The Man With The Golden Gun Movie Review

Q-Branch_2012

After his first successful outing, Roger Moore returns as Bond in his second adventure, featuring a Christopher Lee as the bad guy, Francisco Scaramanga, who has a midget butler called Nik Nak. This movie follows on from Live and Let Die, and features returning character, J.W. Pepper.

This movie ups the campness, and definately establishes the Moore Bond formula, which is high on one liners, humor, and set piece car chases. Although this movie was enjoyable, for me it has nothing spectacular that makes it stand out. It is not a bad movie, but nothing that makes it extra special, which is disappointing, when you have a awesome actor to play the bad guy.

There is a bit of a wacky opening pre title sequence, when Scaramanga shows off his wacky and sureal fun house, as he takes out his would-be assassin. This is followed by the title song, sang by Lulu. Which is another classic Bond tune.

During this period, the kung fu craze was going on, so naturally this movie features several martial arts scenes to capitalize on the popularity. THis are actually quite amusing, which Moore plays on to full effect.

The sherriff from the first movie, J.W. Pepper appears agin in this movie, unfortunately, this is not a good thing by any means, and only adds to the goofiness of the movie, which this movie seems to have alot of.

There is a great car chase around this time, with a spectacular stunt where a car jumps over a river and does a 360 spin, unfortunately, a horrible sound effect is added that completely takes away the awesomeness of a great set piece.

The final battle between Bond and Scaramanga is decent enough, but for me the chemistry between the two is never really there, and it shows on screen, I'm not sure if these two didnt really get on behind the camera, but, for me, I think the two of these don't really work well together which brings the movie down a peg or two.

Overall this movie is a good one, but non-Bond fans may struggle to sit through this, unless the enjoy watching campy movies from the 1970s.

ausbondfan

I liked The Man With The Golden Gun.

The Assassin was rather mysterious throughout the film and you got the feeling that he was a type of guy that could end Bond. Nik Nak was a pretty good villain too and was something different at the time.

Definitely not the best Bond film but a quality part of the series.

chrisisall

ausbondfan wrote:

Definitely not the best Bond film but a quality part of the series.

Totally agree.

Barbel

Q-Branch_2012 wrote:

I'm not sure if these two didnt really get on behind the camera

No sign of any friction in either Lee or Moore's autobiographies, interviews, etc; both men claim to have got on well and enjoyed working together.

Moore Than

Barbel wrote:

Q-Branch_2012 wrote:

I'm not sure if these two didnt really get on behind the camera

No sign of any friction in either Lee or Moore's autobiographies, interviews, etc; both men claim to have got on well and enjoyed working together.

Yes, Christopher Lee said as much in a recent interview, saying he had known Roger Moore for sixty four years. And talked about how much he enjoyed his experience of working on The Man With The Golden Gun.

Q-Branch_2012

Moore Than wrote:

Barbel wrote:

Q-Branch_2012 wrote:

I'm not sure if these two didnt really get on behind the camera

No sign of any friction in either Lee or Moore's autobiographies, interviews, etc; both men claim to have got on well and enjoyed working together.

Yes, Christopher Lee said as much in a recent interview, saying he had known Roger Moore for sixty four years. And talked about how much he enjoyed his experience of working on The Man With The Golden Gun.

They may have got on well, to me it just seemed that they didn't really have much chemistry on screen, and it is just a theory as to why.

Moore Than

Q-Branch_2012 wrote:

Moore Than wrote:

Barbel wrote:

No sign of any friction in either Lee or Moore's autobiographies, interviews, etc; both men claim to have got on well and enjoyed working together.

Yes, Christopher Lee said as much in a recent interview, saying he had known Roger Moore for sixty four years. And talked about how much he enjoyed his experience of working on The Man With The Golden Gun.

They may have got on well, to me it just seemed that they didn't really have much chemistry on screen, and it is just a theory as to why.

We will just have to agree to disagree on this. Their scenes together are just about the biggest highlight of the film for me.

chrisisall

Moore Than wrote:

Their scenes together are just about the biggest highlight of the film for me.

