Beginner’s Bond: Octopussy

“Beginner’s Bond” is the chronicle of my quest to close the largest gap in my cinematic knowledge: the James Bond franchise. To that end, I am watching all of the 007 movies in order for the very first time and writing my reactions here. Due to a mistake on my part, the last film I watched was 1979’s Moonraker, which was a stupid good time. Let’s see if the film with the strangest title yet, Octopussy, can compare.

I gotta give Octopussy credit—it lets you know up front that this movie is going to be absolutely bonkers. It opens with a clown being hunted through the woods by a pair of knife-throwing twins. He gets stabbed in the back and literally crashes into some shocked British politician’s house to hand him a Faberge egg. And then as soon as James Bond takes a look at it he declares it a forgery. What? The film has been on less than five minutes, and my head is already full of questions that I must have answered. Starting with “Why did this clown sacrifice his life for a fake Faberge egg?”

Mr. Bond swaps the fake for the original during a live auction because he’s just that slick, and then engages in a bidding war to identify his target: prince-in-exile Kamal Khan. From there, 007 takes his usual approach by following the villain around and annoying him until the main henchman knocks out our hero and drags him to Khan’s palace. After escaping his room and snooping around, Bond learns that the prince has been using Octopussy’s traveling circus to smuggle stolen Soviet treasures into the West. Of course Octopussy decides to betray her business partner to help 007 about five minutes after meeting him, because no woman can resist James Bond.

Admittedly, I was unsure as to the specifics of the plot. A corrupt Russian general was smuggling jewels to Khan as payment for setting off a nuclear warhead on some European border for… reasons. Ultimately, I did not care because I was having too much fun. Octopussy pulls out all the classic Bond tropes. There’s a crazy taxi chase through an Indian market, a fight on top of a moving train with Gobinder the superhuman henchman, and 007 dresses up in a gorilla suit to infiltrate a circus. Octopussy leads her team of circus-trained ninja women in a final assault on Khan’s palace. It didn’t matter if any of it made sense—every scene you will see something more ridiculous than the last, and that can be plenty entertaining.

While Octopussy was certainly no masterpiece, it was never boring. I’d say this film and Moonraker are the best of the Roger Moore era thus far. But I’ll see if that opinion changes after I watch Mr. Moore’s final outing in the 007 tux: 1985’s A View To A Kill!