For Your Eyes Only 1981

We’ve taken a short break after the painful Moonraker in order to regroup and continue on our Bond bonanza.

Bond enters the 80s with For Your Eyes Only and the producers felt the need to shake things up a bit. Second unit director John Glen is brought in to helm the whole project, his intention being to dial back the wackiness and try to revive some of the more successful aspects of the older films.

The pre-title sequence shows that this isn’t going to happen straight away. Bond winds up in a helicopter remote-controlled by a bald person with a white cat. Stuff happens, the whole thing ends with Bond dumping [Blofeld] the man into a chimney. It’s a childish ‘fuck you’ from the producers, angered at the licensing issues banning them from using Blofeld and SPECTRE in their films.

Once things get going though the new tone does start to come through. A British spy ship containing nuclear decryption codes sinks, and the man sent to investigate is assassinated. Bond needs to find out what happened and recover the information.

Yes, Bond is sort of saving the world but this is definitely more of a Cold War style thriller. It’s a bit more grown up, harking back to films like From Russia With Love where Bond does what you might actually call spying instead of just cocking about.

Bernard Lee died before his scenes as ‘M’ could be shot, so this is sadly the first film where he is not present. His performances were consistently good and often provided much needed relief from some otherwise awful productions.

Roger Moore comes back for the fifth time and despite looking a little older these days he’s still got the charm and wit we’ve come to enjoy.

The stand out role for me is Topol, who plays the pistachio-chewing bad-guy-ally Milos Columbo. He lends a personable air to the role, larger than life but realistic.

Julian Glover is also well cast as the smooth smuggler Aristotle Kristatos.

There’s a revenge plot running through the film. Leading lady Carole Bouquet is supposed to be out to get her father’s killer, and Bond is trying to stop her from doing so prematurely. This feels like a neglected story line; we get glimpses of Bouquet’s character looking mean, nothing more.

She makes the most of the screen time she gets though, providing some depth to the film where others would have failed.

Unfortunately, For Your Eyes Only tries too hard to mix the spectacular sequences of yore with a gritty spy-thriller. What results is a convoluted story, a very confusing tone and ultimately a forgettable film. At least they finally did away with the wild shootout at the end…

A good entry into the catalogue, but unlikely one that makes many top ten lists.

http://benoliver999.com/film/2015/07/04/foryoureyesonly/

James Bond: "And have you?"

Lisl: "Have I ever."

I've seen many Bond films that are sometimes brilliant, some of them are alright, or some of them are awful, and this movie isn't terrible or good, but mediocre in my opinion.

Let's start of what I like in this film: The theme song to film was really good and well done as well. It's a great song if I have to be honest. Roger Moore once again did a good job in this movie, not as good as Connery but still good.

Now for my problems with the film, and boy is they a lot: The movie lost it's sense of fun in the middle and the end of the movie, because the film started off strong and ended weak. The villains in the film are so boring and really bland, and let's not forget that this is a James Bond movie and that means you got to have a great, chilling or cool villain, but here we got boring villain who doesn't do anything special and we go bland sidekick in the background looking mean. The characters were just there to fill up screen time for the movie. The plot has been done before in different and better films.

Overall rating: 'For Your Eyes Only' is a mediocre, bland Bond film.

Bond gets a little more grounded, after going way, way off the deep end in 1979's thoroughly awful Moonraker. Of course, I'm using the word "grounded" in a strictly relative sense, as this film still features 007 outpacing Olympic athletes in specialized sports, smoothly free-climbing a vertical cliff face and working a helicopter like a crane game in his particularly rude farewell to longtime nemesis Blofeld. He's a renaissance man, after all. It's trashy but entertaining, in the mold of several earlier entries in the Roger Moore catalog, and there's a distinct lack of overly ambitious action sets in outer space, so I felt comfortable and content with what I got.

Moore is really pushing the boundaries of plausibility as a dashing young action hero here, an issue which would only grow worse as he clung to the role for four more years. I could almost hear his bones creak during a few of the physically-demanding scenes, and he looks old enough to be costar Carole Bouquet's father (turns out there's some truth to that one; he's thirty years her senior) but still, he wears those wrinkles with pride and hasn't yet lost the charisma that made him the longest-running MI-6 man ever. A promising improvement for the franchise, which had previously lost its way, but still a far cry from the glory days of Goldfinger and From Russia With Love. The franchise is absolutely starving for new blood and a fresh start.