A View to a Kill (1985)

"Well my dear, I take it you spend quite a lot of time in the saddle."

"Yes, I love an early morning ride."

"Well, I'm an early riser myself."

Meh. This isn't quite the worst Bond film so far- that would be Thunderball- but it's certainly the very dampest of squibs. Roger Moore, at 57 and suddenly looking it, is by now absurdly too old to be convincing in the part, but ultimately the problem lies with the script. The plot is fine, but the dialogue is functional and lacking in wit, and as a result the film fails to come alive. That's a shame, as an actor like Christopher Walken deserves a much better villain to play. Still, he deserves much praise for triumphing over a crap script to give us a memorable Max Zorin regardless.

The film also suffers from that perennial problem of Bond films set largely in the United States: what is Bond doing there when the Americans have agencies of their own? Still, Duran Duran give us a decent theme tune and it's always good to see Patrick Macnee, even if his character does spend his final few hours alive being ordered about by Bond. Grace Jones is good as May Day but, again, wasted, as indeed area many of the set pieces which seem to be shot rather unimaginatively. Still, I enjoyed the finale with the airship on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Not a good swansong, then, for the suddenly much-aged Roger Moore: he should have left on a high with Octopussy. It's goodbye too, though, for Lois Maxwell, the only cast member who's been there since Dr No.

Octopussy (1983)

"You must be joking! 007 on an island populated exclusively by women? We won't see him till dawn...!"

Now that's more like it. Exotic locations, high stakes, great set pieces... the Bond franchise has got its mojo back. Well, unless you happen to be a coulrophobe, that is. Then you'd have problems.

It's the early '80s, the Raj is all the rage and Bond hasn't done India yet, so Octopussy gets a fantastic setting with Delhi, the Taj Mahal, and even a massive hunt riding elephants during which Bond meets a tiger. For a baddie we have Kamal Khan, an exiled Afghan prince who, for some reason, is working with the Soviets, his natural enemies or so one would have thought, but it makes for a good film. The real baddie has a Cold War flavour for once in the shape of Steven Berkoff's nuke-happy Russian general, Orlov, although our old friend Gogol is around to stop things going too far. 1983 is a somewhat appropriate year to raise the spectre of nuclear annihilation, of course...

Roger Moore is 55 and looks it, but he just about gets away with it: his charisma and acting chops are as impressive as ever. Maud Adams is an ok Bond hgirl too, although for once the set pieces tend to outshine both the sex and the baddies.

This film is absolutely the least like the source material of any so far (the Fleming short story is actually about an octopus), but how can you dislike a film where Q turns up in a hot air balloon? After two duds, Bond is back on track.

For Your Eyes Only (1981)

"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned."

"That's putting it mildly, 007."

This is very odd for a Bond film. There's nothing awful about it but it's oddly small scale and unambiguous, lacking in glamour, wit and oomph while remaining competent. Still, I suppose it's a natural and predictable reaction to the excesses of Moonraker.

The opening titles are perhaps the oddest thing- it's nice to see Tracy hasn't been forgotten as Bond leaves flowers at her grave, but Blofeld is bizarrely back in a very silly sequence that rather undermines the character.

(Oh, and Tracy's gravestone makes it explicit that she died in 1969, the year she died on screen. Stating this nakedly may be increasingly wise as the years go on!)

The ending is awkward, too. After two films that end with Bond and the Bond girl in question being seen shagging on screen and a gloriously terrible sex-related pun, this time we get a ridiculous skit with a parrot and Margaret Thatcher. There's a distinct lack of polish to this script. Even the set pieces are less dramatic than usual, although I liked the extended riff on the Winter Onympics.

Still, the Greek locations are good, as is Julian Glover as the bizarrely small scale baddie. It's off to see Charles Dance in such a tiny part, though. And it's the '89s now- Moonraker was just two years ago, but the cars and the fashions make that seem a long time ago. This is a decade that suits Bond aesthetically so much more.

One nice touch is the refusal yet to recast the part of M after Bernard Lee's demise shortly before filming his scripted scenes. But overall this is a film which makes no huge missteps but is strangely lacking in ambition. It may not be the worst Bond film but it's certainly the most forgettable so far.

Moonraker (1979)

"I think he's attempting re-entry, Sir!"

Meh. This is Bond by numbers. It's just a collection of barely connected set pieces,  some of them admittedly rather good, leading up to a silly and implausible finale. Hugo Drax must have the resources of a G7 nation to build six space shuttles and a space station. The fact that Michael Lonsdale makes a dull and charisma-free Drax doesn't help either.

At least Roger Moore is on good form. He seemed a little old in The Spy Who Loved Me but he seems a little rejuvenated in his sixth decade. It's also good to see a bigger role for M in Bernard Lee's final film, with a suggestion that, deep down, he always had a high regard for Bond. The return of Jaws is a mixed bag; he gets some superb action sequences but the scenes of him falling in love at first sight are just silly. And he finally gets to utter four whole words!!! Still, I love the way hired him after Chang dies, the suggestion being that there's actually an employment market for henchmen!

