After a cold open where Bond is visiting his wife's grave and takes care of some unfinished business, a more realistic story follows. A British spy ship is sunk in the Ionian sea after trawling an old naval mine, prompting the Secret Service to enlist the aid of a marine archaeologist to try and salvage a sought-after ATAC guidance computer used for sending orders to nuclear submarines. After the archaeologist is killed by an assassin, 007 is sent in to investigate. When the assassin is killed by his target's daughter, Bond follows a tenuous lead through Cortina to Greece, where he embroiled in a feud between two smugglers: Aristotle Kristatos, played by Julian Glover, and Milos Colombo, played by Chaim Topol. Both had been war heroes, and now one of them is conspiring to steal the ATAC for the KGB (no prizes for guessing which one).
Bond is aided in his mission by girl of the week Melina Havelock, the aforementioned vengeful daughter played by Carole Bouquet. She's a good sharpshooter, favouring a crossbow, and manages to help out quite a bit with the resources at her disposal. While her desire for revenge hinders Bond at first, it is played for drama rather than for humour, and I find it rather heart-warming when Bond is able to talk her down. Especially because this film delivers one of Roger Moore's coldest moments when he kicks the henchman's car off a cliff.
The gritty realism adds to the set pieces really well. In one particularly hilarious scene, Bond's gadget-laden Lotus is blown up when someone tries to break the window, so he is forced to escape with Melina in a Citroen 2CV, known to users as 'The Flying Dustbin'. There's also a ski chase, a tense deep-sea diving sequence, an equally tense mountaineering sequence, and a precarious death trap where Bond and Melina are keelhauled.
If there's anything strange about this film, it's the number of fake foreigners. You've got a Greek character played by a British actor, a Greek character played by an Israeli actor, an Anglo-Greek woman played by a French actress, and I don't know what nationality 'Bibi Dahl' originated from, but she sounds very American. But the best case is for an Austrian countess who is actually from Liverpool, played by an Australian actress.
As stated above, I enjoy the more realistic and edgy tone of this film, along with the somewhat deeper relationship between Bond and Melina. The music by Bill Conti (of Rocky fame) adds a lot to this as well.
Also, is one of those goons Charles Dance?
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