Three Blokes and a Chick Watch: For Your Eyes Only

I don’t like For Your Eyes Only very much. It’s a genuinely difficult film to remember after any period of time on account of being a truly forgettable experience. Case in point, following the film I asked the other two blokes and the chick what they remembered from what they’d just watched. I got the following:

• Skiing
• Scuba diving
• A “pubic mound”
• A man with glasses
• Topol
• Charles Dance
• That f*cking Citroen 2CV
• Rolf Harris’ cover of “If I was a rich man”
• “I fell asleep”

This didn’t bode well for this recap, especially as I spent the entire film tanked on half a bottle of whiskey. However, I will persevere! Spoilers ahoy, but I’m saving you from having to watch it yourself so if anything I’m doing you a massive favour.

Why’s this film so forgettable?

For Your Eyes Only is a bit of a non-entity when compared to most of the other films in the Bond franchise – if you were to personify each film, FYEO would be the nasal one in the beige jumper who collects stamps. We spent a good chunk of the film saying “didn’t he do this is [insert Bond film here]?”; FYEO doesn’t really have its own identity, it just apes bits from better, more memorable Bond films.

Let’s consider the film’s background for a minute – it’s the middle of Roger Moore’s run on Bond, following the always-reviled Moonraker which was criticised for being a Star Wars cash-in and recycling the plot from its predecessor The Spy Who Loved Me (in space!). FYEO was all about “back to basics”, which apparently means recycling bits and pieces from Bond films that didn’t take place in space.

What’s the film about?

Ah, the million dollar question. It’s basically From Russia with Love, except this time around the Russians are trying to steal a computer decoder device from the British rather than the other way around. There’s a lot of faffing about before and after Bond actually gets to retrieving the device, and I hope you f*cking love skiing and scuba diving because if you do then this is the film for you!

Who are the characters?

• James Bond: the middle of Roger Moore’s run as Bond, and he already looks far too saggy and old at this point. The scriptwriters have to have Bond actually deny sexual advances because even they realised how creepy it would be to see Roger Moore in bed with someone young enough to be his granddaughter. MI6 unfortunately don’t provide Viagra to their agents, presumably.

And now I have to resort to Wikipedia for character names, because I really can’t remember the names at all.

• Melina Havelock: it’s Domino from Thunderball. She’s an angry young woman who swims a lot and shoots people with a crossbow. Totally Domino.
• Aristotle Kristatos: it’s that dude from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and SPOILERS just like in that film he pretends to be the good guy and later turns out to be the villain. It’s like Julian Glover got typecast for playing turncoat bastards or something.
• Milos Columbo: the coolest guy in the film, so cool that he’s played by a guy with one name, Topol!
• Loque: a dude with glasses. This appears to be his only defining characteristic.
• A whole cast of other arseholes I can’t honestly remember. Seriously, look at how many people are in this thing.

So what happens?

The film opens with Bond visiting the grave of his ex-wife (the one that lasted literally five minutes at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service)¹, when a random priest comes to tell him that his company are sending a helicopter to collect him. Bond can only raise his eyebrow as the priest makes the sign of the cross as the helicopter takes off.

On a nearby rooftop, a bald man in a wheelchair strokes a white cat while monitoring some monitors strapped to his chair. It’s clearly Blofeld from the older Connery era of Bond, but due to some copyright issues at the time surrounding Thunderball-lite Never Say Never Again, he’s officially referred to as “Bald Man in Wheelchair”². I can’t believe it’s not Blofeld kills the helicopter pilot with a remote electrical charge to the brain and begins to scare the shit out of Bond by remote controlling the helicopter to fly erratically, rather than just flying it into a nearby building and calling it a good day’s revenge. Bond manages to break out of the helicopter, climb around the outside (in an extended sequence of rather unconvincing rear-screen projection) and into the pilot seat. Regaining control of the helicopter, we’re treated to a scene of a helicopter chasing a crippled man in an electric wheelchair across a rooftop. Bond grabs not-Blofeld with one of the helicopter’s landing struts and drops him unceremoniously into a smoke stack.

