This review of The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) is part of a wider rewatch of the James Bond series to mark its 60th anniversary. 007 has always been my favourite movie franchise, and I wanted to see where each film ranks within the series. Please check out the main blog post for my rankings of this and the other twenty-four official films and links to the movie reviews for the rest of the franchise.
Short Review
The premise of this film is that Bond and Anya are meant to be the best their country has to offer and a match for each other. However, the writing doesn’t do XXX justice. She spends a lot of time waiting for Bond to save her throughout the film, along with forgiving him so easily for killing her boyfriend, Sergei Barsov (played by Michael Billington), during the pre-titles. She tells Bond that when the mission is over, she will kill him, but she very easily forgives him, and they get amorous in the final scene. The film shows her as weaker than Bond and easily led. I did enjoy this film, its storyline, explosions, gadgets, fights, Jaws, Strongberg, the one-liners from Bond, etc. Unfortunately, the writing is not as strong as I would have liked to see, and the second half of this film is better than the first, which is a bit slow to get going. I feel like the chapter of XXX has so much promise and could have been written better. Graham and Matt of From Rewatch with Love see this as a stealth remake of You Only Live Twice, which I can see in parts.
Long Review and Film Summary
When nuclear submarines of both the British and Russian navies go missing, each country sends its best agent to investigate. 007 (played by Roger Moore) is in a log cabin with a lady in Austria. Bond is requested at MI5 via his label-printing watch. He sets out on the ski slopes where he runs into Russian agents (we will find out later that one of them is XXX’s boyfriend, who Bond kills). Here we witness ski pole guns, shootouts and an impressive jump off a cliff into a Union Jack parshoot. At the same time, Anya Amasova, a Soviet KGB agent known as XXX (played by Barbara Bach) is also called upon by the Russians. At first, they are working separately. However, as the film goes on, their investigations get intertwined to the point where M (played by Bernard Lee) and his Russian counterpart, General Gogol (played by Walter Gotell) make the collaboration official. They are both in search of the Heat Signature Recognition Tracking for the submarines, which has been created by two scientists working for Karl Stromberg (played by Curt Jürgens) who wants to make a new civilisation underwater by targeting key locations (New York and Moscow) with the two nuclear submarines he has stolen and causing World War III. Although Anya and Bond have been told to work together, they can’t help trying to one-up each other, including when they are trying to get the tracking microfilm off each other, shown to them by Max Kalba (played by Vernon Dobtcheff), who gets killed by Jaws (played by Richard Kiel). 007 and Bond get into an epic train fight (who doesn’t love a good Bond film train fight) where 007 electrocutes his teeth with a broken lamp and kicks him out the train window.
Later on, while being chased by Jaws and several henchmen in cars and on motorcycles. We get a classic gadget scene, with mud sprays, smoke screens, and the Bond car turning into a submarine as a helicopter fires at them. Bond and Anya eventually find Strongberg’s secret hideout, along with the two submarines; they turn up on a US submarine and get captured. Once they have disembarked, XXX is captured and taken with Strongberg to Atlantis. Bond fights off his guards, and the Navy turn up with grenades, explosions, flame throwers and tons of gunfire – the Captain seals the operations room. Bond manages to remove the detonator from the nuclear missile on a third submarine and then gets on top of the security camera ball on a track as it moves close to the Operations Room. He cuts the CCTV cable and sets off a 20-second explosion timer. Trying to get away, the pulley jams, and he manages to drop down just as the wall blows up. They work out where the two submarines are and tell them to change their firing position to each other’s location. Bond goes back to Strongberg’s big spider hideout (Atlantis) to get XXX (he only has an hour before the Navy blow it up). He arrives on a build-it-yourself Jet Ski that Q (played by Desmond Llewelyn) sent him.
Once on board, he meets with Strongberg, who has a gun under the table pointed at him. Bond fires through the barrel twice, shoots Strongberg, and then fights with Jaws in the tank room. 007 uses a large magnet to pick Jaws up and dump him in the shark tank – Jaws eats the shark with his metal teeth. Bond finds Anya (as Atlantis starts to explode), and they get into Strongberg’s escape pod. XXX picks up a gun to shoot Bond but shoots the top of the Dom Perignon instead, they are congratulated by their governments and embrace in the escape pod.