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Aug 21, 2011AtomicFez rated this title 2.5 out of 5 stars
Well, it's alright... it's certainly got all the right things in it, so it *should* work... Yet it doesn't quite. I blame the film editing and the script editing. There's just a bit too much of everything thrown in together here and not enough binding material. Imagine going to Dairy Queen, ordering a Blizzard™ that has five different things in it, but only about 20% of the ice cream you normally have. The result is much like this: all of the cool stuff but not enough reason for it being there. We've got girls (two), we've got evil people (two major, several minor), briefings with M (oddly two of them), Q (but no gadgets for Bond, only for Scaramanga, which is *very* weird), nifty locations (four at least), a car chase (including insane corkscrew thing which was done for the simple reason they could), a boat race, Sheriff Pepper shows up again (because they could), and there's a gigantic laboratory with solar-powered gun (which doesn't get used except for one demonstration and doesn't have a visible light beam for some reason). The reason for all this, initially, is that 007 has a death threat issued against him by Scaramanga. Then, later, M tells Bond to find this death threat guy because he's killed a Solar Power Research Engineer, so the world is in peril of that technology being... well, sold to the highest bidder by Scaramanga. As opposed to... erm... sold to the highest bidder by a government, probably. So... not much danger, really. It's a bit of a McGuffin really: the man is bad and he's done something wrong! Then suddenly Bond has to go it alone without telling M what he's doing in order to keep things from the Chinese, so we're back where we started, and that way we get to see the big fight at the end. ...cause otherwise we wouldn't have a movie. Christopher Lee is so very good with what he's given to do, which is a shame as *everyone* gets so little to do in this. The chase scenes and locations get the glory, really. I could take at least 20 minutes out of this merely my tightening up the editing, and the result would be more action packed and probably more interesting to watch. We're given far too much opportunity to think about things before they happen, establishing shots are held too long, there's too frequent use of switching back and forth between characters as they look for each other, too many alternate angles are explored without benefit of suspense; even the appearance of the character Chu Mi seems to be there simply because it fits a pre-determined pattern. Bleah. Still, it could have been worse; not much, but some.