THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

Roger Moore's third outing as the suave spy and considered by many to be his best Bond movie - personally I'm not so sure of that, I've a fondness for For Your Eyes Only but Spy is definitely up there with the best and not just of the Moore ones but of the series as a whole. It's certainly a massive improvement on the previous film in the series, The Man with the Golden Gun.

That's not to say Man with the Golden Gun was a bad film but it did lack spectacle and Spy made up for that in spades. The pre-credit sequence which saw Bond leap off Mount Asgard and the pull the iconic Union Jack parachute and float down to safety. The stunt was carried out by Rick Sylvester who actually did the 1,000 foot drop. These days CGI would be used to create this shot but it would not have the jaw dropping effect of this totally amazing scene.

The plot, such as there is with a Bond film, a variation on the world domination theme, is just meaty enough for the films needs and Roger Moore is superb as 007. For a change the supporting cast are developed beyond the two dimensions and Barbara Bach's character is a kind of female James Bond. Her Russian spy gives as good as she gets throughout the film, often in fact besting Bond. This battle of oneupmanship between then is played out with great restraint and the humour never goes too far into the absurd.

Richard Keil is excellent as the hulking assassin with the deadly overbite, Jaws. In fact every thing about the film is so much larger than life - the sets, the stunts, the girls, the cars - it's everything a Bond film should be which seems to be something the current producers have forgotten with the unpleasantly brutal latest instalments in the series.

The current DVD edition is part of the Ultimate Edition series and is available on both standard and Blu-Ray. The discs really do deserve the tag ultimate editions - there are several commentaries, the highlight being one with Moore himself, numerous documentaries including the excellent Inside The Spy who Loved Me which has been thankfully retained from the previous James Bond Special edition issues. The standard disc is remastered with a booming 5.1 audio track and the Blue-ray is up to the same standard.

An excellent entry in the series.