Man with the Golden Bum
[spoilers follow]
For the first half an hour and a bit, The Man with the Golden Gun is a noir thriller, all dark shades and man against the world. Then kung fu happens and it becomes a huge fucken mess.
There's no other way to put it. You can't say whether it's a good film because while it's full of good bits, it's full of terribad shit too. What's good? The dark tone of the early bit of the film is excellent. Bond is hard and ugly and I like it (although the scene where he beats a woman to get her to talk is the wrong kind of ugly -- it's quite gratuitous and more proof, if it were needed, that the makers of the film simply hate women). Christopher Lee is an awesome, creepy villain -- the scene where he tells Bond how he got into murdering is genuinely chilling. Some of the action is fun, although it's low on thrills. But the downbeat feel is quite alluring.
However, that brings us to the bad. The jarring "humour". JW, the least funny comic character ever. The midget. The kung fu schoolgirls. The dismissal of Chinese people yet again as just bootfodder. A top villain who didn't do anything of any interest and seemed to exist only for Lee to kill.
And then there's Britt Ekland. Oh my fuck. She is bad. The worst of it is he seduces Maud Adams first when she's actually in his bed (hiding) and then when she's in a wardrobe. Then he tells her her time will come. She should fucken castrate him. But no, she throws herself at him. And Roger Moore just isn't that kind of guy, no matter how you look at it.
Then they kill Scaramanga in the weakest way, as though they couldn't be bothered with a decent end, and in fact, they kind of ruined this for Lee by letting him establish that he was a great character and then not having anything good for him to do.
All in all, it had its fun moments, but it just didn't get there. There's a decent film trying to get out but it just couldn't decide whether it would be that film or whether it would be comedy thriller. In the end it's nothing much. C/D I think and most of that is down to Lee.
posted by Dr Zen @ 8:04 pm
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