007 - A View to a Kill

Roger Moore's sub-series has settled into a pleasant groove under John Glen. The director organises two hour long action collages that only demand the odd close-up from its nip-and-tucked star. Once A View to a Kill has finished grinding joylessly through a toothless social intrusion, the film switches gears, transforming into a rolling calamity generator. View's creaky old 007 is pitted against Christopher Walken's test tube Nazi Max Zorin and Grace Jones' steely, feline, bodyguard May Day. Zorin is that rare Bond villain, a man who doesn't simply see the extermination of human life in abstract, statistical, terms. Zorin revels in the slaughter, snorting and giggling as he fills loyal, blue-collar workers full of lead. Like Hollywood's biggest 80s export Arnold Schwarzenegger, he's another automatic Aryan, blazing through terrified bystanders with aspirational Israeli machineguns.

View's first act may flounder but the back half is energised. Bond shuffles through a variety of prefab identities that keep him locked into the firing line while May Day's allegiances flip-flop after Zorin tries to drown her. Glen is game too, manoeuvring around his stiffening star to deliver his garbled take on en vogue cataclysm - armies of emergency vehicles are chewed up and spat out in a destruction derby that recalls John Landis' The Blues Brothers, lit to resemble Walter Hill's The Driver. Best of all, a finale setpiece on and around San Francisco's immovable Golden Gate Bridge plays out with the same barbaric physics George Miller gave to Mad Max 2. When 007 lashes Zorin's branded dirigible to the invincible monument it doesn't just hang there uselessly, it drifts and buckles. Bond and Zorin's confrontation is given an extra layer of danger by this treacherous, collapsing, stage. Glen's film may have the emotional depth of a puddle but the director goes out of his way to find new and terrifying places to strand his stuntmen.

007 - Octopussy

Octopussy represents a series in creative free fall. Director John Glen could excel if he was given brisk, ninety minute tales that learned heavily on stunts. Unfortunately, he's steering something much more ungainly: a series piled high with expectations, choking on formula. Cubby Broccoli and pals squeezed up in the back seat, barking out directions and demanding diversions. Two and a quarter hours or bust. So instead of an airtight plot to install Bond in a circus that smuggles priceless jewels and nuclear bombs on the side, a squad of screenwriters serve up another mind-numbing travelogue. India is the target of their worldliness, the country sketched with all the authority of a half-remembered RKO potboiler. 

Moore matches the ugliness of this tone with a 007 enjoying his second adolescence. Women are not merely bedded, they are ogled and spied upon. Moore permanently seconded in some bush getting his grot on. Eventually Bond finds himself on the fission bomb express, leaping from carriage to carriage, Octopussy finally playing to Glen's strengths. For the climax 007 plants himself on a departing Twin Beech aeroplane then inches around the exterior, fighting off assassins and sabotaging the engines. John Glen and his stunt team lock horns with Steven Spielberg and Vic Armstrong's genre-defining work on Raiders of the Lost Ark, Glen leaning on length and anxious intensity were Spielberg opted for stuttering verisimilitude.

007 - For Your Eyes Only

Poor John Glen. James Bond's perennial second-unit director finally gets promoted to full-on maestro and he's stuck shuffling around Roger Moore's creaking bones. For Your Eyes Only is a back-to-basics investigation with Bond snooping around undersea wrecks in search of some slightly dull Cold War technology. Glen weasels around Moore's decrepitude with an army of silhouetted stunt men lashing out with fluid, dynamic violence.

Despite Roger Moore's presence, the film has obviously been constructed as a launch platform for a new Bond actor - TV thug Lewis Collins was reportedly circling the role until Cubby Broccoli got cold feet. Like Dr. No and Live and Let Die, Eyes' threat levels are anchored in an idea of reality. Main squeeze, Carole Bouquet's Melina, is likewise young and virginal. In a hilariously glib pre-credits sequence Glen and screenwriters Michael G Wilson and Richard Maibaum reintroduce us to the Bond elements the Moore series has largely lapsed on, in particular 007's marital grief and his sprightly desire to absolutely crush those that have crossed him.

Although he has trouble drawing any warmth out of his actors Glen is a far more accomplished visual storyteller than either Guy Hamilton or Lewis Gilbert. Glen junks the numbing mediums that had all but drained the pep out of the series for close inspections of brutal looking machinery. Glen brings some genre vulgarity to Bond, his camera zooming in on Melina's vengeful, disconnected eyeline like a sniper. Glen and cinematographer Alan Hume shoot Bond and his cohorts from ambush positions, John Grover editing with a clip that confers chase pace. Thanks to Glen, For Your Eyes Only instantly arrives at the agitated, coked-up frequency that would become emblematic of 80s action films.

