Review of For Your Eyes Only (1981) by Bryan F — 16 Feb 2013

FYEO is one of the least satisfying Bond films in the series, with a least satisfying performance from Roger Moore. The movie has the usual great locales, women, action and such but it's rather weak within it's pace. After the brilliant ski chase, the film imo falls into flat territory. Even the cool 80's music vibe couldn't save this picture.

Bond's mission is to locate an electronic device and bring it back to England(I'm really bad at describing movie plots so forgive me). Bond has one movie villian, a Greek business man named Kristatos (Julian Glover) and he teams up with Melina Havelock (Carole Bouquet) who wants revenge on the person who asassinated her parents. For comedic purpose, Bond meets Bambi (Lynn-Holly Johnson) and although some fans found her to be very annoying, I found her personality to be kinda cute. In any case, the film is suppose to go back to the serious roots of the earlier Bond pictures but that wasn't the case here. The main villian is pretty much boring and has nothing much to offer and it was annoying to see a main villian waste time in getting rid of Bond by tying him up and dragging him in the sea. The underwater sequences was hard to follow, at times I was trying to figure out what on earth was going on when Bond and Melina were trying to escape the henchman's sub? Blofeld introductory scene was pretty stingy to say the least. Ok Cubby, I know that you were a hot shot producer when you were alive, but to film a lousy scene of having Blofeld (actually name never mentioned)falling to his death in response to Kevin Mclory, is rather pathetic and crass. If there is any good points to this that would be the character Columbo (Topol), first seen as a villian but turns out to be the fall guy turns into a pretty lousy twist.