Live and Let Die – Roger Moore’s first outing as James Bond disappointed me when it first came out. This had been a successful franchise, and had been fun, even when it went somewhat over the top. But this movie was just awful:
1.) At the very beginning I saw, in the opening credits, credit for “shark scenes” . Oh, great, I think, it’s going to be kinda like Thunderball, where you have scenes with Bond barely escaping the sharks, a guy getting attacked by a shark, and guysfighting off sharks – all scenes that had been done with both sharks and stuntpeople in the same shot. In this film, though, the actors are intercut with scenes of sharks. They could’ve filmed it in an aquarium!
2.) Mr. Big’s death scene (Bond forces a gas device in his mouth, and he inflates like a balloon, rises out of the water, and explodes) is easily the most ludicrous and ridiculous one seen in the series up to that point.
3.) The film has a racist feel to it, no matter what they do to try and avoid that.
4.) James Bond smoking a cigar? Really?
5.) Sherrif Pepper, an increment on the police chief in the previous Diamonds are Forever, who also chased Bond. But Pepper plays it for all the character-actor Southern humor he can manage. A definite move in the wrong direction to low comedy. It was even worse when Pepper shows up, off-the-wall implausibly, in the next film, The Man with the Golden Gun.
6.) Bond defends himself from a poisonous snake with a spray bottle-turned-flamethrower. not only unlikely, but it just looks BAD. Even finishing up with Bond using the product afterwards, as if nothing had happened, doesn’t help.
7.) After fighting Russian agents, SPECTRE, and Goldfinger, in plots that involve national secrets, atomic weapons, space ships, and bioweapon terror, it seems more than a little bit of a letdown to have Bond fighting the leader of a Caribbean island and a drug lord. if ever a movie needed SPECTRE, this is it.
There was some good stuff in it – the local scenes and exotica, the “Fleming sweep” that moved the plot from location to location. The chase scene and stunt with the double-decker bus. But it wasn’t enough to save this flick.
