Live and Let Die

Spoilers throughout.

After the Lay-Z-Boy debacle you might think the James Bond producers might have played it safe when introducing their third Bond, but Roger Moore's first outing would prove you entirely wrong. Live and Let Die might be the strangest 007 movie of all, and this is a series that includes Moonraker.

Ugh, I canNOT buhLIEVE she wore the same outfuht???

Bond is called in to investigate an agent disappeared by drug lord Mister Big and/or Kananga, President of not-Haiti, who are the same person wearing an elaborate disguise. Why Kananga didn't just get one of his numerous minions to stand in as Mister Big is beyond me, but then Diamonds are Forever had a villain who was several of the same guy, so why not have a villain who's two guys at once?

YO LIL DONNIE I PULLED MY OWN FACE OFF. WHADDYA THINKA THAT?

Anyway the plot is not important. What's important in the Moore era is chases, stunts, setpieces, gags and ill-advised but always entertaining left turns into whatever was popular that year. Thus it is that Live and Let Die is the first and last early 70s blaxploitation flick starring James Bond wandering around the mean streets of Harlem and fighting drug dealers in comical pimp outfits. As you might imagine, this is the best thing ever in movie (and all) history.

We need to bring back this aesthetic.

Kananga is a fun villain with his inexplicable cosplay hobby and array of sidekicks including Teehee, a hook-handed henchman whose enjoyment of his work is infectious, Whisper, who whispers, and a taxi driver with the best sideburns in cinema. Another quirk of his is using Jane Seymour's Solitaire to predict the future for him using the Tarot. For some reason he believes in the Tarot despite knowing for a fact that Voodoo is real. He knows this because his other bff is Baron Samedi, the Ghede lwa, who appears several times throughout the film, is killed at least twice and can clearly do literal magic, which means in the James Bond films Voodoo is literally the correct religion.

DAS RITE

Why an actual god/spirit manifesting irl wants to help a drug kingpin push heroin is of course never explained, but I'm sure for shits and giggles is a good enough reason. The supernatural is never invoked in any other James Bond movie so this one is all we have to go on. This is also perhaps the movie that best illustrates the "overly elaborate death trap" bit from Austin Powers, with villains trying to feed Bond to both crocodiles and sharks, and has three chase scenes involving a bus, plane and boats. Teehee also continues the tradition of henchmen outliving their masters coming back for one last shot at Bond and starts a trend of fights on trains ending in defenestration that would continue in The Spy Who Loved Me.

70s stuntmen were not paid enough.

Teehee is a sadly overlooked henchman who loves his work.

The only things that keep this one from being the greatest Bond (or otherwise) film of all time are the lame villainess and comedy redneck stereotype. Rosie Carver is set up as a ditzy CIA agent (???) but turns out to be working for the villains, but never gets the drop on Bond and is killed off quickly for no real payoff, and Sheriff JW Pepper is astoundingly unfunny, though perhaps they put him in there to head off charges of racism towards the black cast, who are nearly all villains.

See? We hate poor whites more, now get off our backs.

Such considerations are dumb and gay because one movie out of eight (at the time) having black villains hardly constitutes a pattern, and Quarrel Jr (ostensibly the son of a character from Doctor No) appears as a goody, and, let's be honest, this couldn't be made today no matter what concessions they tried to awkwardly shove in there.

LMFAO who wrote this scene? DW Griffith?

No matter. Bond wandering into literal Voodoo, disappearing through a false wall and a false floor in the baddies' restaurants, and a main villain who inflates like a balloon are all the reasons you might ever need to see this wonderfully strange, unique experiment.

This happens too.

Diamonds are Forever

Spoilers I guess.

The sixth Connery outing promptly ignored the absolute turd that was On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but the damage was done. The rot set in and the beautiful dream that was the classic Bond was over, never to return. Maybe it was the 60s, something unrepeatable, or just changing tastes, but the writing is unmistakably different, and mostly in a bad way. Diamonds are Forever is effectively the first Roger Moore film, but with Sean Connery. It's arch and campy and overtly comical, totally missing the point of its subtler, smarter forebears. Bond was always humorous, but played it straight enough to make it interesting. This one...

Bond was b& from the pool for bullying thots

Nonetheless, the Moore era is not the Connery era, and once this is accepted, it becomes much more enjoyable for what it is. The Moore films aren't surreal or satirical, they're live action cartoons with action beats comparable to Looney Tunes or Tom and Jerry. Diamonds features Connery in proto-Moore mode driving a moon buggy, flipping a car up on its right wheels into an alleyway and driving out on just the left ones, and killing off the baddy by picking up his one-man escape submarine on a crane and smashing it into a building like a wrecking ball. It's all very entertaining, you just can't quite shake the feeling the writers are leaning over your shoulder going "ya get it? Huh? Huh? Ya get it?"

Grand theft auto. The log lady stole my moon buggy.

Diamonds picks up right after the end of You Only Live Twice, with Bond tossing a hapless goon through a paper wall in Japan. He follows Blofeld (now played by Charles Grey with hair) to Egypt where he kills him off for good, until it turns out it was just a lookalike, even though Blofeld himself looks nothing like either of his last two incarnations. They'd have been better off just leaving him dead and having a new villain for the remainder of the movie. The Chairman Mao cosplay is back but the magic is long gone and by the final act there can no longer be any excuse for Blofeld not to just have Bond immediately shot instead of capturing him. He comes across here as an ineffectual pantomime villain and if I were given to writing fix fic I'd say the Diamonds version was just a decoy for the real thing all along. If the OHMSS version is Blohard, we'll call this one Fauxfeld.

