Big Gay Longcat and Expensive Luxury Cat review James Bond: You Only Live Twice (part two)
The appearance of Burt Kwouk as a senior SECTRE henchmanny confirms that Goldfinger is as much a part of the overarching SECTRE plot that spans all of Sean Connery's Bond films as any of the others. While it is true that Burt Kwouk's character did get shot by Goldfinger, and presumably killed, this film isn't called You Only Live Twice for nothing.
Number One meets with two mannys and, as usual, gets Blofeld to do the talking for him. He shows the mannys his pool with piranha fish in it, so that they know he is a cat who means serious business. They were going to pay SECTRE to start World War 3 between the USA and USSR, and Number One wants $100 million in advance - although he presumably wouldn't have much time in which to spend it.
Next he summons in Mr Osato and Number 11 to tell them that the manny they met wasn't Mr Fisher really, it was James Bond. He can tell because only Bond uses a Walther PPK gun. This means that Bond is alive (again) and that they failed to kill him (again). Osato blames Number 11, and Blofeld delivers the classic line
"This organisation does not tolerate failure."
He sends them away, but then uses a secret floor button to drop the bridge over the pool when Number 11 is on it, so she drops in and gets wet. She also then gets nomed by the piranhas, which is almost as bad.
Blofeld shouts at Osato
"Kill Bond! Now!"
or maybe it is Number One shouting, because it sounds a bit like
"Kill Bond! Meow!"
Tiger Tanaka takes Bond to his "ninja training school" where the ninjas train in fighting and shouting at the camera.
"The art of concealment" indeed, mew. They also have gadgets like Q, and Tiger shows Bond a pew gun hidden in a cigarette - hmm, I wonder if that is foreshadowing at all? Tiger wants Bond to do some ninja training, which seems reasonable, but the rest of his plan is as laughable as it is pointless - he wants Bond to "become a Japanese" and to "take a wife" so that he blends in.
To "become a Japanese" involves Bond getting put in some make up and a bad wig. We don't know why they bothered, considering all those other times when Bond hasn't disguised his face even slightly, and can only conclude they must have had some kind of minimum quota for the racism in the film, which a spot of gratuitous yellowface helped them reach.
Bond is sleeping next to Aki when a SECTRE assassin tries to poison him, but misses and gets Aki instead. She goes
Aki had to be killed off to make way for a different character to take part in the sham marriage, which Tiger is still insisting upon as a vital part of his plan. It is utterly baffling why this plot point is necessary - even more so than why it was part of Tiger's plan in the first place - since Kissy Suzuki appears within a couple of scenes of Aki's death, fills exactly the same function in the plot as Aki and, by replacing Aki in this way, completely undermines the film's theme of mannys living twice.
No second life for Aki, it seems, unless of course she actually is Kissy Suzuki - who is never named as such on screen, after all, so she could conceivably be Aki - and has merely taken the more conventional way of living a second time by being played by a different actor. Yes, we must conclude that Aki and Kissy are the same character, and anything that might contradict this can be safely ignored as less of a plot hole than why SECTRE would want to provoke a war between two superpowers with enough nuclear weapons between them to destroy the entire world.
The wedding scene is the most appalling padding and it drags on for ages. Finally the plot is allowed to proceed as Bond, Tiger and the new Aki go to the island. They see the funeral of a manny who died in a cave and, since it is the only clue they have, Bond decides to investigate it.
The cave shows Bond which volcano to investigate, and when he and Aki reach it they find that the wet bit inside is really "metal." It starts to open underneath Bond's feet, so now they know it is really a hollowed-out volcano lair. Aki goes to get Tiger and other ninja reinforcements, while Bond stealths his way into the lair before the roof closes again.
The Americans have launched another spaceship, so SECTRE is preparing to send their own spaceship to nom it. Bond rescues the spacemannys from the first American spaceship, and they help him steal a spacesuit so that he can pretend to be one of the SECTRE spacemannys. We are not clear on what Bond's plan is beyond this point, maybe Bond just really wants the chance to be a spacemanny and go into space? Sadly for Bond, he'll have to wait for a later film in order to realise that ambition, because he gets caught by Blofeld and taken to the control room.
"James Bond, allow me to introduce myself. I am Ernst Stavro Blofeld."
Blofeld reveals himself to be being played by Donald Pleasance. He does this by leaning forward slightly, when really he should have done it in a much more dramatic fashion, such as by spinning around on his chair. Nevertheless it cannot take away from the cleverness in the fact that the first time that we, the audience, ever see Blofeld's face is at the same time as Bond himself does.
