Moonraker

1979 James Bond space adventure

Rating: 12/20

Plot: 007 has to figure out who's behind the theft of a space shuttle, and it turns out to be a bearded fellow with evil plans to destroy most of humanity to start again and create a master race of humans. Meanwhile, Eegah.

First, that poster is bitchin' but misleading. Bond never wears aluminum foil pants. I'd wanted to see this Bond movie for a while and felt that Kiel's recent passing was enough of an excuse. Jaws isn't the bad guy to watch for in this, however. No, that's Michael Lonsdale's Hugo Drax. I mean, just look at that name! That's a good bad guy name! He's got the bad guy stance down, too, a humorless, cocky and slightly effeminate posture with his hands always behind his back. And you have to give the guy credit for thinking big although I'm not sure how nobody knew the guy was building a giant sex space station. Drax also is guilty of the old super villain cliche where he's too concerned with coming up with ingenious deaths for the good guys instead of just having them shot in the head. Why just shoot somebody in the head (so boring) when you can make this fake stone platform that your enemy might stand on at some point which will enable you to toss him into a pond with a giant snake? Or why would you just want to shoot somebody in the head when you can trap him beneath the titular space shuttle as it takes off and incinerates him? Drax does admit that he wants an "amusing death" for Bond though. The return of Kiel's Jaws, although a welcome sight, really stretches the limits of ridiculousness. It's still great to see the look on Moore's face whenever Kiel shows up, and I like the way those two clash, but they've really got Kiel doing some stupid things in this movie. He's dressed as a clown and loses all menace in the frenzy of color in Rio de Janeiro's street festivities. There's cable car nuttiness directly followed by a scene where Jaws actually falls in love. There's also a scene where Jaws is kneed in the crotch, and the sound effect for that is a metallic clang. I'm not sure what they're insinuating there, and although I initially wanted to make fun of it, I'm now thinking it might be the best thing in the world. Jaws also gets a single line in this movie, and I think it would have been a better move to just let the guy be a mute. He also waves, gaily. Love can do strange things to a giant men with metal teeth, I guess. I did like his first appearance in the movie, a plane shove followed by a shot of his teeth front and center. A free-falling chase scene is an awesome start that not even Shirley Bassey's crappy theme song can ruin. The first two-thirds of this movie is typical Bond stuff with some cool locales--Rio de Janeiro, the canals of Venice--before they apparently just said, "Fuck it, let's see what these characters look like weightless." Things gradually got sillier and sillier, but there's one moment when Bond and Dr. Holly Goodhead (ahem) are sitting in the cockpit (ahem) of one of the shuttles, and Moore gives her this look that seemed to say "Are we really going through with this shit?" There were cutesy mainstream sci-fi musical references and one very strange scene that used the theme from The Magnificent Seven, stuff that should have foreshadowed the later silliness. And when James Bond floating around in space and teaming up with Jaws isn't the silliest thing in the movie, then Houston, we have a big problem. No, the silliest scene in this movie and perhaps the most embarrassing scene in any James Bond movie takes place in Venice where Bond's gondola turns into a car and moves through the streets (Wait, Venice doesn't have streets...) while birds and dogs do double takes. This is right after they wasted a character, a cool knife guy who pops out of a coffin in the canal. That assassin had about ten seconds of screen time but needed twenty minutes. He was much better than the goofy-looking henchman who lurks around the first half of this before Jaws comes along again. Guy looks like a vaguely-Asian Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite. There is a really good hand-to-hand combat scene between Asian Pedro and Moore that uses a cool setting and a creative use of props. This isn't the most logical or well-written Bond movies, but it was better than I thought it would be and did keep me entertained for the most part. And I may have given the whole thing a bonus point for an "attempting reentry" pun which is simultaneously predictable and awesome.