 1964 Aston Martin DB5 – and an alarming number of wooden crates and tubing. The mind boggles as to how many horrendous items are stored in here. From instruments of pleasure to actual corpses, this lock-up has probably seen it all. Bond’s plan is to swap cars – becauese company cars ‘have trackers’ and leave a trail of ‘digital breadcrumbs’ that only Silva can follow. As they leave, M comments that the car isn’t very comfortable, so he threatens her with the ejector-seat switch in the gear stick, cementing the theory that as this is Bond’s original car from Goldfinger. This his ‘reboot’ plot has gone right out of the window. She asks where they’re going and he tells her ‘back in time, somewhere we’ll have the advantage’, which can only mean one place: Scotland.

Skyfall Lodge, Bond’s childhood home, sits isolated in a vast Highland glen, nestled peacefully by a loch – the name ‘Skyfall’, of course, taken from Bond’s father, Chicken Little. Inside, it’s haunted by sheets, dust, packing crates and bleak emptiness, and as Bond takes a look around, Kincade (Albert Finney) steps out of the shadows looking like something from Fraggle Rock and brandishing a shotgun to welcome him home. Kincade has been a gamekeeper at the house since Bond was a boy, and has presumably spent the last 30 years living there on his own, eating lobster in his pants and having occasional sexy hot-tub parties. He tells Bond that the house is now sold, including all the guns in the gun room (apart from his dad’s hunting rifle), the hot-tubs, lobster tanks, pinball tables, glitterball and karaoke machine. Bond tells him some men are coming to kill them, so they have to kill them first, and thus begins the Home Alone Kevin McCallister battle plan for beating Silva, by heating up the doorknobs, icing the stairs and readying some cans of paint on strings.

After the first wave of Silva’s men are taken care of without much fuss, Bond wonders where Silva could be as he’s not among the dead, but he soon finds out as a giant helicopter arrives playing ‘Boom Boom’ by The Animals and riddles the house with heavy machine gunfire. Bond sends Kincade and M through a secret tunnel to a chapel on the estate as Silva lands in the chopper and begins chucking grenades into the house, turning it into an inferno. Bond has a plan of his own, though, and after watching Silva destroy his beautiful car, he sets up some gas canisters on a fuse to create a massive explosion in the house and then leaves via the secret tunnel. When the house goes up it takes the helicopter with it, causing it to crash into the house, completely destroying it in a giant ball of fire. So that’ll be nice for the people who have just bought their lovely wee place in the Highlands.

As the Skyfall Lodge burns and the rubble settles, Silva rises to his feet and tells his men to make sure Bond is dead. He’s going after a distant torch flickering in the darkness, which may well be dogging-related. Silva staggers inside the chapel and finds that M is hurt, a bullet from the home invasion having hit her. But try as he might, he just can’t shoot her, so he puts a gun to her head and rests his against hers, telling her only she can free them both. However, before he can carry on with this Sunday Night at the Insane Palladium variety show, Bond arrives to plunge a knife deep into his back. ‘Last rat standing,’ he says as Silva flops to the floor, dead.

Bond cradles M as she dies in his arms and tells him she at least got one thing right, which when you consider how many people have died at Bond’s hands and how many lives he’s wrecked, isn’t saying much for her record. He must be wondering, as her last breath leaves her body, whether it was such a good idea to take her all the way to the Scottish Highlands with him, and that maybe he should have dropped her off at a Premier Inn in Carlisle when they stopped for petrol. Kincade looks on mournfully and removes his hat, which viewers may note he didn’t do for Silva, the disrespectful old git.

As Bond stands on a roof staring manfully over London, Eve joins him to take in the view. She tells him she’s not cut out for fieldwork, and that M left him her awful bulldog ornament. It’s a reminder to Bond not to take a desk-job. He realises they have never been formally introduced, and Eve reveals her full name is ‘Eve, Eve Moneypenny’, so Bond intimates that he’d like to have sex with her one day, and this relationship is coming along beautifully. Tanner appears from M’s office and tells Bond he’s ready to see him now. He walks in and greets Mallory, the new M, who slaps a top-secret mission file on the desk and asks Bond if he’s ready to get back to work. Bond says he is, with pleasure.