The film’s already had to resort to digging up continuity from the Connery era to start off. Let’s start a count, shall we?

References to or reminders of better Bond films: 1.

It doesn’t get much better than this! No, really, this is the best part of the whole film.

One boring credits sequence later, we see a man having a fag break on a fishing boat. He goes below deck and into a secret room, revealing the boat to be a British reconnaissance vehicle. The room is full of tape streamers and oversized banks of buttons (as well as an annoying blip sound I swear appears in every Roger Moore Bond film as a audible sign for “ooh look cool technical stuff!”) because this is the 80’s when computers were still growing up; the room in its entirety probably comes to about 50MB of memory storage (if that) with the processing power of a Sony Playstation (the first one). Fag break man takes over the next shift on the magical box that lets the boat track Russian transmissions, meaning he has to be handcuffed to it. The magical box looks like a speak-and-spell, and is called the A.T.A.C – this will be this movie’s version of the LECTER decoding machine from From Russia with Love.

References to or reminders of better Bond films: 2.

Up on deck, the fishermen are bringing in their net. An alarm goes off downstairs because, unknown to the gormless fishermen, their net has latched on to a WW2-era sea mine. The highly technical British reconnaissance ship has no defence against this primitive attack, and can only take on water and sink after the mine blasts a hole in the side of it. The combination of flooding water and computers powered by electricity means that fag break man can only tremble his hand over the switch to destroy the A.T.A.C rather than just pull it (actually the two don’t seem to be related at all, the actor’s quite clearly trying to make the act of pulling the self-destruct far more difficult than it should be). One of Britain’s most high-tech ships sinks unceremoniously into the deep thanks to sheer incompetence. In fact the sequence reminds me of the beginning to Tomorrow Never Dies, and I’m going to count it because TND made a sinking ship (well, submarine) seem so much scarier.

References to or reminders of better Bond films: 3.

“Curses! If only I’d been handcuffed to the self-destruct lever instead of the machine! Or if, you know, it was a button or something. Behind emergency glass. Something easier to activate if the ship ever flooded or came under attack. Oh well! Glub glub glub”

Back in London, the Minister of Defence (because M was on extended leave as Bernard Lee was dying from stomach cancer at the time) is delivered the bad news by the “First Sea Lord” and the “Vice Admiral”. It’s not said whether the ship was their only electronic surveillance ship, but the conversation is just vague enough to imply that it was. This just keeps getting better!

Meanwhile in Moscow, recurring Bond character General Gogol is on the red phone (see what they did there) to one of his superiors. Apparently the Russians knew all about the ship the entire time and are already looking to steal the A.T.A.C device. I’m already suspecting that fag break man was a Soviet spy, it would explain both how the Russians know all about it and why he refused to pull the lever (and he died for his country in the process, what dedication!). Gogol explains that they shouldn’t get directly involved but he’s contacted their “friend in Greece”. Seeing Gogol just reminds me of The Spy Who Loved Me and A View to a Kill, so I’m marking that as reminding me of better Bond films.

References to or reminders of better Bond films: 4.

Greece! A woman lands in a seaplane near a luxury boat and boards to greet her parents. We’re introduced to a parrot who’ll clearly play some major role later on because that’s the only reason parrots get featured in movies (unless it’s a pirate film, which this isn’t). The seaplane pilot flies off and then comes back around to massacre the f*ck out of everyone on the boat. This attack kills the parents and leaves the daughter alive, and we’re only a string of pearls bouncing on cobblestone away from being Batman‘s origin story. There’s a terrifying moment where the daughter clutches the dress she’d just bought her mother and stares at the audience. Unlike Batman’s origin, rather than “I shall become a bat”, this is more “I shall become a pissed off lady with a crossbow”.

