Octopussy
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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Stand-alone Blu-ray edition
(February 2013)
Review by
Brian Lindsey
 
5
     10   10 = Highest Rating  
Bond # 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.

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

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 part of The James Bond Ultimate Collection Vol. 4, which also contains four other 007 films. On Oct. 21, 2008, the 2-disc UE is being released in stand-alone form (using different cover art).
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