Bond-arama: No. 007 For Your Eyes Only (1981)

Believe it not, For Your Eyes Only was a reboot. Yes it was. This was an attempt to strip away the silliness of the franchise and to return it to its early-Connery roots. The result was a really strong film with one big flaw... Roger Moore. Had they replaced Moore, this could have been in the top three. But they didn’t, so it sits at No. 007 of 0023.

Plot Quality: For Your Eyes Only has a strong story. It begins with a British fishing trawler, the St. Georges, striking a mine and sinking. This trawler also happened to be a spy ship, and it sinks before the crew is able to destroy a communications system (the Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator (ATAC)) which would let the Russians redirect Britain’s Polaris submarines if they had it. The British send noted marine archeologist Sir Timothy Havelock to search for the ship while pretending he’s examining ancient underwater ruins. He gets killed. Naturally, Bond is sent in to investigate.

Bond first hunts for Havelock’s killer. In the process, he runs into Melina Havelock, the daughter of Sir Timothy. She’s seeking revenge for the death of her father. Bond’s attempt to find the killer ends up a disaster, but he identifies a man at the scene who may be important: Emile Leopold Locque, a paid assassin. Bond goes to Italy to track Locque. There he meets an ally, Aris Kristatos (Julian Glover), a well-connected Greek businessman and informant for MI-6. Kristatos is in Italy to watch a young girl, Bibi Dahl, he sponsors prepare for the Olympics. Kristatos tells Bond that the real villain is Milos Columbo (Topol). Bond is then attacked by Locque and an East German athlete.

Bond is soon captured by Columbo after Columbo’s mistress is killed by Locque. Columbo tells Bond that Kristatos is the traitor and he takes Bond on a raid of one of Kristatos’s warehouses in Albania so Bond can see that Kristatos is an opium smuggler. After this, Bond goes to Melina, who has found the St. Georges. They are attacked by Kristatos and left for dead. Kristatos takes the ATAC device with him and plans to sell it to the KGB. Bond, Columbo and Melina must now find a way to climb to St. Cyrils, an abandoned mountaintop monastery, before the Russians arrive to pick up the ATAC.

I said above this is a reboot. The last three Bond films before this had become increasingly silly. The villains were crazed circus freaks or misanthropic billionaires who wanted to wipe out the human race for no real reason. They had laughably stupid plans. Their henchmen came from comic books. The action was more funny than tense. Moore played Bond as a fop who issued snippy one-liners when people died and who simply wandered through the plot as it solved itself. This film threw all of that out the window.

In fact, For Your Eyes Only signals that this is what it’s doing right in the opening. The film opens with Moore escaping an assassination attempt from Blofeld, who uses a remote control helicopter. Bond turns the tables on Blofeld. And right before he dies, Blofeld spits out a truly stupid line: “I’ll buy you a delicatessen... in stainless steel!” Bond then dumps him down a chimney stack to his death. Roll credits, begin the film. This feels like a statement. A lot of people see it as a shot at Kevin McClory, who claimed ownership of the Blofeld character, but really this feels like a statement that the ridiculous Bond was finished. All the silliness got tossed down that chimney and from here on out, there would be no more clownery... Bond would become a serious spy in the mold of the best Connery had to offer. And that is exactly what happens. Observe.

First of all, this plot makes for an extremely good spy thriller. Of course, there are some holes – like why they couldn’t just change the launch systems in the subs, but you can ignore those because that’s not what the film is about. The film is about recovering the device, which is the same idea behind From Russia With Love. The film is fast-paced too as Bond and the villains play cat and mouse throughout. There is more tension in this film than there has been in any Bond film since Thunderball. Bond is serious, challenged, professional and merciless... as he was in Dr. No. The plot is topical and believable. The villains are strong and edgy. There are some iconic moments, like the underwater scenes which are easily the best in the entire series, even beating those in Thunderball. The travelogue feel returns strongly with this film too. And the whole thing is extremely satisfying. In fact, if it weren’t for one big flaw, this film could easily rank in the top three. What flaw?

Moore.