Let’s hope he now settles down to being a proper secret agent and doesn’t go rogue while investigating a personal mission again. Un-bloody-likely.

TWENTY-FOUR

SPECTRE

2015

The gun barrel is back where it belongs! Praise the Broccoli! While it’s not the best, and feels a bit rushed and fed-up, it’s great to see it up front again, not tucked away at the end like an embarrassing uncle you keep in the kitchen at parties in case he tells one of his racist anecdotes.

Black screen. So black it requires a Spinal Tap commentary about how black it is. An ominous Hans Zimmer-esque sub-boom rings out, and a caption rolls across darkness: ‘The dead are alive.’ Words that perfectly summarise Spectre, as the entire project feels like it’s been made by lots of people who would rather be dead than anywhere near it. Every area where Bond films have shone in the past is dull, blunt and listless here. Rather than use the opportunity presented at the end of Skyfall of a new start, this HAUNTED BY HIS PAST motif continues to self-harm its way through the franchise, and the gloriously refreshing Casino Royale feels a very long time ago, with Craig now resembling a sort of Queen Victoria of Bond. He’s occupied the throne for the longest time, but it doesn’t look like he’s enjoying it any more. No longer amused, no longer taking pleasure, his Bond is in a semi-permanent state of mourning for a long-dead loved one. As an audience we’ve been supportive, but it’s also become hard to watch him get like this.

Mexico City on the Day of the Dead is awash with revellers dressed as zombies, witches, goblins and skeletons. The streets are decked with skulls, dead flowers and echoes of the deceased, exactly as I imagine Tim Burton’s house to be on any regular day of the week. A skeleton in a top hat and his female companion stand on a street corner and watch a masked man in a white suit and mask elegantly wander past. They turn and make their way back to their hotel, carefully tracked by a Steadicam operator, and in the lift she whispers in his ear and produces a key from her boobs, in the way I imagine Paul Daniels might have done at saucy parties back in the day.

The woman leads the skeleton man into her hotel room and they begin to remove their masks. Erotically. Surprise, surprise, the skeleton man is James Bond, and as he throws his top hat onto the bed (giving off Live and Let Die flashbacks) they begin to passionately kiss. As she turns away to lie suggestively on the bed, he’s already out of costume and about to climb out of the window, holding a gun. He tells her he won’t be long, but she doesn’t look like she believes him. Say what you will about how it’s not actually all one shot, and about how some green-screen elements are more evident than others, it’s still a perfectly planned and executed set of shots to get him onto the rooftop and his eventual arrival at the ledge.

He observes, with gun poised and laser-sight acting as a microphone allowing him to listen in on their conversation, as the man in the white suit, Marco Sciarra (Alessandro Cremona), takes delivery of a suitcase full of explosives that will be used to blow up a stadium. Sciarra mentions to the other men that he will later visit ‘The Pale King’, a moniker that sounds more like a pint of fruity ale than an actual person, and they decide to celebrate their business transaction with a chink of their glasses of booze. However, Sciarra’s cigarette smoke reveals Bond’s gun’s blue laser-sight, and they spot him on the roof opposite. As they exchange shots, Bond accidentally hits the suitcase, which leads to a massive explosion that presumably kills dozens of people and leads to the CGI buildings collapsing around him. He wanders out into the street as burned paper rains down and, as luck would have it, Sciarra emerges from the rubble in front of him, in a moment that is entirely reminiscent of Brian from Life of Brian emerging from the crashed spacecraft to be told that he was a ‘lucky bastard’. A chase through the streets ensues, and Sciarra phones for a helicopter to come and pick him up. As it lands and he boards, Bond intercepts and a fight breaks out inside. During the scuffle, Bond pulls off Sciarra’s ring, which sounds worse than it is, and kicks both he and the pilot out of the doors. Once the chopper is steadied, Bond considers the ring in his hand. It’s bright silver, smeared with blood, and bang in the middle is a picture of an octopus.

