Operation: Watch All the James Bonds: Episode 4: YOLT

Episode 1: Dr. No and From Russia With Love

Episode 2: Goldfinger

Episode 3: Thunderball

So it's come to You Only Live Twice, Connery’s last in his original run of Bond pictures, and another movie I had no expectations for, except for that it's one of the more divisive in the franchise It seems to be either near the bottom or the top for a lot of folks. And the reasons they don’t like it sounded precisely like reasons that I would like it. Learning that it took place entirely in Japan, I was overcome by a sense of gleeful joy in realizing that this movie would probably be steeped in ignorant and insensitive racial stereotypes. And guess what? I was spot fucking on. Racism out of ignorance rather than malice is by far my favorite kind! I feel fairly comfortable in saying that this movie was absolutely hilarious.

It opens up with Bond in a post-coital relaxation with a Chinese girl, who leaves the room right before the bed they did the nasty on flips up into the wall, taking the super spy with it. A bunch of armed men storm into the room with machineguns and straight dump into the bed. Cut to Bond’s encased body being dumped into the ocean during a military funeral, where he sinks to the ocean floor. You guys! They….they just KILLED James Bond. I can’t believe it! Well, you shouldn’t believe it, because that would be a pretty terrible direction for the franchise to suddenly take. The body cocoon is immediately picked up by a submarine, where they cut it open to reveal our oversexed hero is still very much alive and horny.

A pretty silly start, but where it goes from here is unpredictably bonkers, and in the best ways possible. It’s hard to pick where to start, really. It’s actually kind of a terrible movie, as the characters feel very disposable and the plot incredibly outlandish, even by Bond standards. But it’s such a great kind of bad! The entertainment value is undeniable, even as Connery starts showing waning enthusiasm for his famous role. Okay, so SPECTRE has a spaceship that is sent to swallow other spaceships. It slowly approaches its target, the front of opens up, and in go the hapless astronauts in their pathetic non-spaceship-eating spaceship. SPECTRE is essentially kidnapping a bunch of astronauts and bringing them back to Blofeld’s crazy base inside a hollowed-out volcano in Japan, and it’s up to Bond to find out why. But as everyone he knows thinks he’s dead, except for M and the crew, it’s supposed to be a secret undercover operation. You know…spy shit.

That’s only the beginning of this glorious mess! There’s a fight scene between Bond and a bodyguard where he beats the dude up with a sofa. He literally picks a goddamned sofa up off the ground and starts hitting the guy with it. Another scene has Bond in a car chase, being pursued by a carload of Japanese henchmen with guns, when he calls in some air support. A helicopter with a giant magnet swoops in, picks up the henchmen, and dumps them all in the ocean. I believe I cheered a little at this moment. It's a pretty crazy stunt, even by today's standards!

Perhaps the most memorable action sequence is when Bond encounters Q, and Q delivers him a special gyrocopter he’s been working on, armed with all sorts of ballistic goodies. Bond immediately takes to the skies and does battle with a ton of normal helicopters. It’s a very drawn-out sequence, yet still neat for the time at least. Bond goes through all of his gadgets in the gyro, one by one, and his carnage is displayed by shots of stationary model helicopters exploding and then dropping from the sky like boulders. The entire sequence didn’t really need to exist. While this scene did show that Bond discovers the volcano base from the air, it’s mainly there solely to show off the cool gyrocopter and add another action scene; it could have been cut and wouldn’t have impacted the film at all. Thunderball had this problem as well, of including a scene with a novel gadget just for the sake of having a gadget rather than figure out how to meaningfully incorporate it into the storyline. It’s so endearingly lazy.

You Only Live Twice is also known for finally revealing what Blofeld looks like. In the past few films, he’s only shown from the neck down, stroking his fluffy white cat as he addresses others, being portrayed by different actors each time. Here, none other than the legendary Donald Pleasance plays the nefarious villain. For whatever reason, I guess a lot of people don’t like Pleasance’s portrayal of Blofeld, but I really thought he was fine; maybe a little bit of a wimpy bitch, but more than serviceable. This movie’s version of Blofeld is also the inspiration for Dr. Evil’s look, so he’s worth at least THAT.

Akiko Wakabayashi is the Bond girl this time around, playing Aki. While she is beautiful, her acting is about as rotten as deviled egg farts and is likely the most forgettable Bond girl thus far. Her character is so half-assed, and it seems like all she wants to do is fuck Bond from the second she meets him. I’m sure he’s not complaining about that, but she feels like such a throwaway character. Maybe that’s because she IS, though. They literally throw her away, killing her off two thirds of the way through the movie, replacing her with another equally attractive and useless Japanese woman named Kissy. Yes…. Kissy. The only difference between them is that Kissy doesn’t want to screw Bond and would rather help his mission.