Interestingly[citation needed], the villain was originally meant to be Goldfinger's twin brother who was obsessed with diamonds instead of gold. Sadly Gert Fröbe declined to reappear most likely because he realised that idea was stupid, but it most likely would have been better overall.

Much better baddies are his henchmen, the extremely creepy Mr Wint and Mr Kidd, two flaming homosexuals who literally skip and hold hands with each other but are perhaps the most cheerfully sadistic killers in the series, trying to have Bond cremated alive, burying him in the desert and eventually coming at him with a couple of kebabs. There's also a Bond girl named Plenty O'Toole, which is obvious but still funny, and the excellent scene in which she is tossed out of a window, which features a punchline so good that one shitty Wolverine flick ripped it off word for word.

plenty o'toole more like yeeted out o'the window

I also like the fact the final showdown is set on an oil rig because oil rigs are cool.

this is #cool

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Because we live in the tiresome era of hipsters chasing clout, George Lazenby stinkbomb On Her Majesty's Secret Service has recently become a fashionable favourite among the douchebag crowd. Liking this mess is an instant tell for a pseud, don't even @ me.

Numales will defend this.

The plot involves, boringly, Telly Savalas trying to destabilise British agriculture with a foot-and-mouth-style pathogen disseminated by a squad of brainwashed 60s hairdos. This is such a step back from hijacking spaceships from a volcano I think even with a decent Bond it would have been a letdown, but it gets stupider. George Lay-Z-Boy has to go undercover as a boring nerd, which is up there with casting Arnold Schwarzenegger as an emotionless robot in terms of making the best out of casting, to establish whether or not Savalas is really Blofeld, posing as a count with a suspiciously similar name like he wants to get caught.

What is this stupid fucking doily thing meant to be?

This is dumb for at least two reasons: one is that if Bond is meant to be the same person as last time, Blofeld would immediately recognise him. There's a pre-title gag where Lay-Z-Boy sort of winks to the audience that he's not the "other guy" so I guess maybe he isn't, but if that's the case then why can't Miss Moneypenny and M tell the difference? There's an old fan theory that "James Bond" is just a codename given to every agent who takes on the role, but that's even stupider because that would mean he, Miss Moneypenny, M and Q are all in kayfabe 24/7 like a pack of rancid LARPers.

To paraphrase Scre4m, am I overthinking it, or did the writers underthink it?

The other reason this is dumb is that Blofeld is jeopardising his entire plan for the trivial matter of pursuing a title, which seems to fly, stupidly, in the face of his previous characterisation. The classic Blofeld is interesting only because he's such a mysterious cypher, the literally faceless mastermind known even to his closest followers only as "Number 1". Even the name SPECTRE evokes something ambiguous, amorphous. He didn't even care enough to get the huge scar on his face fixed until now. OHMSS Blofeld, meanwhile, is such a preening douche he'll paint a huge target on himself just for a meaningless honorific. More like Blohard.

Your villain should not look like someone who tells boring stories at work parties and drives a sports car because he's bald.

Worse, this is the one with the ""tragic"" ""love"" story, which makes it all the more regrettable that it's the one where Bond is played by a man with all the acting talent of a rock and all the charisma of a less interesting rock. The girl of his dreams is played by Diana Rigg from Loicenseland TV show The Avengers (not to be confused with Disney's Marvel's borefests), which is like casting the chick from Relic Hunter as Lara Croft, except that would be hot af so not like that at all. Rigg is more likeable than Lay-Z-Boy, but this is not a very considerable achievement, and her character goes from a suicidal trainwreck to Bond With Tits offscreen for no reason at all.

"U WOT M8 I'LL FOCKIN GLASS YA" - our hero's one true love

Even the action scenes are boring and go on way too long, especially the ski chase which features some of the worst back projection I've ever seen, including in Laurel and Hardy flicks. Blohard fucks up constantly, putting Bond in a storage room and forgetting about him, leaving him for dead in an avalanche, getting distracted by his thot at an important moment, dismissing an obvious attack as "nothing" even though it's literally minutes before his win condition would have been achieved, missing an easy shot at an oblivious Bond's back, and dropping a live grenade in his own bobsled. I am literally not making any of those up.

"DURR HERP DERP DURR" - a once feared mastermind

"But Pat", you simper hipsterishly, "OHMSS is Bond for grownups. Simple minds like yours can't comprehend the artistry. I have been to many wine tastings and am enlightened by my own intelligence". While there are two neat transitions in the flick, that is the full extent of its artistic distinction.

Actually I lied, this is the only one.

The story is as silly and contrived as any other Bond, just less fun. In fact it was such a disaster that the next instalment, Diamonds Are Forever, completely ignores it and picks up immediately after You Only Live Twice, with Sean Connery back in the saddle as if OHMSS had just been a bad dream, but not of the Nightmare on Elm Street variety, but of the Freddy's Dead variety instead. (Mildly) interestingly, the Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton Bonds occasionally mentioned Bond's brief marriage, but Lay-Z-Boy was never seen or heard from again.