The opening credits arrive and they are deeply troubling. It’s like someone built a glitter-bomb box full of octopus porn and fire gifs, and set them all off at once. It’s topless Daniel Craig being wrapped in slimy tentacles, while crappy orange and grey hues dance around behind him. And there’s Vesper AGAIN, and Silva, and Le Chiffre, and Judi Dench’s M. Hmm. It’s no Maurice Binder.

London. M is livid with Bond. He went to Mexico with no authority and blew up half a block. Bond explains that it could have been a whole stadium, but M isn’t interested. There has been a merger with MI5 and the Ministry of Defence are just itching for the chance to scrap the whole 00 programme for ever. He asks Bond why he was in Mexico, and Bond tries to claim that he was just on holiday when he stumbled on an international incident. M tells him he’s officially grounded. Just then, Max Denbigh aka ‘C’ wanders in (Andrew Scott), he’s the head of the new ‘Joint Security Service’. After some arch-browed exposition, C promises them both that he will revolutionise the intelligence service.

Moneypenny arrives at Bond’s flat – which looks like an early nineties Habitat advert, with nothing on the walls, bare floors and minimal furniture – with the rest of his personal effects from Skyfall. She tells him the word at work is that he went too far in Mexico and that he’s finished. She, though, doesn’t think that, she thinks he’s got a secret that he can’t share as he doesn’t trust anyone. So he plays her a video, which is a message recorded by M (the dead one, not Mallory) telling him that if anything happens to her he’s to find a man called Marco Sciarra and kill him, and to make sure he doesn’t miss the funeral. Now, does she mean her funeral or Sciarra’s? I am guessing Bond had to go to both just in case, which must have been logistically difficult. Turns out she meant Sciarra’s, and it’s three days away in Rome, which Mallory will not be happy about as Bond’s supposed to be grounded. Bond asks Moneypenny to be his mole inside MI6 and find out all she can about the Pale King, and which pubs serve it.

‘Poor old girl, rigged for demolition in a week,’ says Bill Tanner, pointing at the old MI6 building that is still half destroyed from Silva’s bomb in Skyfall. He and Bond are gliding along the Thames on a speedboat, and Tanner then shows Bond the ‘new centre for national security’. The giant fancy skyscraper, C’s new digs, somehow appeared while Bond was in Mexico, leading to the question of just how long he was there – years? – and just how quickly can they build massive skyscrapers these days? C, it turns out, is no fan of the 00 programme and wants to replace them with all with soulless drones, just like that Jeremy Renner Bourne film. He will be making a speech in three days’ time at a security conference in Tokyo to decide the new world order, to try to combine the intelligence streams on nine countries. (Doesn’t anyone listen to Dr Egon Spengler any more?)

Q has exciting news about some cutting-edge technology. No, it’s not a sex-spying robot dog, or an aquatic crocodile mask, or even a plane that can fly out of a pretend horse’s arse, but ‘smart blood’, which is some sort of nano-technology. That doesn’t mean it reads People’s Friend and does all the knitting; in actual fact it’s microchips that Q injects into Bond’s bloodstream, allowing Q to track his movements and monitor his vital signs from anywhere on the planet. This has been installed on the explicit orders of M, to avoid another Mexico City incident. Q then tells Bond he has something really exciting to show him: a brand-new Aston Martin DB10. But ever the smartarse, Q tells him that since he got into trouble, it’s been assigned to 009, so he gives Bond a new watch instead. Bond then tells Q to lose him for 48 hours or he’ll murder all his cats with hammers before stealing the DB10 and driving to Rome.

It’s Sciarra’s funeral, and, surprisingly, there are quite a few people there, including Bond who is standing at the back, gloating and getting a good look at his widow, Lucia (played by a woefully underused Monica Bellucci). She asks Bond if he knew her husband and he tells her he did, but all too briefly, obviously taking pains not to mention that he threw him out of a helicopter and murdered him. While they are chatting, they realise they are being watched by guards, so Lucia leaves, and Bond cocks his head while playfully waving at them. There’s a mild streak of silliness running through Craig’s performance in this film; he seems to be having fun with it, which is possibly some form of demob happiness knowing it was to be his last. Whatever the reason, it’s something that’s very good to see.

