Movie Review - For Your Eyes Only

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Spoiler alerts After the over the top excesses of Moonraker, with its spaceships, space station, laser rifles and giant snake, this is quite a low key Bond adventure, from 1981 with more emphasis on character and drama than spectacle. It looks like a relatively low budget movie compared to many of 007’s outings. A really interesting touch is the guessing game as to just who the villain pursuing a code reading devise (similar to that in From Russia With Love) is; Topol’s bullion smuggler, or Julian Glover’s drug dealer. Glover is ultimately seen as the real bad guy of the piece. Topol and his gang behave like wartime resistance fighters with a touch of Robin Hood roguery about them. There are great Greek island locations, and largely silent but sinister menacing killers, rather than over the top figures like Jaws or Oddjob. The running over of Cassandra on the beach, and the figure calmly using mini-sub claws to tear apart Bond’s submersible are well handled. The mountaineering scenes work really well, though the underwater stuff is less convincing. The ruined underwater Acropolis with its classical statues standing upright in clear water after 3,000 years in impeccable condition is preposterous. The keel-hauling scene, actually borrowed from the book of Live & Let Die, works well, but Glover’s villain just giving up trying this is anti-climactic. There are fun moments; the Saab car chase with the car tumbling like a ball and standing on its wheels again is funny, as is the loss of the Lotus Esprit which explodes when a window is broken – odd when previous cars have been bullet and shatter-proof. A neat touch is the womanizing Bond pursued by a teenage girl with a crush on him, having to rapidly get out of a situation he’d normally find seductive. Carole Bouquet is a sultry but rather dull Bond girl, but overall I liked this, but it felt more Alastair McLean than Ian Fleming. Sheena Easton’s theme song is under-rated and she is the only performer to appear as herself singing a Bond theme over the opening and closing credits to date. I have added the song as a Youtube here. Arthur Chappell