I Watch Films: Octopussy

Octopussy

Possibly the nadir of Roger Moore’s term as James Bond, and yet there’s something here! The internet claims it first appeared on TV in 1988 when I should… probably not have been expected to know better.

Anyway, the jokes are extremely cheesy, the depiction of India ranges from cliched to outright racist, and the attempt to make the plot actually threatening in the midst of all this fails, with Bond dressed as a clown in a circus having to defuse a nuclear weapon (SPOILERS?).

The film delights in sleight of hand, and more than that, in doubles, fakes and copies. It starts when 009 is killed by a pair of identical twin knife throwers, but he is able to deliver a fake Faberge egg to the British Embassy before expiring. Bond swaps this with the real one with a nice bit of hand work. Later we have a bit of business with swapping dice, and Magda (Octopussy (sigh)’s henchwoman) steals the odd thing from people’s jackets.

The final bit of the plot relies on two identical train carriages each with an identical circus cannon, being swapped in a tunnel. Bond of course disguises himself as one of the knife throwing twins (useful for disguising the stunt man for the extended fighting on top of a train sequence) and later as a clown (the same clown as 009, and also the same as yet another clown who is briefly detained instead of Bond).

This is all good stuff for a spy film, using the flamboyant methods of Octopussy’s circus for smuggling and espionage. It doesn’t seem to really add up to anything interesting, certainly not enough to raise the film out of the low quality of its worst parts.

Watch This: It’s fun and stupid and is grasping at something of the deception of espionage, commenting on the false, surface display of the Bond films even
Don’t Watch This: It’s lazy and stupid and not especially funny, trying to be modern and old-fashioned all at once