Lucia returns to her mansion and rattles around the empty house. She wanders into a room, pours a drink and puts on a very fitting piece of music, Vivaldi’s ‘Nisi Dominus’, which also has the title ‘Cum Dederit’, Bond’s Tinder profile name. She walks into the garden to take in the night air and readies herself for two hitmen standing in the shadows who are about to kill her. She closes her eyes and braces herself for the bullets, but when they come, the two killers fall to the ground instead of her. Bond fixes a drink and confesses that he murdered her husband, but as he was an assassin she won’t take it personally, and it should cut to Sciarra in Hell being probed with a hot spike saying, ‘I do, actually.’ Bond then seduces Lucia and she tells him that the organisation her husband worked for will meet tonight to choose a replacement, kind of like when the BBC execs choose a new Dr Who.

Bond arrives at the Palazzo Cardenza for the highly secretive meeting of the terrorist Stonecutters, and is able to walk right in as he has the octopus ring he stole from Sciarra. He takes his position on the balcony alongside a host of sinister baddies as they watch a cabal of sinister senior baddies conduct a meeting below, which looks like the worst sports event ever created, a kind of ‘International Boardroom Meeting: Live from The Crucible’. The room falls silent as the leader of the room enters and takes his seat, and it’s sadly not Lord Sugar, but instead a mystery man in the shadows. A member of the board suggests that the Pale King needs to be whacked, and that they will need to replace Sciarra, so a man named Guerra volunteers, but is soon murdered by the mysterious Mr Hinx (Dave Bautista), who has silver thumbnails, so is probably really into glam-metal, and Hinx assumes Sciarra’s place.

The mysterious leader of the board suddenly begins speaking and welcomes Bond to the meeting, saying, ‘It’s been a long time, but finally here we are. What took you so long?’ His name is Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz) and he ominously turns to Bond and begins saying ‘cuckoo’ in a voice that may lead to a small bird coming out of his mouth on a stick. Bond leaps through a window and down to his car to begin a chase with Mr Hinx through a totally desolate Rome – save for one man who must be the guy who cleans the entire city alone at night while everyone’s asleep. During the chase Bond phones Moneypenny, who tells him that the Pale King isn’t a kind of fruity ale at all, but is actually his old friend Mr White, though this doesn’t explain why they gave him such a shit name. Bond tells her to run a check on Franz Oberhauser, to check it’s not a Franz Ferdinand tribute band.

Bond has traced the Pale King to a lakeside cabin in Austria. The door is unlocked and there are signs of life, but it looks very much like a teenager’s bedroom, with dust, dirty plates and clothes strewn everywhere. He finds a secret door and goes down some stairs into a basement where he finds Mr White very much enjoying his Ted Kaczynski Unabomber phase. Bond tells him his name came up at a meeting in Rome, and before he gets excited too about buying a Vespa, it’s probably not a good thing. White confirms as much and tells Bond he’s already been poisoned and will be dead in a few weeks. Bond tells him that since he’s a dying man anyway, he should tell him where he can find his ex-boss. White tells him he’s everywhere: he’s sitting at his desk, kissing his lover, eating supper with his family, hoovering his hallway, watching Netflix, completing all his games, changing the name of all his music files so that iTunes gets confused – basically, pure evil stuff. Bond asks who White’s protecting with his silence, and soon figures out he has a daughter. Bond tells him that he can protect her and offers Whyte his gun so he can go out in style, rather than die a slow death from the poison. Whyte relents and tells Bond where she is and that she can lead him to ‘L’Americain’.

C and M, which sounds like a clothing shop for middle-aged gents, meet in the new Centre for National Security, and C tells M that he’s lost control of his agents. He plays a recording of the call between Moneypenny and Bond from Rome, which surprises M as this means C’s listening in to MI6 agents. C readily admits this, telling M they’re listening to everyone. M is shook.

