Octopussy

Octopussy is perhaps the only James Bond film in which the cold open is better than the rest of the movie. Bond is in Cuba to blow up some technobabble, is captured, escapes, flies a small plane back through the building with a heat seeking missile on his tail and escapes through the smallest gap in the closing doors leaving the missile to blow the hapless commies to hell. He then rolls into a filling station. This has nothing to do with the rest of the movie.

This stunt is cooler than everything in the last twenty years' worth of movies combined.

The other best part of the movie is where the villains are pursuing Bond on a hunt through the jungle and he swings through the trees yelling like Tarzan. This is amazingly hilarious because Bond is completely just fucking with them in the most retarded way. I will never not laugh at this because it is the funniest thing I've ever seen.

Then again, since Roger Moore's stuntman looks absolutely nothing like him, maybe this is just Tarzan.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Octopussy, except for the fact that its title is a pun on octopus and vagina, which makes it sound like hentai, is the clash of tones. In the background is a tense, dark Cold War plot involving clown murder and an amazingly hammy Soviet general trying to get a nice war going by blowing up a nuke in a circus, while in the foreground is Bond larping as Tarzan and doing this:

BASED.

Each of these tones is ill-served by the other, and I wonder whether the two villains are really all that necessary, because General Ham & Cheese is much more fun than his partner in crime Kamal Khan and gestures manically in front of a doomsday map out of Doctor Strangelove, in this fucking amazing set right here:

If the Sovs had cool ass revolving panels like this I'd be unironically m*rxist-l*ninist.

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This actor has the best body language ever.

Fortunately the movie ends with Bond hopping on the back of a plane as it takes off and scaring William Shatner by perching on the wing.

weeee