Summary: It tries hard and should have been great but it has more against it than for it and ends up
being one of the lesser films in the series

Bond continues to try and track down the evil head of Spectre, Ernst Blofeld. When he saves the life
of the daughter of a powerful figure within one of the world's largest crime syndicate, Bond takes the
offer of marriage to her in order to get information that will get him closer to Blofeld. During their
engagement, Bond actually does begin to fall in love with Tracy but he also latches onto Blofeld's plot
to release a virus that will decimate the world's crops. Going undercover as a genealogist, Bond
infiltrates Blofeld's 'clinic' high in the alps where he finds a collection of young women being treated for
allergies and a complex system on labs all working on something.

With an opening scene that makes up for in wit what it lacks in action, this film opens with a shudder
rather than a bang – although it is hard not to like the opening 'this never happened to the other fella'
line. The opening credits feature a great tune that has stuck with Bond films really well, more than other
themes in my opinion but perhaps it was a mistake to run images from the other Bond movies over
the credits when it was clearly time to move past these films and start a new chapter. In terms of
plotting, Bond movies are hardly the height of logic and plotting and in some ways this film just follows
the trend – it is not much more than a series of episodes rather than a consistently engaging story. So
far, so much like the rest of the films more or less. There are good set pieces but some of the action is
shoddily edited – fights are hard to follow and have no flow and some of the action scenes suffer from
really poor effects or are just silly (a bobsleigh chase? You're kidding me!). However what the film
does try to do is open up the film with more of an emotional core – we learn a bit more about the
characters and lots of moments are designed to do this. It is just a shame that these don't work at all
(albeit from the scene at the end), partly due to the fact that they don't exist as part of a structure but
as episodes within an episodic film. It also wants to have it's cake and eat it – it wants us to get mushy
over Bond falling in love with Tracy but is happy to still have Bond extend his legend by having sex
with multiple girls during his engagement (booking them in hourly slots!)

Of course a bigger reason it doesn't work is the contribution of George Lazenby. In fairness he had a
hard act to follow but delivering a performance that is uninteresting and some times feels like it is being
phoned in AND read off cue-cards was not the way to do it. I know some like his performance but he
is living proof that Bond is not something you can just walk into (and, post-Brosnan, it shows that the
series can survive a miscasting). Likewise Savalas is not great and doesn't stand out as a good villain –
his character is uninteresting and his global domination plot is toothless, all he wants is his title etc. I
assume that the makers just tried to think of a bald man to fill the role and Kojak was the first that
came to mind. Rigg is pretty good but her subplot with James slows the film down a bit too much. The
usuals are all there but I would have liked a bit more of Q. The best casting is a clinic full of beautiful
women – all gorgeous even if some of the horrid British accents on two of them would have had me
running to the rooms of the Scandinavian, Jamaican, Chinese or even the American girls!

Overall this is a Bond film and it is worth seeing. It has the usual smutty joking, action set pieces and so
on. However it is full of problems, the biggest of which is the casting of Lazenby who has little
charisma and doesn't sound natural at all – a problem made even bigger when you think he was
replacing Connery. The plot is fragmented and not that good – no real sustained tension or dramatic
involvement. I consider it to be one of the lesser Bonds but still worth watching once.