The Hoffler Klinik, a snowy mountaintop health and wellness clinic, is tucked away in the Austrian Alps. Bond is there to see Dr Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) for a psychological evaluation. After many questions about his personal life it’s probably safe to conclude he’s a serial killer, and he basically confirms it by telling her that her father is dead and that he made a deal with him to protect her, and find L’Americain. She puts the brakes on the interview immediately and tells him to leave before she calls security. Bond heads to the bar for a strong drink, but is dealt the bad news that they don’t serve alcohol, and to compound his awful day, Q turns up and orders a ‘prolytic digestive enzyme shake’, making him the most punchable character in film history. He tells Bond that Oberhauser is dead, and has been for 20 years, but Bond knows what he saw. Q tells him it’s time to come back in and do this through official channels, or his and Moneypenny’s careers are over, but Bond asks him to do one last thing and analyse his octopus ring. Just then, Madeleine is bundled into the back of a car by Hinx and his men and driven away, so Bond gives chase in an aeroplane, which begins a lovely chase down a mountain, which would be strongly improved by the use of any Bond theme whatsoever, however, the new films seem embarrassed by it for some reason. The chase ends in a huge crash and Bond escapes with Swann, who’s very annoyed that he brought Hinx and his men to her.

In Q’s hotel room, he tells them he’s analysed the ring and it proves that Oberhauser is still alive via DNA, and that Le Chiffre, Quantum, Sciarra and Silva are all in it as well, somehow. Via DNA? If ever there was a time for Mr DNA from Jurassic Park to return and explain just what the fuck is happening, it’s now. (I’d even accept the Microsoft Office Assistant.) Madeleine tells them the organisation is called Spectre and L’Americain is not a person, but a hotel in Tangier.

Swann and Bond check into the hotel room. She tells him this is where her parents spent their wedding night and returned every year – so it’s essentially a caravan in Dorset. After ransacking the room and finding nothing, they decide to get drunk. She then tells him to keep guard while she sleeps and if he comes anywhere near her she’ll kill him. As night falls, Bond is woken by a mouse and he watches as it runs through a tiny hole in a wall, leading him to find a secret room by punching his way through the plaster wall. The room is full of haunted pasts, photos and VHS tapes – essentially the epicentre of Craig’s Bond. They find an ancient computer, fire it up – somehow not having to wait for it to perform 384 updates – and enter some coordinates they find on a pinned note that lead to Oberhauser’s base in the middle of the desert. This means White wants Bond to finish the job, which he’s all too happy to do, with Swann insisting on coming with him.

M and Moneypenny arrive at a security meeting to find it has already concluded. C announces that the Nine Eyes programme, which unites the security agencies of nine major international powers, is now official and that the Home Secretary agrees with him that the 00 programme should be shut down with immediate effect. M tells him it’s not over and that he’s a cocky bastard, which shouldn’t be taken as a compliment, like when someone tells you you’re a proper arsehole.

Bond and Swann meet for dinner in their evening wear in the dining car of a train crossing the desert, and order two dirty vodka Martinis, which I can only assume means the waiter does something unspeakable in it. She asks Bond if he’s ever thought about stopping, and what would happen if he did, and for a moment he appears to think about it, probably to wonder if she means spying or the relentless sex. Before they can get too deep in conversation, however, Bond spots a giant shape heading towards them in the reflection of the cocktail shaker as Hinx arrives to beat the shit out of him, throwing him around the desolated train carriages, through walls, toilets and kitchens, with barely a soul noticing. Before he can throw Bond off the train, Swann shoots Hinx in the arm and, in the chaos, Bond attaches a rope round Hinx’s neck that pulls him out of the train to his death. ‘What shall we do now?’ Swann asks as they eye the open cargo door and catch their breath, and Bond suggests the only thing he knows: sex.

The following morning, they get off the train at a station in the middle of a desert, and Bond warns that they may have a long wait for transport, but before too long a Rolls-Royce arrives to pick them up and take them to Oberhauser. His sprawling base is set within a giant meteor crater, and as the car enters they are met by a man who looks uncannily like Dennis Nilsen. He welcomes them to Oberhauser’s wacky funhouse and tells them it’s a real crazy show where anything goes, so they had better get some rest before they all meet later.