Agh! What the hell are you looking at me for?! I didn’t kill your parents! You’re the stupid bint who boarded a seaplane and didn’t notice the guns strapped under it!

Back in London, and Bond finally makes his reappearance after about fifteen minutes of screen time without him. He does this by flinging his hat on to the coat-stand, something Bond hadn’t done since the Connery/Lazenby era so I’m going to have to increase the counter now.

References to or reminders of better Bond films: 5.

Bond flirts with Moneypenny, something I never really got in the early films as Louis Maxwell looks, sounds and acts just like your gran, although at this point in time she just about fits Roger Moore’s age bracket. The Minister of Defence is joined by the Chief of Staff (whoever the hell that is, I still can’t get over “First Sea Lord”), who’s a walking stereotype with a pipe. Bond automatically knows about the A.T.A.C (Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator) because he knows sodding everything, and the Chief of Staff informs him that in the wrong hands A.T.A.C could be used to make British submarines attack their own cities. So let’s recap:

• The ship was taken out by a common WW2 mine
• The A.T.A.C self-destruct switch was positioned just in the wrong place should the ship fill with water
• The Russians already knew about it
• It can be used to attack other submarines and British cities

I don’t know about you, but this strikes me as an accident that was waiting to happen. As if there wasn’t enough exposition already, it turns out that the scene with the boat was because the Havelock family were secretly trying to locate the ship for MI6 in “Operation Undertow”. The Chief of Staff gives Bond a title drop.

That’s it Bond, make sure the camera can see it!

Bond goes to Madrid to track down the Havelocks’ killer, but there’s so much exposition that the audience is left baffled. He arrives in a white Lotus Esprit as Lotus were still paying sackfuls of cash to be the official James Bond car at this point, and all I can wonder is if this one can go underwater like the one in the Spy Who Loved Me. Probably not a huge need for that feature while you’re miles in-land.

References to or reminders of better Bond films: 6.

Bond infiltrates an estate where a pool party is taking place by walking around the back of the building. Seeing an elderly Moore spying on dozens of half-naked ladies makes for a creepy picture. The killer, a man named Gonzalez, is there and receives a suitcase full of cash from a man with glasses. Bond notices a figure creeping about nearby when suddenly he’s pounced upon by a black man following the crack of a branch (because everyone knows that black people live in trees). Bond is apprehended and Gonzalez automatically deduces he’s from MI6 just from the fact he’s carrying a Walther PPK. Okay…

• How is it common knowledge that the Walther is the standard issue for British agents?
• Just because the guy is carrying a Walther it doesn’t mean he’s a British agent. That’s like saying that someone is a Russian agent because they carry an AK47!

Bond is led away, apparently not too concerned about escaping (hey, it worked out alright in Goldfinger; perhaps he was just waiting for the right time to rape someone). Gonzalez is suddenly shot and killed by a crossbow bolt. Using the distraction Bond escapes, utilising a parasol to leap from a tall wall like he’s bloody Mary Poppins. He bumps into Melina, who’s now in full Domino-from-Thunderball mode in that she’s killing motherf*ckers like nobody’s business with her crossbow.

References to or reminders of better Bond films: 7.

Meanwhile, two thugs are trying to break into Bond’s Lotus, which is marked as “burglar protected”. A thug hits the door with his gun and the car explodes. Obviously Lotus didn’t pay enough this time around. The application of the “burglar alarm” does make you wonder as to how sensitive it is. What if a cyclist clips the parked vehicle? What if a car nudges into it while parallel parking? Most importantly, why didn’t we get to see the scene where Q introduces this gadget?

“Here’s your new car Bond. It’s a submarine but it also completely disintegrates upon touch. You know, just like a regular Lotus. Also I had my car stolen earlier this year so now I’m being extra cautious by placing nitro-glycerine in the doors of all the cars I work with.”

