Its hard not to think of Austin Powers when watching this Bond film, and indeed this has a touch of the sillies about it - it pushes the stakes to the greatest degree yet, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, although the story really just follows the basic structure of Dr No: a mysterious force is messing with the US and Russian space program, playing them off against each other; Bond goes to poke around in an exotic part of the world, has some local help (including from a girl in the bikini), gets captured by the baddie who explains his plan before killing him, then Bond manages to escape and blow everything up. There's even stolen artworks lying around the baddie's lair as per Dr No and a finale where Bond and his girl make out in a boat when his friends interrupt.
This was the first Bond film to really discard the original book, although elements were kept. On one hand I'm sympathetic - Bond's official mission in the book is not much (trying to get the Japanese secret service to do some diplomatic stuff, then seeking to kill a person who is encouraging Japanese youth to kill themselves... big deal).
However there was a lot of terrific novel material which I'm surprised took the makers of the series so long to use: I know they couldn't have the whole Bond-recovering-from-his-wife's-death stuff (nervous breakdown, heavy drinking, etc) because we hadn't seen On Her Majesty's Secret Service yet, but why not seed this through Diamonds Are Forever? Also there was the mystery castle of death surrounded by killer plants, Blofeld as a samurai, the name Dr Shatterhand, having Dikko Henderson as an Aussie, giving Bond amnesia at the end and getting him to wind up living with Kissy Suzuki who wants to keep him for herself...
I can understand they were nervous of some of this - and the big volcano base is a pretty impressive substitute for the castle. Still, it could have really reinvigorated the formula. (NB And I'm surprised the later films haven't used the amnesiac device more... maybe they're worried about Bourne film comparisons.)
Back to the movie - it's a lot of fun, with plenty of action and spectacle. Production values are first rate, from the location shooting in Japan and Hong Kong (including a sumo match), to some typically superb sets: M shifts his office to a submarine in this one (M and Moneypenny get to wear whites), Tanaka has an underground train, Blofeld has the biggest villain's lair to date.
The character of Tiger Tanaka is one of the great Bond allies - a real kindred spirit to Bond, with his own private train, and country estate full of hot women to wash him and ninja training school. However I felt Tetsuro Tamba was okay in the part rather than exceptional; it's a real shame since he shares a lot of the hero duties with Bond.
Akiko Wakabayashi's Aki is an engaging Bond heroine - pretty, brave, smart, and sexy. Her death at the hands of an assassin two thirds of the way in is a real shock - the most emotionally charged scene easily - and it takes a while for the movie to recover; she and Bond have such a good relationship (she saves his life several times, is a good bedmate, and massages him too) that it feels cheap and wrong even for Bond that he's pleased to marry a hot babe five minutes later, and whingeing about not being able to sleep with said hot babe. It felt like Aki deserved a bit more respect, particularly since she died of poison meant for Bond.
Mie Hama's Kissy Suzuki initially struggles to make an impact in the wake of Aki. I think they may as well have kept Aki alive - you'd lose the shock of the
death, but since Bond isn't really emotionally motivated by it there's
not that much point. Or at least the could have killed her off earlier - two thirds of the way in is
very late to knock off a love interest. However, as the film goes on Hama/Suzuki gradually makes an impression - its an interesting character to play, a small time village girl who is also a spy, Kissy Suzuki is a first-rate name, and Hama is very pretty, looking impressive in a bikini; she also gets points going to the volcano base with Bond in said bikini, swimming back to warn Tiger and avoiding helicopter gunfire (she's a lot more spunky and useful than, say, Domino in Thunderball) then coming back with Tiger's ninja army... still wearing a bikini!! It is a shame they didn't keep Kissy keeping an amnesiac Bond as her lover as per the book.
Donald Pleasance's Blofeld is rarely considered among the top Bond villains - too anti climatic after all that build up, too small, and I have to say I agree. He's not that great, certainly not as good as Telly Savalas' Blofeld, but he's okay; in his defence, he's not helped by a script that requires Blofeld to not kill Bond for a ridiculously long time, and also to spell out some exposition about blowing up his ship with Bond right there. Still, he does have a cool piranha lake.
The henchmen are disappointingly second rate. Karin Dor's femme fetale is undercooked - she feels like a poor man's (woman's) Luciana Paluzzi, with her flaming red hair and habit of bedding Bond then trying to kill him... but she doesn't really do much (Paluzzi was a top assassin whereas Dor just seems to be a secretary), lacks presence, and tries to kill Bond in a really convoluted way (taking him up in the air in a plane then jumping out in a parachute leaving him there trapped... this whole scene probably could have been jettisoned.) Teru Shimada's Osato (what I consider the Guy Doleman-Count Lippe role) is vanilla - by the time Blofeld shoots him I'd forgotten he was in the movie - and Ronald Rich's Hans is a laughable imitation of Red Grant - he barely does a thing throughout the running time, and at the end when Bond fights him it's almost like an afterthought. (Both he and Dor do get points for being eaten by piranhas.)
The movie feels a bit sloppy in its construction of action sequences - the assassination of Henderson (why even have him in the movie?), that random fight on the docks, the silly sequence where Dor tries to kill Bond on a plane, Aki saves Bond twice by driving up in a car, Bond fakes his death then his nationality.
But on the positive side some of those sequences are superb: the helicopter fight, the assassination of Aki, and especially the climactic battle with the ninjas. And there are some very hot Japanese women,
that volcano set, one of the best credit sequences and music scores in the series, and Nancy Sinatra's theme song has always been a favourite. Oh and I like the way the Americans are depicted as being so unreasonable and desperate to start World War Three despite the reasonable protestations of the British - I wonder if this slight anti-Americanism was Roald Dahl's influence.
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