007 - Moonraker

Moonraker rises above the rest of the Roger Moore dreck by dispensing with any pretence of plot, or even reality. Moonraker is a malfunctioning gag generator; spitting out wild, expensive, situations with zero tonal care. Brutal scenes of a secretary being savaged by two slavering Doberman are swiftly followed by 007 driving around Venice streets in an air-cushioned gondola. Moore is no longer called upon to do anything quite so outmoded as acting, instead he's a geographical reference point in a never-ending succession of action. Bad-guy Hugo Drax challenges Bond with a plan that somehow manages to combine the pliant doe-eyed dumb-dumbs of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom with vast, Gerry Anderson trumping Supermarionation. Good for him. 

Michael Lonsdale plays Drax as a fascistic, high-functioning autistic who somehow holds sway over an army of Sea Org morons who can't wait to die in space. Drax's elite soldiers pile out into the void to be vaporised by NASA's death-ray commandos. We see hundreds of lifeless goons frozen in the kind of laser-scorched tableaux that would end up stamped all over 1980s toy packaging. Richard Kiel's Jaws is back by popular demand, hurrying Bond forward in lots of violent, exciting ways. A welcome change from the leaden plotting that ruined the last two 007 films. Thanks to an outpouring of support from the world's bloodthirsty schoolchildren, Kiel's gigantic, silent brute is thrust into the role of a second-lead. His popularity is such that Moonraker bends over backwards to assure us that Jaws and his diminutive bride will be able to survive piloting space station debris through an uncontrolled atmospheric entry. Moonraker is a Saturday-morning cartoon.

007 - The Spy Who Loved Me

Director Lewis Gilbert invests The Spy Who Loved Me with the same light touch he brought to You Only Live Twice, which is handy because they're both basically the same film. As with James Bond's Japanese adventure, The Spy Who Loved Me revolves around an improbable leviathan swallowing up state-of-the-art Cold War technology, in this case nuclear submarines, from both sides of the Iron Curtain. Roger Moore's 007 is joined on his investigation by Agent Triple X, a Soviet spy played by Barbara Bach who would rather be slipping a stiletto between Bond's ribs. The couple start off competing for information in Egypt until Richard Kiel's grilled-out assassin clamps down on their leads. There's the germ of a great thriller in The Spy Who Loved Me: two antagonistic secret agents fighting like hell to stay one step ahead of Kiel's massive slasher killer. 

Unfortunately this Bond knows he's invincible, Bach is reduced to a wet t-shirt and Kiel disappears for long stretches while the film churns through agonising formula. Gilbert does get the most out of Spy's increased budget though, drafting Ken Adam back into service to create a massive, futurist, submarine hanger that was so difficult to light that the production designer had to call in a favour from his pal Stanley Kubrick. Spy excels then in terms of technique rather than narrative. Second unit director John Glen stages some excellent skiing stunts for the pre-credit action, culminating in an insane jump from Rick Sylvester. Cameraman Willy Bogner Jr, an Olympic skier himself, keeps Sylvester dead centre of the frame all the way down. We see a tiny little man disappearing completely into a white, shapeless, void. It's terrifying. There's absolutely no sense of up or down. The ground and death could arrive at any moment. Then a Union Jack parachute unfurls, Monty Norman's theme blares, and the film cuts to a bored looking Roger Moore.

007 - The Man with the Golden Gun

Nine films in the James Bond series is running on pure cynicism. Ian Fleming's The Man with the Golden Gun was a slight, unfinished novel that saw a compromised 007 shipped off to Jamaica on a suicide mission. Since this is only Moore's second adventure, obsolescence doesn't really fit the bill so Fleming's story about a KGB sanctioned pimp is reorganised into a dreary, unconvincing travelogue that occasionally allows Bond to peck at a dark twin played by Christopher Lee. Scaramanga resides in a pocket universe of tropical islands accented with nightmarish carnival violence, his residence a gaudy mash of low-art and new money living. The big idea being that this would be Bond if he gave into avarice and auctioned off his talents to the highest bidder.

