While this oft-forgotten Bond movie certainly suffers from an evidently ageing Roger Moore, a surfeit of daft postmoderny gags — former tennis ace Vijay Armitraj fighting off foes with a tennis racket; Bond quelling a tiger by shouting “Sit!” just like dog-trainer Barbara Woodhouse— and a lack of focus for the villainy, there’s still a good plot at work here. Bond is fully occupied tracking the origins of the Faberge Egg to Maud Adams’ Octopussy (half villain, half Bond girl, great name) who is tied up with Kamal Kahn (slick Louis Jordan) and General Orlov (Steven Berkoff, yawn) who are plotting world domination or somesuch.
John Glenn has got it well-organised in its globe spanning (Berlin, India, the East German border country) building up a fair head of tension with all the familiar Bond ploys: disarming a ticking atomic bomb dressed in a clown suit, knife throwing twins, a scowling henchman with a kid of razor-edged Frisbee thing. The ending sags, with too much silly Q business, but makes up for it with an army of acrobatic babes in skin-tight lyrca.