With Bond’s ride trashed by an over-zealous anti-theft device, he and Melina have to get away in the only alternative: Melina’s bright yellow Citroen 2CV. I’m not sure which is worse – that the Citroen is this film’s Bond car or the implication that Citroen paid more cash that Lotus to get their car to take the limelight. While making their escape, the following exchange happens:

Bond: “Who are you?”
Melina: “He killed my parents.”
Bond: “Pleasure to meet you Ms. Killedmyparents, or should I call you ‘He’?”

Okay, I made that last bit up, but it’s still an awkward bit of dialogue. You have to wonder if she says that to everyone.

In one of the least thrilling chase sequences ever put to film, we watch the Citroen flip over and get picked back up by helpful villagers, the pursuers get held up by traffic, Bond gets villagers to push-start the car, the Citroen rolls down a hill at the slightest nudge, the Citroen brakes suddenly and causes the pursuers to collide, one of the pursuing cars gets flipped over down a hill, some crops are ruined, and it all ends with one of the pursuing cars getting stuck in a tree (which just reminds me of the bit in Moonraker where Jaws crashes his car vertically into a house and walks out unsullied).

References to or reminders of better Bond films: 8.

Before you disagree that the Citroen was this film’s Bond car, Corgi models used to produce all the toys for the Bond films and you know what toy car they made for this film? The f*cking Citroen. I have to call it that, because I’m the kind of obsessive person who buys anything in a series and I currently have a toy Citroen sat in my cabinet next to all the cool Bond cars (it comes complete with realistic flipping hood!).

Back in London, Bond is chastised for letting Gonzalez get killed. There’s an oblique reference to having to inform the Prime Minister and that “she’ll have our guts for garters!” because it’s the ’80’s! During the Thatcher regime! Woo!

Fearing a fate worse than death, Bond quotes the exact line of his report where he says he saw a man with glasses and is told to use “the identigraph”, which turns out to be one of Q’s latest inventions. Q is annoyed when Bond remarks “I see you managed to get the Lotus back together again” upon seeing a red Lotus sat in Q branch, which doesn’t make a lick of sense as the explosive anti-burglar device was probably his invention to begin with (this is a man who is so anti-theft that he installed an ejector seat into the passenger side of an Aston Martin). I’m going to have to increase the counter because the panel on the door to the identigraph room plays “Nobody does it better” from The Spy Who Loved Me.

References to or reminders of better Bond films: 9.

The identigraph turns out to be a police identikit computer that looks like every computer in films during the 80’s – green lines on a black background. Bond somehow knows exactly what positions each facial feature should be in despite only seeing the man with glasses briefly once.

“I said ‘lips fuller’, Q. Not ‘gay stereotype’.”

Several hours later and the picture is complete. Somehow the computer automatically equates this to a real person and spits out a criminal profile of a guy called Emile Locque, despite the line drawing possibly matching the looks of hundreds of people.

Bond goes to the Italian mountains. This next section is so dull that I’m just going to summarise it.

• Bond takes a cable car up the mountain and is greeted by an Italian moustache-less Inspector Clouseau wannabe called “Luigi”. This just reminds me that Roger Moore once played Clouseau after the Inspector had plastic surgery (Trail of the Pink Panther).
• We’re introduced to an Olympic skater less than half Bond’s age and pray that he won’t f*ck her, as well as the Olympian’s blatantly lesbian coach.
• We meet a guy called Kristatos, who’ll almost certainly betray Bond later.
• Bond goes for a carriage ride with Melina.
• Bond doesn’t screw the under-age Olympic athlete (there is a God!).
• Bond goes skiing and inevitably gets chased, this time by a Red Grant (From Russia with Love) wannabe with a hunting rifle, and then by a bunch of thugs on motorcycles.
• There’s a lot of f*cking skiing, oh god the skiing.
• Not-Red Grant picks up a motorcycle and throws it at Bond, failing miserably.
• Bond gets assaulted by a hockey team after saying goodbye to the under-age Olympic jail-bait at an indoor skating rink.
• The audience pauses to wonder what the hell any of this had to do with retrieving the A.T.A.C.

