For Your Eyes Only – Bond Cruising

I don’t know why, but Roger Moore’s ‘For Your Eyes Only’ never really gets mentioned in ‘Bond circles.’ It’s as if it never really happened and was just some sort of way of killing time in between his (usually agreed as the best) ‘Spy Who Loved Me’ and his slightly less serious and slightly less capable ‘Octopussy/View to a Kill.’ Perhaps it was because it never seemed to be on TV during the time when people actually watched terrestrial TV in the eighties and nineties.  However, just because it’s not up there with the best (or down there with Bond swinging through the jungle making Tarzan noises!), doesn’t mean that it’s not pretty good fun.

Maybe this is Roger Moore’s ‘comfort period’ where he was certain that he’d laid Connery’s ghost to rest and made the role his own enough to just simply cruise.  The story is nothing new (certainly not be today’s standards, but perhaps it was slightly more original at the time); it revolves around the Russians trying to get their hands on an important piece of British tech and Bond having to get there first before an unscrupulous third party sells it to our Soviet foes.  And, as is customary, there are plenty of beautiful women along the way, wonderfully-exotic scenery courtesy of the Greek islands and underwater diving moments and all manner of car chases and punch-ups (plus a chase scene on skis which – although well-choreographed – does come across as a little over-the-top and cartoony!).

It’s a pretty standard affair, but good with it.  Special mention to some moments like Roger Moore’s Bond exhibiting possibly his ‘darkest’ moment when he kills a henchman out of revenge.  But then that sort of this is counter-balanced by the humourous moments when a young (and by ‘young’ I’m guessing she’s roughly eighteen years old) constantly comes on to Bond, scaring him more than Jaws and Oddjob ever could!  Plus the Bond girl Melina Havelock, played by Carole Bouquet, does possibly save Bond’s backside more than any other girl before him, showing how far the representation of women in Bond films has come since Ursula Andress came out of the water in ‘Dr No.’ No one has used a crossbow more fiercely until ‘The Walking Dead’s’ Daryl Dixon!

Overall, if you’re in any way a fan of Moore’s  why interpretation of the superspy, you really should settle down for this one.  It may not be the best, but it certainly isn’t the worst and the rock-climbing scene/fight near the end really is pretty tense.  I just wonder what the (then) Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher thought about her ‘cameo’ in the film?

8/10 The Force is definitely strong with this one