They’re taken into a dark room with a giant black rock centrepiece, which looks like the last of the California Raisins band, stuffed for posterity, with its Motown secrets preserved for eternity. Oberhauser enters and tells them they can touch it if they like (and I get the impression he’s said that before), and that it’s the meteorite that made the crater they’re standing in. He then uses it to form the basis for an allegory about choosing the right moment to strike after lying dormant for years. He tells them he’s so excited to see them both and he’s been looking forward to it for ages.

We’ve only known Oberhauser for seconds, but we can already tell that he is pure evil as he wears no socks and tiny black slipons. He gives them a brief tour of the facility and then asks Bond why he came there, as the 00 programme is now officially finished, so why bother? Bond tells him that he came all this way to kill him, which Oberhauser finds amusing. He reveals the scope of his intelligence and that C is working for him to get him the access he needs to every major security agency on the planet, before then revealing that he was behind it all – ‘the author of all your pain’. Every mission Bond’s ever taken on, everything that’s gone wrong in his life, every time he’s stubbed his toe, spilled his milk, shat his pants, had a bad haircut . . . it was all Oberhauser, the architect of his misery. He then decides to lighten the mood by showing a video of Mr White killing himself, but fails to put any jaunty music under it, so it can’t be memeable. Bond prevents poor Madeleine from seeing her dad die, but is knocked out for his troubles.

He awakes strapped into an elaborate torture chair – the real torture is having to look at Oberhauser’s bare feet in those dainty loafers. Bond is to have a drill put into his head, seemingly for a laugh, to deprive him of his sight, hearing and balance, and leave him with a comedy accent. Madeleine, who is next to Oberhauser under the watch of his guards, asks why he’s doing it, and he explains that his father raised James after his parents died, and he liked James more – probably because he’s not a weird bell-end – so he killed his father, and once again he calls Bond a ‘cuckoo’ in a funny voice. Bond laughs drily and asks if he knows any other bird noises, and Oberhauser tells him that his name died 20 years ago, and he is now Ernst Stavro Blofeld – named after his mother, perhaps. This is meant to be an exciting moment to make everyone gasp, but seeing as it’s utterly unearned and has no significance in this universe, it falls flat on its face in much the same way as the ‘I am Khan’ moment in Star Trek: Into Darkness.

Blofeld begins the torture, drilling into Bond’s skull, and tells Madeleine that when he’s finished, Bond won’t recognise her. He will die not knowing who she is. As the drilling takes a break, she rushes to Bond’s side to see if he’s all right, and to tell him she loves him, which feels like a bit much. Bond opens his eyes, whispers to her that his watch is a bomb and tells her to throw it at Blofeld. She does, and it blows Blofeld and his guards across the room. She unlocks Bond from the torture chair and they escape with minimum fuss, with Bond able to pick off various guards with astonishing accuracy even after having his head drilled, before setting a Guinness world record for the world’s largest film stunt explosion ever captured on screen – which somehow manages to feel a bit anti-climactic.

Back in London, M arrives at Hildebrand Prints and Rarities (a nice Fleming in-joke there, as ‘The Hildebrand Rarity’ was one of five short stories he wrote in the book For Your Eyes Only), a safehouse, with Tanner, Eve and Q – aka The Groovy Gang – to meet up with Bond and Swann to hear Bond’s plan. He tells M that Blofeld is dead, and at midnight C will have control of a global surveillance system so they will need to stop him. As they leave for the mission, Madeleine tells them she can’t go with them as she doesn’t want this life. She wishes Bond good luck and says goodbye, which she could definitely have done before they travelled all the way to London first class.

Bond and the Groovy Gang head for C, but M’s car is hijacked by some mysterious goons and Bond is snatched while he’s unconscious. He wakes up in the old MI6 building, where Blofeld has made a beautiful Bond-themed GCSE art exhibition, like a teenager who’s based their entire portfolio around One Direction.