The only memorable moment is while watching the earlier pursuit, you’re casually trying to keep an interest when wait…is that…

“Hello? I’ve just shot somebody and I did it on purpose! I said, I have murdered a man and I want to confess!”

That’s Charles m*therf*cking Dance, and you’ve cast him as a common thug with no lines. This is the man who would go on to play some of the greatest villains of all time! You bastards!

For half an hour FYEO manages to ape On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, The Spy Who Loved Me and From Russia with Love and fails to surpass any moment from any of those three films.

References to or reminders of better Bond films: 12.

The film shits itself at this point and just wallows in slow-moving exposition excrement for what seems like forever. Bond goes to the casino and has dinner with Kristatos despite not catching on to the fact the guy has blatantly been trying to have him killed for the past week, and even on re-watching just for this blog I can’t really see what any of this has to do with the A.T.A.C. Bond seems to have got hung up on chasing Kristatos’ nemesis Columbo on the grounds that “he might be able to fund a salvage operation to retrieve the A.T.A.C before the British government”. I think “Faffing Around Only” would have been a more apt title for this film.

And then Bond gets distracted by a Countess for a while and there’s a bit where the two of them are walking along a beach only to be attacked by thugs in beach buggies…wait, you’re ripping off On Her Majesty’s Secret Service again? For Christ’s sake!

The audience wakes up for a bit when Bond meets with Columbo, because he’s played by Topol, a man so cool he only has one name. Topol reveals to Bond that he’s really the good guy and Kristatos is an arsehole, but we missed most of this exposition because one of Topol’s most famous roles was in Fiddler on the Roof and we got distracted by Rolf Harris’ cover of “If I was a rich man”.

Columbo takes Bond to ambush Locque and there’s a sub-par action sequence with a gun fight, ending with Bond defeating Locque with cartoon physics; Locque crashes his car so it’s perched on a cliff, and Bond throws a badge into the car – just enough weight to cause it to topple off down the cliff (alright, Bond does actually give it a poke with his foot too because the film won’t even commit to over-the-top comedy). Against all Bond film conventions, this film is so disinterested in itself at this point that Locque’s car doesn’t even explode upon hitting the ground.

“Damn it, car! You missed your mark! Hit the rocks, then explode!”

As if the skiing wasn’t bad enough, we now have extended scenes of scuba diving while Bond finally gets around to looking for the A.T.A.C. This takes the sodding Mickey. Nothing could kill my interest in a film more than watching stunt divers in face-concealing gear faff around underwater. It’s terrible because the film feels like it’s trying to be Jaws for a little bit (complete with a tepid “jump scare” involving a shark), and there are protracted scenes of Bond and Melina in a small submarine that isn’t half as cool or interesting as the Lotus in The Spy Who Loved Me. In fact, I’d rather sit through Thunderball and I f*cking hate Thunderball. Hell, Tomorrow Never Dies had a sequence almost identical to this, and I remember its version of scavenging a sunken vessel being much more interesting!

References to or reminders of better Bond films: 15.

Bond blows up a deep sea suit and gets into a submarine-on-submarine fight. He retrieves the A.T.A.C (which is apparently completely waterproof, unlike the ship it was housed in) and is promptly captured along with Melina when resurfacing. Kristatos ties them together, throws them off the back of his boat and takes them for a ride, until they escape by tying the rope around a big rock and cutting their bonds on some coral. All seems lost until the parrot saves the day by barking out where Kristatos intends to meet the Russians to give them the A.T.A.C – St. Cyril’s, which turns out to be a monastery on top of a massive lump of rock in Greece.

Topol helps Bond to get there, and Bond is left to climb the rock by himself because Topol is far too cool for that shit. Oh hey, pubic mound!

