The Spy Who Loved Me

In a globe-trotting assignment that has him skiing off the edges of cliffs and driving a car deep underwater, British super-spy James Bond (Roger Moore) unites with sexy Russian agent Anya Amasova to defeat megalomaniac shipping magnate Karl Stromberg, who is threatening to destroy New York City with nuclear weapons. Bond's most deadly adversary on the case is Stromberg's henchman, Jaws, a seven-foot giant with terrifying steel teeth.

Review from rogerebert.com

“The Spy Who Loves Me” marks the first time Roger Moore appears in the flesh in the pre-credits sequence (he doesn’t appear at all in the pre-credits to “Live and Let Die,” and appears in “The Man with the Golden Gun” as a cardboard cut-out in Scaramanga’s shooting gallery, perhaps a visual confession by the filmmakers of how stiff his character is in that film). The epic sub hijack and ski chase in this sequence—culminating in Bond surviving a leap off a steep mountain cliff by opening a Union Jack parachute—suggests that after an early-to-mid-seventies lull, Broccoli and his team were ready to take the whole enterprise seriously again by not taking things too seriously.

“The Spy Who Loves Me” is a triumph of absurdity, easily the best of the Moore films because it works so hard to make everything a great lark of plasticity and humor. In his wonderful, definitive James Bond Bedside Companion, critic and novelist Raymond Benson graphed out, in witty detail, side-by-side-by-side story comparisons of “Spy,” “You Only Live Twice” and “Moonraker,” the three Bond films directed by Lewis Gilbert, and came to the conclusion that they were all basically telling the same story with only slight variations in names and settings. And if this is the case, what matters is less the horizontal line of narrative motion, and more the vertical line of style, and “The Spy Who Loved Me” has a great deal of fun zigging and zagging across it.

Read the rest of the review from Brian Doan here...