"They told me you were assassinated in Hong Kong.""Yesh, thish ish my shecond life.""You only live twice, Mr Bond."
Clang!
The scene of the SECTRE rocket launching is slow and lengthy, but unlike the fake wedding scene earlier it is incredibly tense and dramatic because the stakes are so high and yet Bond has been captured and is forced to watch it all powerlessly. There is some hope, however, as we see Tiger and his ninja army approach the volcano. But Tiger may have brought too many ninjas for them to be effective, as SECTRE starts shooting them with hidden guns.
Blofeld tells Bond
"The firing power inside my crater is enough to annihilate a small army. You can watch it all on TV. It's the last programme you're likely to see."
In a subtle but amusing touch, the television screen they look at is in the place of the fourth wall, so it looks to us as though they are looking at us.
"Well if I'm going to be forced to watch televishion, may I shmoke?"
Bond has identified Blofeld's weakness - he can't resist the chance to make a witty remark. What is a strength in our hero is a weakness in his enemy - the difference being that Bond waits until after he has killed a baddy before he quips about it.
"Yes, give him his cigarettes. It won't be the nicotine that kills you Mr Bond."
Bond uses the cigarette to shoot a baddy, and then he pulls the lever to open the crater floor. Or is it the lair ceiling? Confused cats are confused, and only Ceiling Cat knows the true answer. Bond gets recaptured, but not before he has let the ninjas in.
The ninjas start blowing up the base, and they and the SECTRE henchmannys get into a gunfight. (Some of the ninjas have brought their swords to this gunfight, and this reveals that some of the SECTRE mannys are really robots, because they make the same metal noise when they get stabbed as when they parry with their own weapons.) Blofeld closes the shielded "shutters" to keep the control room safe. More importantly, it keeps Number One safe too... or does it?
Despite Blofeld's claim that the shutters are "impregnable" the ninja bombs explode a hole into it. Bond may be happy but Number One does not like this one little bit. In case you don't speak cat, here is what he is saying at this moment:
"Blofeld you idiot! Your plan has gone wrong, again, and now I'm getting scares! This organisation does not tolerate failure, remember? Next time I'm going to get another actor to play you - get me Savalas on the Tellyphone!"
Blofeld opens a secret passage and then says
"This is the price of failure, Mr Bond."
before he shoots Osato. Then he says
"Goodbye Mr Bond."
but Tiger rescues Bond with a ninja throwing star to Blofeld's paw, causing his second shot to miss. Notice that Number One escaped into the secret passage, off screen, in between shots. Blofeld then escapes in his tiny monorail before he, too, disappears in between shots.
Bond, Tiger and Aki now have to fight their way back into the control room so they can use the button (which Blofeld conveniently demonstrated to Bond earlier) to make the SECTRE spaceship self-destruct.
In Bond's way is Blofeld's big henchmanny Hans, so they have a fistfight until they end up on the bridge over the pool, which Hans ultimately ends up falling off to become piranha noms. Bond quips
"Bon appétit."
which would have made more sense if it had previously been established that Hans was French, mew.
Bond blows up the SECTRE spaceship in the nick of time, but Blofeld still has one spiteful trick to play. His monorail has taken him to another self-destruct switch, and this one is for his lair.
The lair starts to blow up, and it looks like the volcano is erupting with flows of lava and everything - perhaps the implication is that the self-destruct has actually caused a volcanic eruption? Bond, Tiger, Aki and some of the ninjas escape down a tunnel to the cave Bond discovered earlier. From there they can swim to the sea, where some friendly planes are dropping very convenient inflatable dinghies for them. Bond and Aki get into one together, while Tiger and the other ninjas all just seem to vanish.
Well, they are ninjas.
Bond and Kissy-Aki are having kiffs when a submarine rises up from underneath them. We see that M and Miss Moneypenny are on board, so presumably it is the same one they were on earlier in the film, in a vague attempt at bringing the narrative full circle in the hopes of arriving at a form of thematic closure. M orders Miss Moneypenny to
"Tell him to come below and report.""It'll be a pleasure, sir."
And so, aside from a slow pan away from the submarine over which the end credits commence rolling, the film ends on Miss Moneypenny smirking at the thought of interrupting Bond while he is in the middle of having kiffs. Naughty Miss Moneypenny.
Expensive Luxury Cat's rating: Expensive and Luxury
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