For Your Eyes Only (1981) – Review

After the rather over-the-top science fiction adventure that was Moonraker, the producers decided maybe a return to a more down-to-Earth setting was in order, something more in keeping with the novels written by 007 author Ian Fleming, and thus in this entry Bond hangs up his laser gun and tackles KGB agents and a revenge-seeking woman with a more plausible flare. This is not to say that the filmmakers were interested in making a faithful adaption of a Fleming book, that’s just not going to happen, but they hoped to make one that was, at least, a little less farfetched and a tad more grounded.

The first thing to note is that For Your Eyes Only was not a novel but a collection of short stories, including the titles From a View to a Kill, For Your Eyes Only, Quantum of Solace, Risico and The Hildebrand Rarity, and the plot of the short story For Your Eyes Only was about an elderly British couple who refused to sell their Jamaican home to a former Gestapo officer who was currently working as the chief of counterintelligence for the Cuban secret service. When the couple is murdered the angered M, who was friends of the family, sends Bond on an unsanctioned mission to assassinate the ex-Nazi as a warning to future criminals who might think of targeting British citizens. When Bond arrives on the scene he finds the daughter on her own mission of revenge, with a bow and arrow.

In the movie, she is upgraded to a crossbow.

The plot of the movie surrounds the accidental sinking of the British spy vessel St Georges, which stupidly netted an old naval mine, but onboard the ship is the ATAC system (Automatic Targeting Attack Communicator) which is what the Ministry of Defence uses to communicate with and co-ordinate the Royal Navy’s fleet of Polaris submarines. When a marine archeologist and his wife are murdered, after being secretly tasked by the British government to find the sunken ship, James Bond (Roger Moore) is sent to Greece to retrieve the device before the Soviets can get their communist little hands on it. Things get complicated when the first link in the chain of killers is murdered by Melina Havelock (Carole Bouquet), daughter of the murdered archeologist, and she vowed revenge on the men responsible for their deaths. And who is the man behind the murders and the hunt for the ATAC system? Could it be the charismatic Greek smuggler Milos Columbo (Topol) or his ex-partner Aristotle Kristatos (Julian Glover), a former war hero turned smuggler whose every action screams Double Agent?

“I’ll also betray Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, so don’t feel too bad.”

It should be noted that if Bond had simply destroyed the ATAC, after finding it aboard the sunken St Georges, the movie would have ended 30-minutes earlier, but instead of following procedure, he disarms the self-destruct mechanism and basically hands it over to the villains. The device is eventually destroyed at the film’s climax, so all that silly rigmarole does is allow us time to go on a scenic detour to the beautiful Monastery of the Holy Trinity in Greece so we can “witness” a 54-year-old Roger Moore scaling the 400 metres high rocky precipice as if he were Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 2.

“We’ll have the final confrontation there, it will be as exciting as it is pointless.”

Stray Observations:

• Blofeld trying to kill Bond during the pre-credit sequence was a pretty dickish thing to do, even by supervillain standards, Bond was visiting the grave of his late wife and you’d think there would be some sort of honour among enemies that would prevent such a tasteless act, but apparently not.
• Why would an officer be handcuffed to the ATAC console? Was British Intelligence afraid someone would grab it and run off with the thing? Also, being handcuffed to something that can sink is an intrinsically bad idea.
• The ATAC can apparently transmit to British submarines and order them to launch their Polaris ballistic missiles, but the idea that the Ministry of Defence couldn’t simply have their subs turn off the ATAC receivers is a bit ridiculous.
• Bond’s Lotus Esprit is “Burglar Protected” which means it explodes if someone tries to break into it, now, one must admit this is a bit extreme and if done by just a regular car thief, in a populated area, it could lead to innocent casualties.
• They send hockey players to take out Bond, seriously?  Is this a Bond film or a sequel Slap Shot?
• We do get a young Charles Dance as one of the villainous henchmen, so that’s nice.

“A Lannister always pays his debts.”

I can understand the filmmakers wanting to return to a more grounded Bond, one that is closer to what was found in the earlier films, but those were the Connery days and Roger Moore’s Bond wasn’t quite up portraying a Bond from those grittier spy thrillers. What we have here is a James Bond who travels from one exotic locale to another yet none of these trips really serve the plot, instead, they simply set up the next action set-piece and the “dramatic” moments between these bouts of action don’t really add up to much and certainly not helped by French actress Carole Bouquet whose vacant expression throughout the film had me wondering if she were on valium. I’m not saying Bouquet is the worst Bond girl in the franchise but she is easily the most forgettable.

Maybe the very idea of bedding James Bond requires a drug supplement.

This outing moves back towards a more ruthless Bond, an aspect that Roger Moore was against, and though the action sequences on display are quite spectacular nothing really stands out – the ski chase pales in comparison to the one found in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and this one resulted in the death of a stuntman – and once again we have Bond bedding some poor woman only to have her killed by the villains in the very next scene. It seems that for every attempted step forward the franchise took two steps back. That all said there are, of course, some solid adventurous elements to For Your Eyes Only and both Topol and Julian Glover were fun to watch while Moore brings a nice sense of sadness and gravitas to his world-weary superspy, but unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to overcome the key problem with the film, which is the fact that there simply wasn’t enough story to keep everything afloat – the hunt for the sunken AVAC system just wasn’t all that interesting and a bit too close to the plot of Thunderball – and Roger Moore embarrassing himself with younger actress each film only gets worse from here.

Could he possibly look any more uncomfortable?