We open with a shot of Christopher Lee with a third nipple and then it's all downhill from there in
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, in which Bond must both stalk and be stalked by a deadly assassin while also reclaiming an energy-crisis-solving McGuffin device of some kind.
This movie is...kind of a mess. Where to start. Let's talk about Roger Moore. He continues to be quintessentially British. The thing I already see about Roger Moore is that - unlike Connery - he has little to no ability to rise above a bad script. Connery could pull off the roguish charm regardless of circumstances. Moore cannot overcome poor quality writing, and we have that here. Bond is a little bit more of an asshole in this movie - slapping a woman around to get info out of her, tossing an annoying little child off a boat - although I did read that this was a result of the producers wanting movie Bond to be a little more like book Bond in some ways, and that Moore wasn't a fan of some of these elements.
Christopher Lee plays Scaramanga, the titular assassin and primary antagonist of the movie, and he is hands down the best element - just not enough to salvage the rest. He and Moore had the best chance for a great villain/hero dynamic since Goldfinger, and there are times it really clicks, but it's not enough to save the movie.
There are just a lot of really strange half-assed directorial decisions in this movie. The random martial arts scenes (to take advantage of that burgeoning 1970s movie craze, like the Blaxploitation elements in Live and Let Die). The weird car-plane hybrid. The decision to ruin what is possibly one of the greatest car stunts recorded on film during this era of movie making history with a slide whistle sound effect. And the absolutely atrocious decision to - for no good reason at all - bring back the Louisiana sheriff character from the last movie and turn him into a Bond sidekick for a few scenes. I audibly groaned when he showed up on screen. It was not a good time.
Look, I made it through the movie, we got all the way to the end, but that's about all I can say about it.
Let's make sure to update the Bonk Counter - here we have 2 bonks with 2 different women so - 28 bonks with 22 bonkees is the updated count. Including a hilarious scene where Bond hides one girl in a closet to seduce another girl, and STILL manages to hook up with the first girl at the end of the movie. What a wild man that Bond is.
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