Same here. -{

Bodie

I like TMWTGG in parts but like OP it annoys me in the sense that it could have been a great Bond movie if handled differently. The idea of Bond being up against an assassin who is the dark side of himself had fantastic potential but as with most Bond movies of the RM tenure it seemed to suffer from an identity crisis in that it didn't know whether it wanted to be a thriller or a comedy and thus did not succeed at being neither.

One of the weakest of the series.

Remade with Craig as Bond and an actor of the abilities of Javier Bardem playing Scaramanga it would be epic.

chrisisall

Bodie wrote:

One of the weakest of the series.

Bodie, I've been pussyfootin' around with this, but no more.
TMWTGG is the BEST BOND movie of Sir Roger's entire tenure as Bond, and one of the two best in that entire decade. Yeah, TSWLM was fun, and yeah, OP had tons of brilliant moments, but TMWTGG had a young, fit Moore, a KILLER Barry score, Christopher frikkin' Lee, the anti-matter Oddjob, and peerless model work blowing up at the end!!!
DEAL with it, BITCH!!*


*the 'bitch' inclusion in the rhetoric should not be in any way taken as a personal insult, rather as a humorous indication of the mindless level of ranting over something as innocuous as an opinion on a movie and the innate stupidity of taking such waaaay too seriously.

Bodie

I've been called worse.

chrisisall

Bodie wrote:

I've been called worse.

Hey- this is no fun if you're going to be all civil... you could have at least called me a moron or something.
That's it. I take that 'bitch' back! You can't have it any more. 8-)

Blackleiter

Bodie wrote:

Remade with Craig as Bond and an actor of the abilities of Javier Bardem playing Scaramanga it would be epic

Yep!

Lexi

Just watching this now... it's one of the few Bond movies I haven't really seen all the way through... but something is bothering me...

How did Bond know about Hai Fat, and that Scaramanga was hired by him... it seems as though Bond 'plucked' this name out of thin air... unless I've missed something

minigeff

Bond knew there was a connection as Gibson was trying to go back to the Brits, Gibson was offed by Scaramanga (deduced by Q from the bullet) and the finger was thus pointed at Hai Fat, who Gibson was trying to defect from.

Lexi

minigeff wrote:

Bond knew there was a connection as Gibson was trying to go back to the Brits, Gibson was offed by Scaramanga (deduced by Q from the bullet) and the finger was thus pointed at Hai Fat, who Gibson was trying to defect from.

Thanks MG....was Hai Fat mentioned then when they were looking at the bullet?
Or somewhere else....?

minigeff

I think the connections are made during the briefing on board the disorientating Queen Mary wreck.

And always happy to help out. -{

Lexi

minigeff wrote:

I think the connections are made during the briefing on board the disorientating Queen Mary wreck.

And always happy to help out. -{

Well that's where I'm confused....Bond seems to 'pluck' this name out of nowhere...which is why I was asking the question. I was wondering if Hai Fat had been mentioned before...? (or if I had missed something) are we just supposed to go along with the fact that Bond knows of Hai Fat....?

Don't mean to sound stupid, but well people are complaining about not knowing other details in Skyfall, and I'm wondering if this is one such instance that I should just accept and go along with it )

NeverSayDie

I watched it again today for millionth time. Love it. Christopher Lee is amazing!
The thing I noticed this time is why go through the bit with getting the bullet
from the belly dancer to have it examined by Q when they already have a golden bullet with 007 on it? It is still one my fave films as I think it's the first one I saw aged 6 or 7.

chrisisall

I wanna watch it again right now! )

ChromeJob

NeverSayDie wrote:

I watched it again today for millionth time. Love it. Christopher Lee is amazing!
The thing I noticed this time is why go through the bit with getting the bullet
from the belly dancer to have it examined by Q when they already have a golden bullet with 007 on it? It is still one my fave films as I think it's the first one I saw aged 6 or 7.

Ballistics? (I dunno, haven't seen it in many many years.)

Funny, but I think I read somewhere that Barry wasn't happy with his score, but as a kid I loved it. Still have the vinyl LP. If you think of a good Barry Bond score as having staccato percussion, horns, guitars, and a female vocalist who sounds like she's purring in bed, well then I'd say this film's score stands up well to Goldfinger's score.

chrisisall

Yeah, the score is excellent!

Silhouette Man

Love this film. Intend to review it on The Bondologist Blog soon.