This brings me to what I think is simultaneously the best and most offensive part of this film: the aforementioned racism. Although this movie was filmed on location in Japan and uses real Japanese actors, it still depicts the Japanese culture with the accuracy of a blind sniper in a hurricane. It’s the 60s, though! You couldn’t realistically expect any different. And honestly, this was still probably the most positive portrayal of Japan in Western media after WWII. This aspect of the movie served up the funniest moments, especially in the movie’s final act. Bond, in order to blend in and infiltrate Blofeld’s volcano base, had to, for whatever reason, look Japanese. You know what this means! OMG MAKEOVER! So this actually happens: Bond is laying on a table while some people apply prosthetic pieces around his eyes to make him look Asian, as well as dye his skin yellow with lemon juice. I couldn’t say that I actually expected them to do that, but you can bet your ass that I was so, so happy they did. Then they cut away mid-procedure.

Bond is soon shown walking into a room to meet his newly assigned fake wife, Kissy, with his head bowed. He slowly looks up for what the movie tries to make a big reveal of his new Japanese look. I looked at my dad in disbelief and howled with laughter. The best part was that even with the rubber eye pieces, unnoticeably dyed skin, and dorky haircut, he still didn’t look remotely Japanese, but bless them for trying. The fact that they actually did this without any level of self-awareness was pretty amazing in and of itself. Bond’s ally then reveals that they’ll be breaking into Blofeld’s base with a team of ninjas! Because what else would they be? Incredibly inept and poorly trained expendable asshats with guns is probably a more apt description. After Bond trains to become an honorary ninja himself, he and Kissy go off and find the base on their own. When they start climbing down the volcano, it’s broad daylight, and when they finally reach the bottom, night has fallen. Bond instructs Kissy to go and assemble the ninja team for a full-on assault, so off she goes. But she manages to make it back to the top of the volcano in a matter of 30 seconds. I can see that continuity is not one of the producer’s primary concerns. In the meantime, Bond sneaks inside and disguises himself as an astronaut, but is caught by Blofeld about 90 seconds later.

The ensuing battle inside Blofeld’s volcano base is about as nuts as you would expect, as dozens of gun-toting ninjas rappel from the roof after blowing it open, many of them being shot dead before they even reach the ground. So you guys barge in as loud as fucking possible and immediately put yourselves in what couldn’t be a more vulnerable position. Really living up to the ‘ninja’ name, morons. They serve as a great distraction that allows Bond to escape, knock some asshole into a pool of man-eating piranhas, and stop Blofeld’s ingenious plan to swallow an American spaceship. There is a GREAT goof when everything is going haywire in the control room. Blofeld is standing there holding his cat when the roof suddenly blows open and there are loud explosions and gunshots everywhere. The cat is freaking the fuck out in his arms, its eyes nearly bulging out of its poor cat head, desperately trying to escape Mr. Pleasance’s clutches while he’s trying to act and hold on to the cat at the same time. Shhh…just leave it in….no one will notice! Everything from there goes as one would expect. Bond wins, the super-secret volcano lair is destroyed, and Blofeld escapes to presumably come up with some other convoluted clusterfuck of a plan for the future. (SPOILER ALERT………..this is exactly what happens in the next movie).

You Only Live Twice is nothing if not very ambitious. For all of its many faults, it does not only more than what the previous Bonds set out to do, but more than what most other movies were doing back then. Between the many huge action scenes featuring larger-than-life stunts, the extravagant set design of the volcano base, and the on-location shooting in Japan, there’s a lot of nice stuff to look at. The wonderfully hammy acting and blatant lighthearted racism is thick, heart-stopping icing on the cake. It’s not Connery’s best performance as James Bond, nor is it as wholly competent as Goldfinger, but I’d say it’s every bit as entertaining. I really adored this Bond adventure, maybe not for the reasons intended, but what’s the difference? As the finale for Connery’s main run of Bond films, and as the continuation of the increasingly silly nature of them, it’s nearly perfect.

Title Sequence Assessment: The opening credits to You Only Live Twice have a predictably oriental theme, and aside from shots of Japanese women, feature a lot of shots of boiling lava in volcanoes. Fitting, I guess. The song, however, is sung by Nancy Sinatra and is absolutely wonderful. I’ve heard the main melody in a bunch of other stuff before and never knew this film was its origin. It’s used a lot throughout the film itself, too, and never gets old. It’s just so…pleasant. The title sequence makes me feel I was forced to inhale a near-lethal amount of laughing gas and was then dragged through a beautiful field of flowers while chained to the back of a pick-up truck.

Up next is the black sheep of the Bond franchise, On Her Majesty's Secret Service! Thanks for reading!