Review: Moonraker (1979)

 

We've discussed lately a good Bond flick, a middling one, and now we go into the bounds of unhinged lunacy. If you haven't seen this one, you've probably guessed just from the poster that it's The One Where Bond Goes To Space. But it's more than that. It's also the one where Bond drives a hovercraft gondola through the middle of Venice for no reason. It's the one where the henchman saves the day with a random romance out of nowhere. And it's the one that epitomizes the classic Bond villain tendency of conjuring the most long-winded death possible!

Speaking of villains, the one here is played by the recently deceased Michael Lonsdale, for whom we'll give a moment--a talented actor, who, as we'll get into, remains one of the highlights of the film (see also Day of the Jackal). Even despite the way his character's written, every line drips with cold smugness, and he really nails the deadpan delivery that makes for some nicely memorable lines--what more could you ask for a preposterous bad guy who shops for clothes at Obvious Maniacs R Us?

I have the same reaction to people nagging me to watch Tiger King. 

Let's start with the plot...er...such as it is. Bond, fresh after defeating one crazed industrialist with world-genocide scheming last time, finds himself immediately facing yet another one, in an eerily simialr scenario. Almost as if the writers were scrambling something together straight after producers decided to hop on the Star Wars bandwagon of the late seventies and decided it wasn't worth wasting the cliffnotes. Here, he finds himself pursuing Lonsdale's Hugo Drax after the mysterious theft of a space shuttle. Drax is so unstable that he orders Bond dead straight after he steps in his front door, even though he wouldn't otherwise have a clue against him--but of course, it has to be via the first of many deathtraps Austin Powers would laugh at years later! 

But, if nothing else, Lonsdale's performance gives Drax the air of someone so full of themselves, in such epic proportion, that he apparently just views Bond as an annoying minor impediment that exists solely to 'amuse me'. Much like in the original book, Drax has a very dim view of British people, leading to a couple of genuinely amusing interactions that include him taking shots at the concept of afternoon tea. At least he didn't put Benny Hill up as the epitome of the UK's cultural output. 

After that, we get pretty much Bond stumbling from one exotic location to another via very convenient clues that might as well say 'Go to here dumbass' on the labels. Another thing you'll quickly notice is that the tone is kind of schizophrenic--literally, we follow one scene with Moore smugly mouthing off, to something out of a horror movie, where Drax dispatches a lady subordinate Bond seduced with hunting dogs. There's no last-second intervention, there's just a drawn out and eerily scored sequence of her running in helplessness. I mean I guess it sells Drax as been utterly evil, but not long after we get a drawn-out scene of Bond being chased around Venice in a gondola that also turns amphibious, and drives it in front of the whole city with a smug grin. It's bizarre, but just so utterly stupid it turns into hilarity. That they even toss in a reaction shot from a pigeon is just the cherry on top. 

Along the way Bond meets CIA operative Holly Goodhead (hey, at least it's not as bad as Pussy Galore), played by Lois Chiles, who is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, her character's a pretty capable secret agent, able to tussle with bad guys and smart enough to fly a space shuttle completely impromptu. On the other, the direction Chiles was seemingly given was 'mild boredom punctuated with slight distress like when you're not sure when you left your house keys'. 

And we can't go by without mentioning the other star--Richard Kiel's iconic henchman Jaws. In the last film, Jaws was a pretty formidable force, akin to a proto-Terminator, executing people with his metal teeth and standing up even after getting slammed by vans. Here, he's basically just bumbling comic relief, with the camera getting every bizarre expression Kiel's otherwise mostly mute performance can muster. That is, apart from another pseudo horror-movie scene that comes out of nowhere that's then immediately ruined by the day being saved not by Bond, but random Brazilian carnival goers. It's like the script is being fought over by a semi-professional and a monkey on Jack Daniels, but I can't deny not finding it idiotic fun.

I had much the same reaction to Sean Connery's underwear shoot in Zardoz.

Eventually, of course, Bond and Holly go into space, after tracking Drax to his Amazonian base and surviving yet another pointless deathtrap because 'shoot with gun' is too passe a solution. For the time, a lot of the outer space shots are actually pretty impressive and nicely done, and Drax's ludicrously massive space station is a commendable piece of modelwork (apparently its destruction was done by the crew just firing shotguns at the model, which is the sort of fun you just can't have with CGI!). There soon comes a massive laser battle with US space Marines and Drax henchpeople, zero-gravity shenanigans, and Jaws turning to the side of good entirely because of an aside glance from his spontaneous bespectacled girlfriend, I kid you not. Lonsdale gets one more moment to shine as Drax loses all vestiges of composure, which lasts only a few seconds but is effective enough, before he gets sucked into space and is all well. 

Moonraker is quite simply a mess--you'll find it either insultingly stupid, or gut-bustingly hilariously stupid. I lean to the latter camp--though the script is pretty much one silly sequence after another strung together with stuff flimsier than the stunt double's bow tie, I can't help but go along with this imbecilic ride. And, to be fair, there's enough effects work particularly near the end that is pretty decent for the era and holds up well enough today--as well as more than a few memorable lines of dialogue from the bad guy that only Lonsdale's sardonic demeanour could sell. John Barry's score once again isn't half bad either, and as far as the waves of Star Wars cashing in around this time go, it's a step above Battle Beyond the Stars at least.

That's it for Bond for the time being--we'll likely see how No Time to Die pans out soon enough I hope, and to which category it'll ultimately fall into. Whether a greying Craig will go out with a bang, a whimper, or just a quizzical expression, I certainly look forward to one last ride with him. And hopefully we'll get a bad guy with a real crazed and wonderfully stupid scheme like old times again!