The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
Directed by Guy Hamilton
Cool government operative James Bond searches for a stolen invention that can turn the sun's heat into a destructive weapon. He soon crosses paths with the menacing Francisco Scaramanga, a hitman so skilled he has a seven-figure working fee. Bond then joins forces with the swimsuit-clad Mary Goodnight, and together they track Scaramanga to a Thai tropical isle hideout where the killer-for-hire lures the slick spy into a deadly maze for a final duel.
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What critics compared The Man with the Golden Gun to
Well, that and the ingeniously shot, surrealistic final fray-for-all, which recalls Christopher Lee’s Scaramanga versus Roger Moore’s 007 in The Man With the Golden Gun upped by orders of magnitude.
Brief respites for humor (villain Dacascos is irregular but amusing to see in a big-budget endeavor), some Jackie Chan-styled fighting, and vengeful dogs become the high points, while the protracted finale, overflowing with heavy-hitting yet underwhelming skirmishes, is a strangely disappointing lull (mixing “Enter the Dragon” with “The Man with the Golden Gun”).
Alas, it seems to have taken its inspiration from one of the lesser Roger Moore efforts than the classic Connerys and the result is a fitfully amusing but increasing tedious and occasionally appalling mess that plays like "The Man with the Golden Gun" with ridiculous amounts of gore and severed limbs on display, though the nipples this time around are not so much superfluous as they are distressingly nonexistent.
And I ask in return: Do you remember the Solex Agitator that James Bond had to track down in The Man with the Golden Gun?
You want a larger-than-life villain with a secret island lair, but hate The Man With The Golden Gun? You're covered.
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(Anyone who can explain the plot of The Man With the Golden Gun is smarter than I am, and I’ve easily seen it 30 times.)
Certainly Roger Moore was a comparatively lightweight Bond with his seven appearances in the series: Live and Let Die (1973), The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979), For Your Eyes Only (1981), Octopussy (1983) and A View to a Kill (1985).
Few will argue that The Man with the Golden Gun is the silliest of all the James Bond motion pictures ( Casino Royale excepted).
Though she's as unsuccessful as the franchise itself has been in reconciling the burden that feminism places on these pictures, her homey conversations with Maud Adams (The Man with the Golden Gun and Octopussy ), Lois Chiles ( Moonraker ), Carey Lowell (Licence to Kill), and still others (the less said about Halle Berry, the better) are unexpectedly melancholy, especially as it dawns on d'Abo that, as a refugee of the thoroughly chaste The Living Daylights, she was one of the least-objectified Bond girls.