a review of 007之你死我活

Came away liking this one a lot less than I remembered. Compared to the Connery/Lazenby era films it almost feels a bit too eager to top itself at every turn, with an even more convoluted plot than usual. Roger Moore does okay as Bond, but the script feels like it was written for a 007 with the same mix of brutality and sophistication as Connery; Moore nails the latter but doesn't feel entirely convincing at the former. There's a lot of extraneous business happening with Yaphet Kotto's Kananga, where it's like the filmmakers came up with too many ideas for what kind of villain he needed to be and wound up using all of them. So he ends up being a Caribbean dictator who's also a Harlem drug lord who's also running a Voodoo cult who also has a lake full of deadly crocodiles but also an underground lagoon full of sharks, and he has something like six different named henchmen who each have their own silly deformities and gimmicks, and to be honest it gets kind of exhausting after a while. There is a speedboat chase in the last half hour that by all rights should be the most exciting thing in the picture, but it feels like it lasts for the actual duration of the 1970s. But really, the worst thing about the movie is how it is clearly trying to capitalize on the Blaxploitation craze, while also hinging its entire plot on some pretty racist assumptions exemplified by all but maybe one or two black characters in it.