Project Bond: Octopussy

We open on Bond wearing a false moustache and dressed like a communist at a show-jumping event, where there is an unnamed bearded cigar-smoking chap dressed like a communist. Bond and his obligatory female companion shoot out the tyres of an army truck that crashes into a chicken coop, for some reason. The “end of the beginning,” if you will, sees Bond escape in a small plane that was hidden under a false horse’s arse in a false horsebox. Most ingenious, I’m sure you will agree.

The next 00 agent we meet is 009, dressed as a clown running through some woodland in East Berlin, which was still a thing then. He is chased and killed, meaning that 007 (Bond, James Bond) has to go to Sotheby’s and bid on a Fabergé egg, but he doesn’t really want it because he swapped it with a fake one, so now he’s got the real one, which he uses to fund his backgammon habit, but first travels to India so his boss won’t find out. As luck would have it, while there he encounters a bad guy, Kamal Khan, and hustles him at backgammon, but in so doing is forced to reveal the Fabergé egg in his possession.

Khan comes after Bond and takes the egg back, and Bond works together with a woman named Octopussy and a snake charmer who plays the Bond theme on his wee flute to get it back. However, he soon finds he has bigger fish to fry because it turns out the Russians (boo) are planning to set off a dirty great bomb! Worse still, they’ll make it look like it came from the USA! Bond is left with no choice but to infiltrate the circus. Dressed just like 009 was at the time of his death, 007 successfully defuses the bomb with around a second to spare. You can tell this because the bomb has a digital display counting down to the exact moment it will explode, like all bombs do.

It’s not over, though, because there’s still the problem of Khan (from before, remember?) to deal with. Bond ends up having a fight with Khan’s henchman on top of a plane, which is in the sky. Khan’s man should win because he has a knife, whose power he extrapolates by shouting “Hiya!” with every stroke of Bond’s face, but Bond gets hold of the plane’s radio aerial and pings it back into the guy’s face, the force of which inevitably knocks him to his death, and Blighty triumphs yet again. Huzzah!

This effort definitely has a bit more direction and a less confusing plot than the two before it, but it’s still a good bit behind even Moore’s first two films, and around the level of The Spy Who Loved Me. Only one to go now.