Huh.

It’s the last twenty minutes and the audience begins to wake up again because the film gets quite good from this point on. Bond’s scaling the cliff with his bare hands, which is something not ripped off from another Bond film. It’s a sheer drop and the scale is amazing, it’s even quite tense because the camera zooms out to show the stuntman climbing the rock-face and he’s tiny against its bulk. You don’t realise it but your brain appreciates it because it subconsciously thinks “some poor sod actually had to climb up there just so they could get this shot”.

At the top a guard spots him and boots him in the face. Bond is left dangling as the thug notices Bond’s other rock clamps. In a pretty awesome act of desperation, Bond unlaces his shoes and uses the laces to gain purchase on the rope and climb. Meanwhile, the thug at the top (rather than call for help or just shoot Bond’s rock clamps out with his gun) wants to show off how big his balls are and ties a rope to a pole to descend down the cliff-face. Bond is making progress but the thug knocks out two of the clamps while he climbs.

“I can see no negative outcome in slowly lowering myself over a cliff-face while not being tied to the rope and not telling any of my associates about what I’m doing. GOD MY BALLS FEEL SO BIG RIGHT NOW”

Bond hits the guy with a throwing knife and the nameless thug plummets to his doom. Farewell nameless thug, the size of your balls will be admired forever, as will how you almost kicked James Bond’s arse to death. Bond lowers a basket lift to let Topol, Melina and Topol’s men up to the monastery. All the while, General Gogol is approaching the rendezvous point by helicopter. There’s sneaking, followed by a melee in which Bond shoves not-Red Grant out a window and he rolls down the cliff to his death, and Topol chases Kristatos as he runs to hand over the A.T.A.C.

It ends with Bond holding the A.T.A.C in front of Gogol, at gunpoint. Rather than hand it over, Bond launches it off the cliff and it smashes to pieces, as if to say “f*ck you” to the audience. We’ve just sat through two hours of faffing around on snow, under water and rock climbing to find this damn thing, and Bond has it for literally five seconds before destroying it. Bond wittily remarks “that’s détente, comrade. You don’t have it, and I don’t have it”. Yeah, but MI6 has a shit-load more of these back home, right? Right?

Rather than have this thorn in his side shot dead, Gogol laughs and walks away.

Bond has sexytimes with Domino Melina. MI6 try to put Bond through to the Prime Minister, but he let’s the parrot do the talking instead while he gets it on with Melina, who says “for your eyes only, darling” as he undresses her. Wait, what? How does that make any sense? That’s like undressing some bird and her saying “my breasts are private and confidential, my dear”.

The film ends with a “hilarious” exchange as Margaret Thatcher talks to the parrot, thinking it’s Bond.

F*ck you.

Credits roll, there’s more bloody scuba diving while they do.

So how is the film overall?

Bloody hell does this thing drag its feet. It’s two hours long, and the progression is a lot of exposition thrown at the viewer all at once followed by a random scene change, rinse and repeat. It feels like a disconnected series of Bond doing things in different places. It’s only half way through (an hour in!) when you realise that Bond hasn’t got anywhere in locating the A.T.A.C and that you have no idea why he is where he is or what he’s trying to do!

On top of that, the villains are rubbish. Ironically, despite being a joke villain, Bald Man in Wheelchair is the most memorable antagonist in this. All the other villains don’t really stand out, and if they win then so what? The Russians get a bit of British kit and the British will have to come up with some means to counteract it. It’s not quite WW3, is it?

I now long for a genuinely bad Bond film now, because writing about this little squirt of nothing has been agonising. For Your Eyes Only is a mere cum stain on the trouser leg of history that is the Bond franchise.

Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | August 17, 2012 at 8:26 pm | Films, James Bond, Three Blokes and a Chick Watch | No comment

Tags: 007, bad film, For Your Eyes Only, James Bond, movie recap, movie review, Roger Moore