Bond Quality: This is Moore’s fifth film and it’s the first one he took seriously since Live and Let Die. And in the scenes where he’s playing the spy opposite Kristatos, Columbo or Locque, he does an excellent job. This time, he doesn’t come across as prissy or snippy. Instead, he plays the character in a relentless, professional manner that is reminiscent of Dr. No. And for once, he’s physical. You also actually believe he can kill someone in cold blood in this film. And in fact, he does that to Locque, in a scene that’s unlike anything in his prior films as he mercilessly pushes the man over the cliff. He is what Connery was in Dr. No... suave and cool, but also professional, cold-blooded and merciless.

So how is Moore the flaw? To put it simply: age. At this point, Moore comes across like the protective father of grownup daughters. He walks, instead of runs. He counsels caution instead of fighting. He still seems perfectly content to let the women around him do his fighting. He wears granny glasses. And he seems ill-at-ease with women. In fact, the biggest mistake the film made was pairing him with young Olympian Bibi Dahl. He comes across as far too old for her, and far too fatherly, and when she throws herself at him, it feels really creepy; it highlights just how old and uncool he has become. It’s even worse that she’s just using him to try to make the East German athlete jealous. That makes him the fool or the over-matched babysitter. She should have been stripped from the film... actually, Moore should have been replaced with someone younger.

The Bond Girl: The main Bond girl is Carole Bouquet as Melina Havelock, who is the daughter of the murdered marine archaeologist who was looking for the ATAC. She’s Greek and thus is supposed to be passionate and driven by the burning fire of revenge. Unfortunately, she’s a little too stiff for that to work. She also has zero chemistry with Moore, which probably isn’t her fault. Fortunately, she’s absent from large portions of the film.

Villain Quality: Julian Glover is an accomplished actor at playing villains in big budget films. He was Gen. Veers in The Empire Strikes Back and Walter Donovan in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He even tested for Bond before Moore got the role. And he does an excellent job as Kristatos. Kristatos is a well-connected Greek businessman and informant for MI-6. His loyalty appears beyond question, yet Glover injects just enough ego into Kristatos that you wonder what he’s really up to. There is also something off in the way he acts toward Bibi and her handler, which belies the grandfatherly proclamations and suggests a villainous core. These acting choices give real depth to the character, something you rarely have in Bond villains.

Then you add his back-story. A freedom fighter who sold out Greece to the communists and acted as a double agent against the British... a smuggler of opium... a cold-blooded killer... those are all things that make this character come alive, especially as he doesn’t act maniacal. In many ways, Kristatos seems modeled on Largo from Thunderball, right down to having a young “niece” living with him. But to Glover’s credit you not only don’t notice that he’s a copy, but he makes his version into the most realistic villain since Largo.

His scheme is highly believable as well. Indeed, just as with From Russia With Love, this is exactly the kind of thing audiences think spies are busy doing all the time. And the stakes, though probably phony, are presented as sufficiently high and sufficiently believable to present the audience with a good deal of tension: “If the Russians get this, then they can launch British nuclear missiles!” Those are big stakes, and the film does an excellent job of making the action which underpins the plot feel believable as well. This time, there is no army of unexplainable henchmen, no volcano lair, no nonsense plan to destroy the planet, and no insanity in Kristatos’s character. He is simply a smuggler and a traitor who wants to recover something the Soviets would want very, very badly. That makes him an excellent villain.

In the end, what you have here is a very smart film that tosses away the silliness and excesses of the past twenty years. And in the process, I believe, they saved the franchise. If they hadn’t rebooted the series here, I suspect the Bond franchise would have simply vanished as a forgotten franchise that got too silly for its own good and burned out on volcano layers and space stations. This film... this reboot... changed the direction of the series back to a direction it hadn’t been since the 1960s by taking its scheme from From Russia With Love, its villain from Thunderball, and its Bond from Dr. No. Add in the fast-paced script, the great underwater effects and the strong physical ending, and the result is a very strong film... one of the best. Indeed, if they had swapped out Moore for someone less fatherly and more comfortable around women, this could easily be remembered as one of the best Bond films ever.

But they didn’t. And that’s why this film sits at No. 007 of 0023.