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U.K. /
1983
Directed by John Glen
Starring
Roger
Moore
Maud Adams
Louis Jourdan
Color / 131 Minutes / PG
Format: DVD (R1 - NTSC)
MGM Home Entertainment
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New
2006 Utimate Edition
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10
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Bond
Number 13, Octopussy,
was the sixth film in the series to star Roger
Moore as Agent 007. Savoire faire still
intact, Moore was by now too old and out of shape
to play the part of a cinema superhero. Apparently
the producers thought that involving Bond in a
convoluted storyline amid the exotic locations
of India, punctuated with the usual assortment
of thrilling stunts, would help audiences overlook
this. After all, with Octopussy
Moore would return to the tongue-in-cheek humor
that had marked most of his tenure as Bond (briefly
abandoned in 1981's For
Your Eyes Only), a knowing wink to the moviegoer
that said, "It's okay, folks. This is
all a load of bollocks but I'm having fun. So
should you!"
It almost works.
The film starts out promisingly
enough. The pre-title sequence — unrelated to
the main plot — has
Bond infiltrating an enemy airbase in an unnamed
Latin American country. (Interesting, considering
the film was shot shortly after the Falkland Islands
War between Britain and Argentina.) Almost immediately
captured, 007 then immediately escapes in the
amazing AcroStar mini-jet, a real-life functioning
aircraft smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle. In
a terrific sequence Bond dodges a surface-to-air
missile in the tiny jet, then leads the heatseeker
into one of the base's hangers by flying through
the building at top speed. The hanger (or rather
the model) is destroyed in the explosion as Bond
does a victory roll. Running out of fuel, Bond
lands the plane on a highway and pulls up to a
gas station! (Perhaps the most memorable pre-title
sequence of the Moore era besides The
Spy Who Loved Me's, it's unfortunately marred
by the glaringly obvious support rod holding up
the mock AcroStar as it 'flies' through the interior
of the hanger. Today, of course, the support would
be digitally airbrushed from the few seconds of
film in which it appears.)
Moore's groaner of a joke ("Fill 'er up,
please") segues into the opening credits,
which play to a lame 'easy listening' ballad sung
by Rita Coolidge — it's Muzak, 007 style. Thankfully
a well-directed, tightly edited suspense sequence
follows... A circus clown (actually 009, working
undercover) is stalked
through a dark wood by a pair of knife-throwing
twins and murdered. Bond is assigned to find out
what 009 discovered that got him killed, and who
killed
him. So we're
off on a complicated adventure that has Bond tracking
a smuggling ring to India, where he tangles with
the urbane but vicious Kamal Khan (Swamp
Thing's Louis
Jourdan), an exiled Afghan prince in league with
a power-mad Red Army commander, General Orlov
(Steven Berkoff). Bond discovers that Kamal is
helping the Soviet officer smuggle a small nuclear
bomb into West Germany in exchange for a cache
of priceless Kremlin jewels. Orlov, prescient
that the U.S.S.R. is on its last legs, plans to
detonate the bomb on a NATO base and instigate
World War III —
confident of a victorious Soviet blitzkrieg through
Western Europe (commanded by him, of course).
A key element of the villains'
plot is the duping of the exotically-named Octopussy
(Maud Adams, in her second Bond film), a beautiful,
mysterious woman who runs the smuggling ring in
association with Kamal. Her traveling circus,
which plays to audiences on both sides of the
Iron Curtain, is the perfect means by which to
move contraband across Cold War frontiers. She
has no idea what deadly cargo her circus train
is to carry from East to West; she's a smuggler,
not a murderer. Along with thousands of others,
she too is to die when the bomb goes off —
while
Kamal absconds to India with the jewels. Our hero
prevents this, of course. As Moore arches his
eyebrow from one set-piece to the next, the viewer
is treated to both high and low points in the
007 film universe.
Octopussy
is a schizophrenic Bond film. Its pendulum-like
tone swings from one extreme to the other: deadly
serious, as in the clown murder sequence (or when
Bond plugs a Russian soldier between the eyes
with his PPK); to utterly absurd — 007 swinging
on vines through the Indian jungle, warbling Johnny
Weismuller's Tarzan yell. The latter instance
occurs in an overly-rushed Most Dangerous Game-style
set-piece that blows the potential for a series
highlight (Bond in serious jeopardy, from the
enemy and the environment, with only his
wits as a weapon) in favor of silly humor. When
a ferocious tiger springs from the foliage at
Bond, his admonishment to "Sit!" actually
works. (But tigers are cats, Rog...) Scenes
like that make the true Bond aficionado positively
cringe. Nor does it help matters that in a couple
of key action scenes it's painfully obvious that
it isn't Roger Moore on the screen, but a stuntman
in a bad wig.
Still, the bulk of the film is quite enjoyable.
It's got strong villains in Orlov and Kamal; one
an obsessed militarist with a Napoleon complex,
the other a cruel, greedy thug beneath a veneer
of sophistication. (U.S. audiences burst into
giggles when Jourdan would say "Octopussssssy"
in his French accent.) Refreshingly, 007's love
interest is a mature woman of about 40 instead
of a bimbo half his age. (And with Moore at this
point we're talking late 20s.) As she's the namesake
of the film, Octopussy has a lot more to do with
the plot than other Bond Girls. Former model Maud
Adams certainly has the best role of her film
career here. With her smoky, slightly accented
voice (she's Swedish) —
not to mention those fabulous cheekbones — Adams
convincingly essays a believable "mystery
woman" even with the most farfetched of pulp/potboiler
backgrounds.
John Glen, who directed all
the '80s Bond flicks for EON Productions, is a
competent, totally conventional filmmaker. Sticking
to a tried-and-true formula, this is an old-fashioned
kind of adventure movie. Surprisingly, the highpoints
in Octopussy
don't involve a single stuntman.
In the auction scene at Sotheby's, Bond and Kamal
bid against one another for a Faberge egg. 007
takes on his opponent in a bloodless battle, with
its own peculiar rules of engagement, from across
a crowded room without either having spoken to
the other. Moore plays this scene perfectly, and
its one of his best moments in the series. Later
in the film Kamal and Bond square off again over
a game of backgammon at a hotel casino. Moore
and Jourdan deftly play off one another as Bond
turns the tables on the villain for cheating with
loaded dice. It's in scenes such as these that
Moore definitively proved he could be action
hero James Bond —
as long as he was sitting down.
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The
Octopussy disc
is another winner from MGM in both presentation
and extras. Bond fans will delight in the two
documentary features included. Inside Octopussy,
about the making of the film, is a compilation
of interviews with all the major cast and crew
(sans Jourdan). Narrated by Patrick McNee, it
details the both the humorous and harrowing events
that came with bringing the 13th chapter of the
007 saga to the screen. (A stunt man was terribly
injured shooting the train sequence.) Designing
Bond —
Peter Lamont
focuses on the man who's been the chief architect
of the Bond "look" on film ever Octopussy's
production in 1982.
Also included on the disc is a moderately interesting
audio commentary by director John Glen, animated
storyboards of two of the film's action sequences,
theatrical trailers, and the music video for the
rather vanilla theme song. As usual, the package
is all tied together with a snazzy animated menu
that's customary for the Bond DVDs. 8/07/01
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| UPDATE
OOP for a couple of years, Octopussy
was reissued in December 2006 by MGM. This completely
remastered 2-disc edition — with new, additional
bonus features — is a part of The
James Bond Ultimate Collection Vol. 4, which
also contains four other 007 films. |
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