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