For Your Eyes Only

For Your Eyes Only opens with a meta-legal in-joke in which Eon, forbidden to use Ernst Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE (to whom Kevin McClory held the rights at the time), killed off a "suspicious man in wheelchair" with the bald head, accent and white cat all associated with the character from the early films, making this the James Bond film equivalent of that scene in Friends where Chandler dances in front of Joey saying "not touching, can't get mad, not touching, can't get mad".

Note the neck brace, which strongly implies that if this were Blofeld, this would be a direct sequel to On Her Majesty's Secret Service, not You Only Live Twice or Diamonds Are Forever. However, this is just a man in a wheelchair, what are you talking about?

A fun game you can play is to start the movie at 05:29 and pretend this is just some guy and Bond just murdered him for shits and giggles.

Unfortunately the rest of the movie is played much more straight in an attempt to win back naysayers of the previous film's fantasy elements. More fortunately, there is still an excellent chase in which Bond's gadgeted car is blown up and he has to escape in the Bond Girl's cheery yellow Citroën.

DA-Na-Da-NAA

This is the clear highlight, after which it's all pretty much down-to-earth generic spy action, not terrible, but very whatever. The ski chase goes on too long and the villains are all pretty boring, which casts an ironic light on the hilariously spiteful killing off of not-Blofeld, since his brand of quirks is much missed. The main henchman doesn't even have a gimmick.

Glasses aren't a gimmick.

It's an over-correction that foreshadows the Dalton and Cr**g eras, but it's not too bad, as in addition to the standout sequences mentioned above there is an excellent Bond Girl in Melina, who can't act for shit but has a cool crossbow and shows tits in the Buñuel film That Obscure Object of Desire.

>tfw no gf with crossbow (so she can kill me)

Another nice detail is that General Gogol of the KGB appears briefly as an actual antagonist, although he's nice enough to let Bond live having worked with him previously in The Spy Who Loved Me. General Gogol is such a nice cheery guy you could almost forget he was part of the organisation that murdered countless people and whose gay ops continue to fuck the west to this day.

Imagine this dude reporting to Beria.

This is also the only Bond film to tip its hand regarding its real life context by featuring then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher (played by a lookalike) in its final scene, who gets crank called by a fucking parrot.

R*dditers be like Margaret Thatcher is in the BOND UNIVERSE but what if instead Bond is in THE universe?