“Octopussy” is a pretty entertaining Bond movie despite its individual flaws like an aging Roger Moore, Maud Adams playing a Bond girl the second time as the titular character Bond Girl ( she was Andrea Anders and Scaramanga’s girlfriend in “ The Man with the Golden Gun” ), one of the worst baddies in Bond movies in Kamal Khan( played by the late Louis Jordan) and a somewhat dull plot .
Despite all that, it was an entertaining movie and it was the first Bond movie shot in India with some entertaining Tuktuk chases and the Royal palaces of Udaipur added some grandeur to the movie.
It was the early 1980s when the average person in the West thought India was the land of elephants and snake charmers ( the movie does have the obligatory snake charmer scene with Vijay Amritraj using it as a cover as Bond’s MI6 liaison in India) and suddenly seeing all the grand palaces made people go “ Is this really India?” and they picked the Lake Palace Hotel and the Jag Mandir as Octopussy’s lair.
I think they squeezed the maximum out of India ( I don’t think the franchise has gone back to India since then) and it had an exotic appeal to the movie.
Was it one of the best Bond movies? Not by a long shot
But was it an entertaining watch? Yes
Maud Adams did look good in a saree.
Here’s to Octopussy and the the title song “ All Time High” with alternative scenes, most of them from Indie.
It was an entertaining Bond movie despite a weak plot and lot of flaws.
Frankly, EON should have shopped for a new Bond after “ For Your Eyes Only”