C bursts into his office telling his men on the phone that they need to find M as they need both him and Bond dead. He’s infuriated all the more when he finds he’s locked out of his own computer. M appears and tells C that Q has locked him out, and that he’s going to bring him in for having poor taste in friends, which is how they got Gazza. C tells him the world is full of chaos because of spineless pen-pushing politicians like him, and he’s just doing what needs to be done. C pulls a gun and throws out a zinger that M stands for ‘moron’. The gun clicks as it’s emptied of bullets. ‘Now we know what “C” stands for,’ M says, with the whole world willing him on to say it. However, he goes with ‘careless’, while revealing he has the bullets, and the whole world sighs, causing a hurricane in the middle of the Atlantic.

Bond, meanwhile, has discovered that Blofeld is essentially Jed Maxwell from I’m Alan Partridge, as he’s stuck pictures of him on everything. Bond follows the trail of cut-out photos, string and sticky-back plastic until he reaches the man himself standing behind bulletproof glass. He’s now sporting a massive cut in his face, and a milky eye, which he claims doesn’t hurt, but it looks like it might sting a bit. He tells Bond the building is rigged to demolish in three minutes and that he has hidden Swann somewhere within it. He tells Bond he has a choice: instead of saving her he could just walk away and live with the pain, which isn’t much of a suggestion, really. Bond races around the empty building, shouting her name like Jack at the end of Titanic, as Blofeld flies off in a helicopter.

As they watch Q crack the code, C tells M he doesn’t matter any more, and M mildly agrees with him, though is at pains to point out that something should still matter – but before he can go on a rant about how pubs no longer use proper plates, C makes a grab for M’s gun, and in the wrestle for control is sent tumbling off a ledge to his death. Now, that was careless.

Blofeld looks on with Dennis Nilsen from within his chopper as Bond finds Swann literally tied up in red tape, which was definitely a dig at bureaucracy and a hard-hitting commentary on how the regulators have gone mad. Bond releases her and the pair jump to safety just as the building explodes and collapses in a giant mound of smoke and rubble. As Blofeld’s chopper swings away to leave, a speedboat shoots out from under the wreckage with Bond and Swann on board to give chase. While Blofeld priggishly sits inside the chopper and contemplates if he should do his next art project on the Jonas Brothers, Bond’s bullet hits the engine and sends smoke and flames pouring out of it, and forcing an emergency landing on Westminster Bridge. Blofeld kicks his way clear of the wreckage and crawls away from the flames only to be greeted by Bond. ‘Finish it,’ Blofeld says, as Bond draws his gun – and I am hoping he means his life – but Bond won’t. He pops the bullets out and puts the gun away, obviously having had enough of shooting people in the face. He looks one way on the bridge to see M, and the other to see Madeleine. Which direction will his life take? He chooses her, and they walk away together, obviously delighted that they don’t have to answer any questions or fill out any paperwork. Blofeld looks on while lying on his belly looking really angry, possibly coming to the conclusion that he’s wasted his entire life.

The next day, Q is working alone in his lab when he receives a surprise visit from Bond, who tells him he needs one more thing from him. They insinuate it’s the car, but you can be sure it’s some sort of very special and confidential nano-bot-based biometric smart sex toy that Q’s been working on for Bond after hours.

As Bond starts the engine to the fully restored 1964 Aston Martin DB5, he looks over to the passenger seat – and there’s Madeleine. They both smile as they drive away to early retirement.

Daniel Craig and the rest of the world thought this was his farewell from the James Bond franchise. But after years of gentle persuasion from Barbara Broccoli (and an eye-watering amount of cash), he agreed to return in No Time to Die. And when he does, so shall we.

