Amazon Should Learn From The Most Mediocre Bond Movie
The world is a little too much.
It’s a long-running joke that a franchise starved for ideas should go to space, but that meme didn’t emerge from a, well, vacuum. Fast 9 did it, Jason X did it, and Moonraker, the 11th canonical James Bond movie, did it all the way back in 1979. Apparently, a franchise’s 10th installment is around when the midlife crisis develops.
Moonraker was an expensive special effects bonanza that made money hand over fist, but it divided critics and has enjoyed precious little reevaluation since its release. It has its moments, but it was ultimately so campy and over-the-top that it proved ripe for the sort of parody that slowly dragged the franchise into the cultural abyss.
Casino Royale rescued Bond from that abyss in 2006, but the super-spy’s handlers faced a more immediate problem as their golden goose entered the ‘80s. Once you’ve gone to space, where do you go next? Amazon has control of 007 now and is trying to figure out what to do with him. The company should not, under any circumstances, send Bond to space, but it would do well to learn from what did and didn’t work in his first post-Moonraker adventure.
For Your Eyes Only, which hit American theatres 45 years ago today, is a back-to-basics affair where Bond returns to Earth and pursues a stolen doodad capable of sabotaging the United Kingdom’s nuclear submarines. The KGB would pay a pretty penny to get their hands on it, while complicating matters is the fact that Bond’s first lead winds up with an arrow in his back thanks to Melina Havelock (Carole Bouquet), who’s out for revenge after her parents were murdered as part of the villainous plot.
If you asked someone who only knew the basics of Bond to envision a Bond movie, this is basically what they’d summon up. There’s the requisite car chase, ski chase, and underwater sequence. There’s the doomed one-night stand, and the Bond girl who fends for herself but is inevitably seduced. There are some good jokes, and some very silly ones. The gadgetry is toned down, but still present, and you’d better believe the adventure could be described as globetrotting.
In a shock ending, Bond and Havelock manage to put their differences aside.
In some ways, it’s almost too toned down from Moonraker; while it’s nice to see Bond tackle a case that doesn’t carry the weight of the entire world, it’s a little anticlimactic to focus on squabbling Greek smugglers after watching Moore blow up a variety of evil lairs. Perhaps he appreciated the change of pace — Moore, then 54 and working at a time when action stars were allowed to appear their age, looked a little too old for the part. And, two movies before he definitely looked too old for the part. Still, he turns it on when he really matters, and a finale that involves climbing to a remote monastery remains one of the franchise’s most memorable.
Five films into the Roger Moore era, this is a quintessential Bond film and a quintessential Moore film, for good and ill in both categories. Perhaps Moore’s most “serious” Bond, this is still a movie where Bond dumps some goons into a hockey net, a parrot reveals a key plot point, and a tacked-on side story stars a bratty, horny figure skater. There’s a B+ theme song and some C- goons (keep your eyes out for a young Charles Dance doing his best to look sinister in a yellow sweater). If you mostly knew Bond thanks to Austin Powers, watching For Your Eyes Only might feel like trying to take Zero Hour! seriously after watching Airplane!
Reviewers then and now felt similar, with some finding it refreshing and others finding it hokey. It’s aged better than other Bonds, but if you’re not an aficionado, this won’t be the installment that wins you over. If you are a fan, you’ll get a competent but unremarkable affair that sits comfortably in the middle of the ever-growing pack. That may sound like faint praise, but that’s also what the franchise needs right now. Bond’s most formulaic elements can be his greatest strength, because not even Amazon can screw up fast cars and exotic locales.
Bond is threatened by some villainous benchwarmers.
Nearly a half-century after For Your Eyes Only, Bond is approaching a precipice similar to the one he faced after Moonraker. The most recent Bond movie didn’t go to space, but it did nearly everything else during its overstuffed runtime. Exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure, the finale of the Daniel Craig era also capped a three-film run that had inexplicably determined that James Bond, the source of the ultimate and infinitely repeatable action-movie formula, needed Lore. Dense reams of it, inky depths full of flashbacks and retcons and follow-ups to half-remembered plot points from a decade ago.
Amazon’s new Bond will need a lot of things, but it absolutely doesn’t need that. Skip the origin story. Write characters whose relationships don’t need to be tracked with charts. Give Bond a PPK and a mission, then let him get to it. Forty-five years ago, that was considered rote. Today, it would be a panacea for the franchise maximalism that even Bond fell victim to. Amazon will need a better villain than a two-timing Julian Glover, but the most daring thing it could do with its shiny new franchise is have Bond not save the world, only a piece of it. For Your Eyes Only, despite its flaws, remains watchable because it gets right down to business. Amazon should do the same.
For Your Eyes Only is available to rent on Prime Video, Apple TV, and elsewhere.
