ffolkes (1980)

I’m not unsympathetic.  I get it.  An actor who gets trapped in a familiar role yearns to stretch himself, try something new, paint a legacy as something more than just a one-trick pony.  For Roger Moore, ffolkes is not a step in the right direction.  It is clear that he wanted to push away from James Bond a little bit and try a different kind of role.  The problem is that Rufus Excalibur ffolkes is really just James Bond with a new paint job and a few eccentricities, like his devotion to his cats and his needlepoint hobby.

Really, if he wanted to make a film that was far and away from James Bond, he couldn’t do worse than this half-assed retread that merely takes two steps to the left.  Let’s see, he’s a counter-terrorism consultant who is recruited by Lloyds of London to come up with a plan to save the North Sea oil installations should they be taken over by terrorists.  No sooner does he come up with the plan then – sure enough – there’s trouble aboard a supply ship when a group of men posing as reporters come board one of the platforms.  They rig the platform with explosives and demand a huge ransom from the British government.

What to do?  Well, what about that cat-loving, needlepoint-obsessed, counter-terrorist guy that we hired to come up with a plan?  Let’s get him to take out the terrorist.  And the rest of the movie goes just as you might expect.  There is nothing new, or even interesting, in ffolkes save for the notation that it might as well have been a James Bond picture in the first place.  You couldn’t do any worse.