It’s hard to find The Man With the Golden Gun very high on any list of Bond films. And it’s easy to see why. This was actually the only film with Roger Moore as Bond that I hadn’t previously seen, and while it isn’t his best film, it isn’t his worst either. It’s one of those films that’s just kind of… there. It’s unremarkable in that it has little that is very good and little that is very bad. I think what this film is more than anything is frustrating. It has a terrific villain, but an awful Bond girl. It starts off as a pretty intriguing story, but quickly devolves into a predictable mess and has a ridiculous climax.

Roger Moore does a fairly good job of continuing to effectively make Bond his own character. By now it should be clear that we’re not going to see Bond played the same way that Sean Connery did, for better or for worse. It’s just as easy for him to slap women around as make love to them. He has more of an edge than Connery had, and more range of emotion. He also comes across as more intellectual and debonair than did Connery, but Moore’s sexuality doesn’t feel nearly as natural. Connery also felt way more natural for the role, and he lit up the screen in a way that Roger Moore, through no fault of his own, was not capable of doing. Overall, Roger Moore’s portrayal of James Bond feels flat so far compared to Sean Connery.

Story-wise, this is a disappointing film. One of the things that makes it so disappointing is that it starts off with a very promising premise that they end up abandoning for a different, much more farcical one. We come into the film believing that the villain Fransisco Scaramanga, a world-class assassin who charges $1 million per hit and uses golden bullets shot from a golden gun has set his sights on assassinating Bond, and Bond must find Scaramanga before Scaramanga kills him. It then turns in to this muddled plot line where Scaramanga is really trying to acquire a solar powered Solex Agitator that converts the sun’s radiation into electricity and can solve the world wide energy crisis. He plans on selling it to the highest bidder, who will be likely to dominate the world’s energy market for years to come.

As a villain, I quite like Scaramanga. He was played by Christopher Lee (Saruman in The Lord of the Rings trilogy & Count Dooku from the Star Wars prequels, among others), and Lee plays the role with an intellectually sinister style that belies his fairly silly backstory of having grown up an orphan in the circus and learning to be a sharpshooter in that environment. Despite that, Lee plays Scaramanga as a competitive villain who wants to beat Bond as much to show he’s the best killer in the business as much as just for the fact that he needs him dead. This is actually a deep character with emotional scars as well as the physical disfigurement of having a superfluous 3rd nipple.

There are actually two Bond girls in this film. One of them, Andrea Anders starts out as Scaramanga’s lover, and he eventually kills her. She was played by Maud Adams, who would come back to the series nine years later playing the title role in Octopussy. She plays this role well, but her death is a bit ridiculous. Bond plans to meet her in a public place so that she can give him the Solex Agitator, but Scaramaga shoots her when she’s in her seat. Bond sits next to her, but she only stares straight ahead and doesn’t say anything. Bond notices that she’s been shot in the heart and is dead. The thing that bothered me about the scene is that Andrea is sitting erect in her seat, even though she’s stone dead. She at least would have been slumped over, or maybe would be arched over the back of the seat. Dramatically it works, but the fact that it was so unrealistic took me out of the movie.

The other Bond girl is Mary Goodnight, and she might be the worst Bond girl ever. Britt Ekland played her, and her acting was awful. Fine acting has never been a hallmark of the Bond series, but Ekland’s acting in The Man With the Golden Gun is some of the worst acting in the series for such an important character. She carries the baggage of unrequited love for Bond that finally is consummated by the end of the film, but not before Bond shoves her in a closet (like he did with a girl at the beginning of Live and Let Die). She’s also a bit of a blunderer, having been captured by Scaramanga as she spies on his midget assistant Nick Nack (played by Herve Villechaize who would become better known as Tattoo from TV’s Fantasy Island) and then later bumping her butt into the control panel that turns on the the solar device that Bond is trying to dismantle and nearly kills him. Otherwise, she’s another unremarkable aspect of an unremarkable film.

There was one ridiculous thing in this film that needs to be mentioned. There was a boat chase in Live and Let Die that introduced Louisiana sheriff J.W. Pepper, a tobacco chewing redneck sheriff who was clearly put in the film for comic relief. He reappears in The Man With the Golden Gun while on vacation in Thailand. That was something else that took me out of the picture, because it just felt ridiculous having that character suddenly show up in Thailand because it was a blatant attempt to connect the two movies and there was no good reason for it. J.W. Pepper didn’t have to be there. I understand the desire for comic relief, but the film makers could have been more creative than that in finding it.

Of the nine Bond films I’ve watched so far, this one does rank in the bottom half. It’s clear that the film makers are still trying to find their way with Roger Moore playing Bond, and they would actually hit their stride in the next film.