Director: Guy Hamilton
Genre: Action, Adventure, Thriller
Rating: C+
This might be my least favourite of the Bond movies so far. It’s
racist, it’s rediciulous, it’s bad. It’s
Roger Moore’s first run at being James Bond and, while I didn’t hate his
performance, per say, I didn’t really warm up to him. One movie in and I’m definitely preferring Sean Connery, if only because Connery was in better Bond movies.
Live And Let Die sends Bond
(Moore) to New York where he’s investigating the murder of an MI6 agent. There he runs into gangster Mr. Big (Kotto)
who is involved in the heroin trade and meets Mr. Big’s psychic and tarot expert
Solitaire (Seymour), who’s powers depend on her being a virgin. Points if you’ve already guessed whether or
not Solitaire is 1) still psychic at the end of the movie and 2) still a
virgin.
The big problem with Live and
Let Die – beyond the racism – is that it didn’t have the feel of a Bond film, much like the George Lazenby
film. It seems like being Bond is something
that the actors have to grow into, a task that may take more than just one film
to do so. Producers, on the other hand,
don’t seem to really be interested in making this growth easy for the actors
either. Had this been another Connery Bond it might have felt more Bond-ish simply because the character
and actor are already established. As it
is, however, Live and Let Die is
something different from its predecessors, a fact that becomes more prominent
given the new actor playing Bond. If
they’d started with something more Bond-ish
then followed up with Live and Let Die
it might have come across as better… or it might not have, because Bond-ish or not, it’s still a horribly
racist movie that isn’t really good.
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