Review – The Man with the Golden Gun

This came out when I was eight – just about the perfect age to appreciate James Bond – which is probably part of why it’s still my favorite Bond picture. Casting Christopher Lee as the villain didn’t exactly hurt, either. I mean, this guy has it made. He gets paid a million bucks a pop to kill people (which was more money in 1974 than it is now). He has his own private island. He even has a vertically-differently-abled servant who attends to the place and cooks Cordon Bleu meals. What more could a guy possibly want? Of course the first time I saw it I wasn’t old enough to get the gross gun-related sexual fetishism. This entry and the next one also mark the starting point of the series’ slide into cartoonish self-parody. On the other hand, it’s the closest the Bond movies ever came to striking a perfect balance between too prosaic and too far-fetched. Even three decades later, it’s still a lot of fun to watch. Worth seeing