Scaramanga is 007 tracked to the terrifying conclusion of an undead monster residing within a state-of-the-art mausoleum. This concept is good but it would work a little better if Lee's pistolero was reflecting off a particularly virtuous interpretation of Bond but, unfortunately, he isn't. Screenwriters Tom Mankiewicz and Richard Maibaum have written a Bond so indistinguishable from his enemy that when 007 starts sniping at Scaramanga for his amorality it registers as sanctimonious. Perhaps that's the point? Regardless, Golden Gun's Bond is a sadistic control freak who delights in his ability to dominate women both physically and mentally. In a film series not exactly noted for its chivalry, Golden Gun still manages to stand out with a hero that threatens to snap a helpless women's arm one minute, then is breaking out the bubbly to seduce her the next. Moore's performance manages to be both smarmy and robotic, a man so completely drained of charm that his see-sawing mood comes across as manic and psychotic rather than rakish.

007 - Live and Let Die

Live and Let Die is a 70s remix of Dr. No, with Bond arriving in another nation shaking off the shackles of colonialism then promptly murdering his way to the top. In Roger Moore's debut Bond finds himself staring down Yaphet Kotto's softly-spoken Dr Kananga, a Caribbean super-criminal so successful that he can eat a billion dollar heroin loss and still have seemingly every black adult male in the Western Hemisphere on his books. On the surface it appears that Live and Let Die is an overlong action film that trades on an alarmist racial paranoia but, dig a little deeper, and the film starts to resemble an apocalyptic death match between two distinctly defined faiths each associated with consumption. Most obviously, Baron Samedi is a Voodoo loa synonymous with cigars, obscenity and rum. He's a bony figure that hovers between the realms of the living and dead, greeting the recently deceased and chasing after mortal women.  

James Bond, as both a literary character and film franchise, exists because of a kind of conceptual animism. He was willed into being by an ailing Empire desperate to remain vital after a financially crippling world war. 007 embodies everything Britain purports to love - ingenuity and clear-headedness - as well as everything we actually do love - violence and incessant crudity. Moore's new Bond is resurrection incarnate, an invincible sexual magnet blessed with a selection of obnoxious technological gadgets concealed in his shaving kit. He's empty, abdicating his most basic human gifts to electronics. Live and Let Die then presents Bond as a piece of overwhelming, arrogant, machinery cursed to have a dick between its legs.

Bond eventually clashes with Samedi during a choreographed ritual sacrifice. The ceremony is positioned in the film as a spot of casual brutality used by Kananga to conceal his headquarters and provide his doped out subjects with a distraction. Jane Seymour's virginal Solitaire is the prize, the locals want her bitten and devoured by snakes while Bond wants to do much the same to her himself. Samedi rises from the grave to oppose 007 and is swiftly dispatched, thrown into a coffin filled with pythons. Samedi's mistake was to try and confront Bond on the secret agent's celluloid turf. The magical spirit's impromptu gatherings are nothing compared to James Bond's million dollar annual rite. 

It's notable that the two most significant Bond actors share such a similar first adventure. Given the horridness going on in Britain in the latter decades of the 20th century it's tempting to imagine the whole process as some kind of Masonic power ritual: 007 is a spell cast by the rich and deranged to ensure Britain's economic prospects limp on a little further. George Lazenby strayed into the Bond role flanked by an army of filmmakers prepped to deliver their career-best work. Financially, and in terms of cultural penetration (On Her Majesty's Secret Service is often skipped over when ITV are broadcasting bumper blocks of Bond), they underperformed. Turns out all Lazenby really needed was a blockbuster story about a rugged white man travelling abroad to kill lots of poor black people.

Jackie Chan in the 1980s - The Cannonball Run

The best thing that can be said about Hal Needham's The Cannonball Run is that a lot of the stunts look genuinely dangerous. Needham's team excel at making vehicles appear completely out of control. Cars and planes lurch uncontrollably before their pilots administer an expert, last minute correction. Unfortunately these visceral dangers are fleeting, the majority of Cannonball is spent in the company of boozy celebrity capering. Although Roger Moore is fun as a delusional lothario, Jackie Chan is wasted as an inexplicably Japanese racer who'd rather sneak a look at Golden Age pornos than drive his computerised Subaru.

Chan and his navigator (Hong Kong comedian Michael Hui) speak in a garbled mix of Japanese, Cantonese and Mandarin, their scenes bracketed by racist musical riffs. These indelicacies become even more bizarre when you consider Golden Harvest bankrolled the film. Chan's moment in the sun comes late in the day, helping to fight off some sleazy bikers during a brief pause in the competition. Chan even stays to thrash a few more goons when the race resumes, ploughing through nobodies with energetic high-kicks. The most consistent barrier to enjoying The Cannonball Run though, apart from a deeply uncharismatic turn by Burt Reynolds, is that it doesn't really have any punchlines. There are comedic premises, we understand jokes are in play, but they never reach a satisfactory conclusion.