Live and Let Die Aug01

Tags

Related Posts

Share This

Live and Let Die

Live and Let Die used to be my favourite Bond movie, but while seeing it again only the other day I found myself irritated by how often the bad guys could have killed Bond but inexplicably chose not to, or rather decided on ill-advised, over-elaborate and far-from-fool-proof encounters with extreme physical harm instead, when a bullet between the eyes would have sufficed. Now, of course I know that the real reason Bond never dies even though his not-so-mortal enemies have ample opportunity to dispose of him is because it’s written in the script. But yet, that script is supposed, to a reasonably plausible degree – even for Ian Fleming – to represent reality. It seems that Mr Big just isn’t serious about killing Bond. He has him dead to rights at least five times in the movie and insists on these ridiculous machinations.

He cuts Bond’s forearm and suspends 007 and Solitaire over a tank of sharks. You see, sharks are very sensitive to blood and can smell it from miles away. He never imagines that Bond has a wristwatch with a circular saw. He has Bond trapped in a secret room but chooses instead to take him outside into a public alleyway to shoot him, where predictably Bond cleverly uses a fire escape ladder to bludgeon his foe.

The most ridiculous scene is probably the one in which Mr Big explodes because he obligingly swallows a compressed air pellet fed to him by Bond – but there’s no blood, skin, flesh or anything left of Mr Big except shreds of clothes. Maybe Mr Big was just a balloon all along, and men led by a balloon can’t be effective assassins, let’s be realistic.

The best thing about Live and Let Die is not even the huge black man with the mechanical arm; it is Jane Seymour, or Solitaire as she is known here. She is a Tarot specialist, a seer in bondage, working for Mr Big; and she inevitably falls for Bond’s charms. Look out for a moment of, erm, ‘slippage’ right near the end on the the train. Bond wasn’t the only thing that got away.

RH