Review of The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) by Vidyabum — 22 Oct 2021

Having watched 25 Bonds from Dr.No to Skyfall, I place this one at 13/25.

The Man With the Golden Gun is fascinating to cricitise because there is so much to say. Right from his start with Live and Let Die, Moore entered like a dog in aHaving watched 25 Bonds from Dr.No to Skyfall, I place this one at 13/25.

The Man With the Golden Gun is fascinating to cricitise because there is so much to say.

Right from his start with Live and Let Die, Moore entered like a dog in a bowling game. His first movie was terrible and it was in great part due to him playing his old role and being a pompous prancing bourgeois.

For Golden Gun, they decided to force him to be serious, to be hard. And boy, did he catch that boat and ride it. We get to see Roger Moore threaten people with castration by rifle, we get to see him slap a woman in the face HARD, he threatens, he beats, he throws, it's a movie that aims to correct the excesses of the last one by whole new excesses in the other direction.

And Moore delivered. He really did a great job on a movie that was decidedly against his style.

However, Golden Gun had other problems. I often complain about the villains falling flat, well not here: Christopher Lee not only makes a good villain, but most importantly, we're rid of the old daring 00 agent VS Evil CEO/Scientist/madman. Scaramanga is a brilliant mirror to James Bond, a killer to a killer, a woman user to a womanizer, a man famous for his skills to one equally famous. The famous "we're not so different, you and I" speech comes from this movie, and by God, they really did it justice. Or they would have.

I also liked the character of Nick Nack and the setting in Hong Kong was simply wonderful.

With a great villain, a strong Moore, good theming and style, this would be a wonderful Bond. And then there's the 3 big problems.

1: The Cop Character. Now you can like him or hate him, I hate him with a passion, but I suspect someone at EON who wrote plots was humiliated by the american police at some point, because there is the humiliation of the police in Diamonds, then the horribly stupid, ugly, redneck cop character in Live and Let Die, and now that same character, is somehow in Thailand and this time, doesn't just provide bad comic relief, he gets on Bond's car, and latches on to the movie for 15 whole minutes, killing everything.

2: The comic relief. This is where the movie gets a bit schizophrenic. Golden Gun is a decidedly very dark Bond in several ways. But they tried to balance it out with the aforementioned cop, with the extremely stupid "noob agent" bond girl they shoehorned in, with lots of just disruptive scenes and moments that kill the mood.

3: The kung-fu, and if I mentioned schizophrenia with the comic relief, it's nothing compared to this. After some 25% of the movie being a very dark and interesting Bond take, we have a (very stupid) scene where instead of finishing off Bond when he's down, someone orders that he gets "taken to school". The "school" is a martial arts school, where Bond wakes up surrounded by three women cleaning his nails and body(???), he then sees two students fight and murder one another(?????) and then is invited to fight, after which, realising he can't win, he jumps out a barbed window, not having any idea if he's on the 1st or 6th floor(??????), where a fellow agent just instantly finds him, picks him up, while his two 15 year old nieces destroy the entire 40-ish student body with their kung-fu(????????????). After that, the agent drives away, leaving Bond behind in some of the dumbest comedy I've ever seen, and the viewer is served with a long chase sequence. It's a massive WTF moment, perhaps one of the biggest in the series. This entire part lasts about 20 minutes, and considering the movie came out in 1975, this is one of the worst cases of cramming something popular to latch on to a fad.

There are other issues like the very strange directing for the last part of the movie where it feels like Moore and Lee are having a casual friends talk while Lee exposes his Evil Plan, and it's a bummer that they just sort of drop the very interesting "we're not so different, you and I" conversation, that was clearly not going Bond's way.

But really, the 20 minutes of terrible kung-fu, the 15 minutes of redneck cop, and the generally bad comic relief, all killed the vibe of a movie that could have stood as one of the greatest Bonds. The end result is a fascinating, but ultimately failed Bond movie.