Ranking the Roger Moore James Bond Movies from Worst to Best

But if you need more, suffice to say that Octopussy starts at the very beginning promisingly enough, with Moore continuing the Cold War warrior shtick from his previous and superior Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only (1981). Octopussy is immediately daffier with 007 stealing an espionage plane from what is meant to be Communist Cuba and landing it in front of a gas station to ask for a fill-up, but all the way through his late night tryst with Kristina Wayborn as a glorified Circus Du Soleil performer, it has a mild campiness that is harmless… if disposable.

But the further the movie goes into unlocking the schemes of its awful villain (a sleepy Louis Jourdan) and how they intersect with an army of cultural-appropriating acrobats, the worse it gets. Most deadly though is how dull it becomes, and how truly over the hill Moore finally looks in the part at the age of 56. The sad clown makeup didn’t help.

6. The Man with the Golden Gun (1974)

Is The Man with the Golden Gun actually a worse movie than Octopussy? We admit, it’s a bit arbitrary in picking one over the other. But let’s begin with what works about The Man with the Golden Gun. For starters, it’s right there in the title since Sir Christopher Lee and his gilded pistol make for a memorably striking presence. Still in his Dracula heyday, Lee transfers from Hammer Studios a similar regal menace to the Bond series.

Alas, also like his gun, the ostentatious villain only has one bullet in the chamber. Otherwise, the movie (based on Fleming’s final and honestly unfinished novel) makes too much out of the villain’s campier aspects, such as a prosthetic third nipple and Hervé Villechaize as a short of stature henchman whose mocking depiction would inspire the Mini-Me character in Austin Powers many years later.

In the plus column, Moore is much younger and more virile in this one, and is great when he’s allowed to lean into the comedy side of the character. The Bond producers hadn’t quite figured that out, however, depicting 007 at his most chauvinistic and cold toward women in this one, as if hoping to make up for the lack of Sean Connery by upping the caddishness. It doesn’t work, and poor Britt Eland is reduced to playing the ditzy blonde in a bikini via the role of Dr. Goodnight, who was actually one female character that author Ian Fleming wrote with a degree of sympathy over the course of several novels (she’s closer to the onscreen Miss Moneypenny than the Moneypenny of the books).

Nonetheless, there are brief flashes of classic Bond movie ingenuity here: the duel at 10 paces between Moore and Lee, Bond’s escape from a karate school, and a chase that features one of the best stunts in the franchise, with a car doing a 360-degree barrel roll while jumping between two ends of a broken bridge. Such a shame that most people never notice the last bit because the movie adds a tacky sound effect.