The Man with the Golden Gun
Year of Release: 1974 UK Cert: PG Starring: Roger Moore, Christopher Lee, Britt Ekland, Maud Adams
Reviewed by Andy Phillips Rating: *1/2 out of ***** (Poor)
Let me begin by saying that this is easily the worst movie in the entire official (and even unofficial) James Bond series. It is so full of self-parody and silly characters that you would almost believe you were watching a spoof.
An omen of what is to come is provided by the pre-credits sequence, a dull affair featuring a confrontation between a man (it's difficult to give a better description since no mention of him is made elsewhere in the movie) and the assassin of the title. A song with woefully terrible lyrics follows, and the rest of the movie is even worse.
The plot might have been a pleasant change from the usual rule-the-world so often found in the James Bond movies of the 70s, but here we get a confused mismash about a fabled assassin, Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee, putting in a performance which is one of the rare saving graces of this movie) who someone has apparently payed one million dollars to in order to remove Roger Moore's 007. There is also a flimsy connection with the energy crisis and a missing solar cell with 95% efficiency. It's as much of a mess as it sounds.
Bond is "helped" in his task by Mary Goodnight (Ekland), whose character couldn't possibly be any closer to the stereotypical bimbo. During the course of the movie she gets locked in both a closet and a car trunk, blunders around a control room accidentally setting off a laser and serves no purpose in enhancing the plot whatsoever. Maud Adams (later to star in Octopussy) is a much more stronger and useful character, but she hardly features in the movie. Scaramanga's lackey is a dwarf called Nik-Nak, who rather fittingly is also possibly the silliest henchman in the series, serving up annoyance and weak dialogue in equal measures.
Worse still is an almost total lack of action throughout the whole movie. There is but one fight sequence about fifteen minutes in (not counting a ludicrous scene where two teenage girls beat up several dozen trained martial artists -- another misguided attempt at humour). The solitary car chase might have been a highlight, but the "action" is interrupted on a frequent basis by a redneck sheriff (J.W. Pepper, played by Clifton James of Live and Let Die "fame") yelling stupid comments out of the passenger window. He is easily the most irritating character in a James Bond movie. Even his presence could have been made bearable by one of the most impressive car stunts in cinematic history, a 360 degree twisting loop jump over a broken bridge -- could have been, except somebody got the idea to dub a mocking whistle tone over the final print. On top of that debacle, the whole end of the film is an anticlimatic sequence in Scaramanga's "funhouse".
The only good thing that came out of this movie was that the producers had to make the next film in the series (the infinitely superior "The Spy who loved Me") a great film in order for the Bond franchise to survive.
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