Our first glimpse of Bond, playing chemin de fer in Le Cercle at Les Ambassadeurs Club in Dr. No. MGM Studios/Getty Images

Sean Connery and the first (and probably most iconic) Bond Girl, Ursula Andress (Honey Ryder), pose for a promotional still for Dr. No. MGM Studios/Getty Images

Canadian actor Joseph Wiseman playing ‘Chinese’ villain Dr. Julius No. Popperfoto/Getty Images

Bernard Lee (here pictured with Lois Maxwell’s Miss Moneypenny in From Russia with Love) played the role of M brilliantly for eleven movies. Always cantankerous when dealing with Bond, he could also be touchingly affectionate. Sportsphoto/Alamy

Bond, Tatiana Romanova (Daniela Bianchi) and Donald ‘Red’ Grant (Robert Shaw) prepare for the shocking faux pas of having red wine served with fish in From Russia with Love. United Artist/Getty Images

Shirley Eaton, playing Jill Masterson, covered in gold paint on the set of Goldfinger. Popperfoto/Getty Images

Lois Maxwell, the wonderful Miss Moneypenny, with Sean Connery during the filming of Dr. No. Collection Christophel/Alamy Stock Photo

See, I told you his hands were massive! Desmond Llewelyn shows off one of his new gadgets to Bond in A View to a Kill. Sportsphoto/Alamy

Jetpack! Bond flies to his car in Thunderball. United Artists/Getty Images

Donald Pleasence as Bond’s arch enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld on the set of You Only Live Twice. Express Newspapers/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Mr and Mrs James Bond. George Lazenby, in his one appearance as Bond, with Diana Rigg (the Contessa di Vincenzo) in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

Blofeld (Charles Gray) checks out the ‘plastic transformation’ process that allows his scientists to create doppelgängers of himself in Diamonds Are Forever. Collection Christophel/RnB © Eon Productions/Danjaq/Alamy

Roger Moore makes his debut as Bond in Live and Let Die with (from left to right) Julius Harris (Tee Hee), Jane Seymour (Solitaire), Geoffrey Holder (Baron Samedi), Yaphet Kotto (Kananga) and Earl Jolly Brown (Whisper). Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

The masters at work: Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli and Harry Saltzman with Roger Moore on the set of Live and Let Die. AF Archive/Alamy

Bond and the three-nippled assassin Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee) prepare for a duel in The Man with the Golden Gun. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

Jaws (Richard Kiel) chomps through a plank of wood during a fight with 007 on a train in The Spy Who Loved Me. United Artist/Getty Images

Bond goes to space (of course he does, space is COOL) in Moonraker. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

Looking more like her uncle than her sexy spy lover, Bond checks out Melina Havelock’s (Carole Bouquet) crossbow in For Your Eyes Only. John Bryson/Sygma via Getty Images

Bond disguises himself as a clown in the ridiculous dénouement of Octopussy. AF Archive/Alamy

Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) and May Day (Grace Jones) hold Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts) and Bond at gunpoint in A View to a Kill. AF Archive/Alamy

There’s a new man in town: Timothy Dalton takes on the role of Bond in The Living Daylights, while Maryam d’Abo (playing Kara Milovy) tries to act cool after apparently tripping over. Sportsphoto/Alamy

Dalton takes on the threat of drugs in Licence to Kill. Here Dario (Benicio Del Toro) holds Bond at gunpoint while Franz Sanchez (Robert Davi) examines the goods in his lab. AF archive/Alamy

Q aims to impress the latest incarnation of Bond (Pierce Brosnan) with his plaster cast gun in Goldeneye. Frank Trapper/Alamy

Bond and Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) assemble some kit to take on ruthless media mogul Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) in Tomorrow Never Dies. United Archives GmbH/Alamy

Anarchist Renard (Robert Carlyle) mid-gun battle with Bond as he steals weapons-grade plutonium from a Russian missile base in Kazakhstan in The World Is Not Enough. PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy

Zao (Rick Yune) proudly shows off his diamond-studded face while torturing Jinx Johnson (Halle Berry) in Die Another Day. AF Archive/Alamy

The first blond Bond (as if anyone cares), Daniel Craig, takes on Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) at poker in Casino Royale. Collection Christophel/Alamy

Looking hot. Bond and Camille (Olga Kurylenko) wander lost through the desert, much like the production of this entire film – Quantum of Solace. Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

M(ummy) issues – Judi Dench enjoys her final full outing in the franchise with an angst-ridden Bond in Skyfall. Francois Duhamel/©Columbia Pictures/Everett/Alamy

The author of all our pain. Christoph Waltz assumes the role of the iconic baddie Blofeld in Spectre. WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy