Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Bond Films: Diamonds Are Forever

Diamonds Are Forever is the second bad Bond film I've seen. It's hard to say it's better or worse than You Only Live Twice; it's bad in a different way. It's a little campy, as if Bond wandered into a Batman TV show version of the Bond-o-verse, which makes sense given at one point Adam West was considered as a replacement for George Lazenby. Diamonds Are Forever has a couple of good points to it, notably a cop-car chase, and a reasonable (for a Bond film) plot, but otherwise, it's poorly executed.

The basic plot of Diamonds Are Forever is: after apparently killing Blofeld, Bond is set on the case of an underground diamond smuggling ring. Posing in place of a member of the transportation chain, Bond meets the girl (played by Jill St. John) and follows clues to Vegas. At one point, he drives a moon buggy off a completely unexplained moon landing set. Eventually he learns that Blofeld is actually alive, and has used the diamonds to build and launch a space-based death ray. Bond finds Blofeld's hideout on an offshore oil rig, and after sabotaging the death ray controls, escapes and heads on a voyage with the girl.

A pair of villainous henchman are straight out of an U.N.C.L.E. show; implied to be a couple, they alternately mince and murder their way like Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern with bizzarely complex methods of murder - a scorpion, hiding someone in a pipe, and so on. Jill St. John as the girl is about the most annoying Bond Girl one could imagine; all ambition and no class, she only makes sense as a parody of an American, illustrating why Bond bangs best on the Continent. While we're at it, even Moneypenny comes off as kinda sad and almost stalker-ish - maybe it's just that seven movies in, her unrequited flirtations with Bond seem more genuine and less office-joke than before.

I was starting to think that there are no bad Bond films; this one can go to the bottom of the list. In fact, I'd rate it don't-see. It's surpassed by many other on-Bond films in scope and tone, and pales compared to its predecessors.

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