The film fails because it is melodramatic in conception, but does not have the courage to be unashamedly melodramatic in execution.

**THE BIGGEST BOND OF ALL!** Moonraker is a joy from beginning to end. Huge spectacle, stunning locations, lashings of humour, superb stunts, sexy ladies, a despicable and memorable villain, great special effects and of course, the legendary Sir Roger Moore as James Bond. Elements of You Only Live Twice - spaceships swallowing spaceships - are expanded upon here and Moonraker fits right in with the classic silliness that the Bond franchise has always embraced. It's a shame that the 2006 reboot threw it all away and chose to run away from being Bond films.

One of the best of the Moore era I steered clear of “Moonraker” (1979) for years because critics almost unanimously said it was awful. So when I finally sat down to view it I fully expecting a dog. Wrong! “Moonraker” is thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end and is one of the best of Roger Moore's 7-movie stint in the series. The plot revolves around 007 investigating Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale) after a space shuttle on loan to the British is stolen. James slowly discovers that Drax has a mad scheme to recreate a race of perfect human specimens. The giant Jaws (Richard Kiel) returns from “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977) as Bond teams-up with the beautiful Dr. Holly Goodhead (Lois Chiles). The story climaxes with a spectacular battle at Drax' space station. Everything in “Moonraker” is over the top: The locations, the action, the villainous scheme, the humor, the seriousness, Jaws and the space finale. This works fabulously because Bond films were never meant to be deep, thought-provoking pieces of art, but rather grandiose pieces of thrilling eye candy with an amusing sense of the absurd. One thing that I demand in any Bond adventure is great globe-trotting and spectacular locations. This is one of the reasons I consider “License to Kill” (1989) weak, but “Moonraker” delivers in spades! The film starts out with breathtaking scenes high above Napa Valley, California,…

Now my geography isn't great, but I am not sure you can actually fly from the Yukon to the British coast in fifteen minutes! That's how this outing for Roger Moore begins, and it's symptomatic of the rather weak storyline and sloppy production that seems intent on getting "James Bond" to capitalise on "Star Wars" (1977) fever. Anyway, a space shuttle is stolen and "007" is sent to visit gazillionaire industrialist "Drax" (Michael Londsale) who lives in a genuinely imported French chateau in California. A dizzying experience introduces him to "Dr. Goodhead" (Lois Chiles) and pretty soon the pair, after a bit of a sticky start, are trying to find out what happened to the missing spaceship and to thwart an ingenious plan to replace the population of the planet with an Aryan-style perfect race. Everyone here just looks tired. Lonsdale tries hard to inject some sort of menace but the rest of it lumbers along in an episodic fashion with a couple of set-piece escapades that are frequently let down by poor visual effects (the dogs eating the steaks, or the gondola chase - where they have clearly just speeded up film...). John Barry and Hal David delivered another number for Shirley Bassey and, indeed, the score provides quite a bit of the humour with nods to "Close Encounters" (1977) and the "Magnificent Seven" (1960) but the rest of this is really mediocre. Usually there are a few sce…