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Reviews of films

Octopussy

There are a few James Bond films which people don't tend to know much about. The names are more or less familiar but press them to a chair and ask for a précis and they would flounder. Die Another Day, For Your Eyes Only, The Living Daylights - you might get a hum of the theme tune and a confident prediction of who played Bond but more than that and you'd know you've found a fan. Octopussy fits into this category too - though has the benefit of a wonderfully memorable name. All I remembered about it was the 00 agent dressed as a clown being killed by circus folk and a Faberge egg. I would later learn that classic Bond theme "All Time High" was owned by Octopussy and not - as I thought because it sounded logical - Moonraker. Moonraker has a fantastically forgettable Shirley Bassey number which is the least memorable part of her lung busting trilogy.

Octopussy does, of course, have an awful lot of famous bits in it. It has the little plane that is hidden in a horse box and which flies through a hanger and lets the missile that was following blow the baddies up with their own petard. It also has the spot where Bond is sliding down the banister and finds his bits and pieces are about to be scrambled by a stone figure at the foot of the staircase. It even has Bond saving the world while dressed as a clown and who is going to forget that? So it has memorable bits so why is it not more well known?

I think the problem with it is that the story itself is extremely thin. Basically, and you can quote me on this, the entire story is an atomic bomb being placed in a US air base in Germany. When it goes off, the West will turn its back on nuclear weapons and the way will be clear for the USSR to help itself to Western Europe. That's it - a bomb, an airbase, the end. Everything else is pure window dressing. The Faberge eggs, the jewel smuggling, Octopussy and her island of young ladies, Kahn, India - everything. It's all just stuff that happens to fill an hour and a quarter before the bomb is put on the train and taken to the base. It isn't bad window dressing. As padding goes it's pretty good. largely derivative of course (how exactly does the chase through the Indian village differ from every other chase through a city, except that it's in India and they're driving Indian cars?) but still fun. Where it falls down is in being suddenly complicated - we have three baddies (the General, Kahn and Octopussy) and at least one of them is being double crossed by at least one of the others. It forces the audience - i.e. me - to come out of our cosy "This is proper James Bond goodness" stupor and actually work out what is going on. Once we do that we realise that nothing in the first 75 minutes means anything.

The pre-titles sequence is fantastic. Bond tries to place a bomb in an experimental foreign aircraft but he's discovered. He escapes captivity with the aid of his pretty young assistant and a small plane hidden behind a horse's backside. It is everything you want in a Bond opening - it's huge, it's fun, it is audacious and things blow up in a really enjoyable way. I don't want to criticise Quantum of Solace (just because it's the worst Bond film ever made and should by rights be cut out of the franchise like a tumour) but Octopussy's opening scene is everything QofS's car chase wasn't. When Bond ran out of petrol and had to land his little plane he steered it into a bumpkin's petrol station. "Fill her up" says James. We know we're in for a good couple of hours.

I'm not really sure what the point of Octopussy - the character - was. Apart from providing some much needed glamour, she seemed to serve no real purpose. Yes, it was her circus that was the cover for the bomb smuggling but that's it. And how did an Indian jewel smuggler and cult leader come to have a European circus while we're at it? It makes absolutely no sense that she'd split her time between giving spiritual succour to her army of eager young ladies, smuggling fake treasures around the world and running a circus. It's like they planned this film, realised there were lots of things missing and created her to fill all those gaps. It looks to me - and I've no proof of this - that they wanted her to be the main villain but got cold feet and decided it had to be a man. Octopussy as the Big Bad would've worked. Tentacles in every pie - that would've been her gimmick. But instead she is just there. Have a plot hole? Cover it with a line and say she does it. She's nominally in charge but is so easily betrayed by Kahn and the General that you wonder how she got to be the head of anything, let alone a network.

The film has a few truly shameless spots - the sort of glorious silliness that Bond gravitates towards and which, every so often, he must be pulled away from in a fit of "realism". The rather dour Dalton era was a reaction to the excesses of Roger Moore just as the "gritty" new Craig era is a response to the antics of Brosnan's later films. When you have Bond swinging through the jungle on vines and making the Tarzan sound you do begin to wonder whether the franchise has jumped the shark. But take away the sound effect and it is no sillier than Bond running on the alligators' heads in Live and Let Die. It's silly but in a good way. Equally, the cut from Bond saying "Play with your asp" to a snake charmer to a woman's bikini clad backside is too much but it made me smile. Smile because it's how we want Bond to be. We want it to be shameless.

I enjoyed the first hour of Octopussy but the second hour began to drag. There was too much faffing around with trains - most of which really seemed to be padding - and not enough fun. That was where the sudden injection of plot took me by surprise. Were there two identical trains which were switched in the tunnel? Or did I get the wrong end of that particular stick? I was assuming there had to be as they spent so long on the trains but maybe there wasn't - maybe the switch was just the jewels for the bomb. I don't really care to be honest. There was no obvious reason why Kahn would want to help the General blow up an American airbase (as it would destroy the circus which was his distribution route, unsettle Europe which was his main market and kill Octopussy who was his principle ally) nor why the General would choose to trust a jewel smuggler to help him plunge Europe into crisis by detonating an atomic bomb. But these are mere quibbles - the plot of the film is so slight that it can comfortably be ignored because...

Oh yes - they have one last moment to delight us even after the bomb has been disarmed.

...during the climactic battle between Kahn's men and Octopussy's young ladies, we wonder where Bond is during this tussle. And then a hot air balloon - a Union Jack hot air balloon - glides into view. Bond and Q literally flying to the rescue. In a hot air balloon. It makes no sense but it is fantastic. Octopussy is topped and tailed by sheer Bond magic. The sort of goodness we wouldn't get much longer. Maybe they'll rediscover the outrageous silliness of the Moore era. Maybe Daniel Craig will get his chance to be entertaining. Or maybe not. There weren't many jokes in the Bourne Trilogy so I can't imagine anyone will think of putting jokes in a Bond film again for many years.

So Octopussy can be seen as massively sexist, generally pointless and one of the low points for serious spy drama action films or it can be seen as a sexy, funny, brilliantly inventive film which puts a smile on the audiences face and which - if you suspend your disbelief - you can't help but enjoy. It has its slow bits but it ends up being one of the gems of the Roger Moore era.