Plot: James Bond (Roger Moore) may have met his match in Francisco Scaramanga (Christopher Lee), a world-renowed assassin whose weapon of choice is a disinctive gold pistol. When Scaramanga seizes the priceless Solex Agitator energy converter, Agent 007 must recover the device and confront the trained killer in a heart-stopping duel to the death!
Firsts: None that I could tell
Gadgets: None that I could tell
Girls Bond slept with: Andrea Anders, Mary Goodnight
Elaborate murder attempt that Bond escapes: Duel in a funhouse.
Personal review: As you can tell by the data above, this one didn't have a whole lot going for it. This is, in my opinion, one of the dullest films in the franchise. There's just nothing here that's memorable or noteworthy. Anything that has the potential to be interesting is undercut in some way. For instance, Nick Nack (Herve Villechaize) could have been a neat henchman but he ends up being creepy and somewhat of an Oddjob knockoff. You have Goodnight as a female agent actually helping James, but she ends up being played as a comedic foil rather than a legitimate ally. Then you have the 360 barrel roll stunt that loses all of it's coolness with the unnecessary cartoon sound effect.
Scaramanga is a decent villain on paper, but I felt Christopher Lee underplayed him. He never comes off as either evil or crazy. Rather he just seems like a guy with a lot of time and money on his hands.
The one thing that really annoyed me about this film was the number of coincidence that occured. You have Bond finding a woman who has kept a bullet for years that he happens to need. You have the Hong Kong agent driving by at the exact moment Bond escapes Hai Fat's school. You have M somehow knowing the number to the phone on Scaramanga's junk. You have J.W. Pepper (in an unnecessary cameo) vacationing in the same spot that Bond is at. And these are just the ones that I remember off the top of my head. I can tolerate a lot of plot shortcuts in Hollywood films, but there were just too many here.
The Man With The Golden Gun isn't as offensively bad as say Diamonds as Forever, it just fails to live up to the quality we expect in a Bond film. This is just a compilation of rehashed old ideas along with uninteresting new ones. I suppose the solar energy subplot was more riviting at the time this was released but that did nothing for me either. Thus far, Roger Moore is batting .500. 6/10
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