But this is all very obviously influenced by Star Wars and very silly, at a time when peak human space travel had already given way to the age of the space shuttle and the Moon had given way to the brilliant Voyager spacecraft. And worse: it's very worrying to see a Bond film be quite as formulaic as this.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

"Just keeping the British end up, Sir..."

Ah, 1977. The year of my birth. No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones. The two sevens clash. And any number of punk allusions you'd care to make. It's also the absolute nadir of men's fashions: every single bloke in this film looks absolutely awful. It's difficult to understand why men bothered to wear suits at all in 1977 because they all, without exception, look shit. You can see how punk was so very necessary, for fashion as much as music.

Still, The Spy Who Loved Me is another triumph. I'm a little puzzled as to why The Man with the Golden Gun was so no pulse with both critics and public- I rather liked it- but I'll not argue with the consensus here. The taut plot, the awesome action sequences, the wittiest script yet, all of this makes for one of the finest Bond films yet, even if Roger Moore is perhaps, in only his third film, beginning to look just a little too old for the part.

Neither Moore nor Barbara Bach )Mrs. Ringi Starr!) will ever win any Oscars, but they somehow work perfectly together. Curd Jurgens, taking a break from playing 75% of all Nazi officers in the history of cinema, is the finest Bond villain yet. He has it all; the underwater lair, the hare-brained scheme to bike the world so humanity can start a new life under the sea(!); and the sharks beneath a trapdoor to eat treacherous underlings. 

Meanwhile Caroline Munro is there to look sexy, and Richard Kiel is a splendid if mute presence as Jaws, suspiciously soon after a film after the same name, also featuring a shark. Hmm. There's also a staggering number of British characters on display- George Baker, Edward de Souza, Vernon Dobtcheff, Nadim Sawalha and Cyril Chaps. The American submarine commander is played, inevitably, by Shane Rimmer. It could never have been otherwise.

The film is full of brilliant, stylish action sequences from the opening ski chase (love the parachute) to Bond's best car yet. By this point we know all the tropes and the film can have real fun with them.

The double entendres ("Well, tell him to pull out immediately") are superb. There's even a moment of wit for the incidental music: the familiar refrain from Lawrence of Arabia is heard as Bond and Anya traverse the desert.

The locations- Cairo, the pyramids and Karnak- are the best possible. Carly Simon's theme tune is the best yet and surely unsurpassable. Can this be the best Bond yet?

The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

"I admit it's a little kinky..."

It says a lot for the recent high standards of Bond films that, while The Man with the Golden Gun is a splendidly enjoyable film in which both Roger Moore and Christopher Lee are excellent, it is in comparison not as good as many of its predecessors, merely very good rather than superb. Still, the run of good Bond films continues.

Lulu's stab at theme tune is a perfectly good one even if it's no one's favourite and she's so Shirley Bassey. And those lyrics... "Who will he bang?" Oo er!

Q is back, this time paired with a ballistics expert played by the superb James Cossins, who I will always remember fondly from a certain episode of Some Mothers do 'Ave 'Em. But it's an unusual Bond film, the villain being an assassin whose grand scheme to monopolise solar power seems almost an afterthought. But seeing solar power as a panacea? And one has to raise an eyebrow, given the current price of oil, that supplies of oil and gas were thought to be exhausted back in 1974, even if the central point is true.

The film is a splendid series of entertaining set pieces, this time in various parts of the Far East. I was a little perturbed to find Sumo wrestlers in Thailand, though: it's almost as though all eastern Asian countries and cultures are considered interchangeable. Our agent in Hong Kong even has convenient relatives in Thailand. Still, schoolgirls kicking ass with martial arts are cool.

I'm not sure about including that annoying sheriff from the last film as comic relief, but the film is another triumph. We get the first of the formulaic endings, too, with M phoning Bond while he's otherwise occupied with Goodnight ("She's just cumming, Sir"). The Roger Moore era is in full swing already.

Live and Let Die (1973)

"There's no sense in going out half-cocked..."

Well then. It seems there's a possible new candidate for best Bond film so far. Live and Let Die is brilliant, crammed with set piece after set piece, Roger Moore is charismatic and compelling from the word go- he is Bond, straight away- and Yaphet Kotto as Dr Kananga may be the best Bond villain yet. All this and we also get Jane Seymour as a decidedly quirky Bond girl. Where's Q, though?

I'll leave others to decide whether or not the depiction of black Americans and the Carribbean is racist or not (sooo many afros!), but Baron Samedi and the snake are cool, and I love the killings with the coffin that make a great pre-titles sequence. Unlike On Her Majesty's Secret Service, this time we don't see the new James Bond until after the opening titles, dragging out the suspense.

So much cool stuff- alligators, Tee Hee's hand, tarot cards,  boat chase across the Louisiana bayou and a comedy sheriff: this is a very different but very impressive Bond film.

Again, though, why are so many MI6  agents operating in America when, you know, the CIA exists?