Avis Metacritic

Roger Moore’s third outing as Bond is undoubtedly his best.

A glitter sci-fi adventure fantasy that balances the indestructible James Bond with an indestructible cartoon adversary, Jaws (Richard Kiel), who is a great evil windup toy. This is the best of the Bonds starring the self-effacing Roger Moore.

What The Spy Who Loved Me lacks when it comes to establishing the atmosphere of danger present in some the best Bond movies it makes up in spades in the creation of one apparently-impossible situation for the protagonist after the other, the kind that other entries would have been lucky to include a single example.

For the first time in three films, Roger Moore starts to unearth a personality for Bond.

Triple X posed an ideal opportunity for the series to rectify its dismissive treatment of women until this point, putting a lady on equal footing with Bond. To its credit, the film does feature a bit of screwball badinage between the two (a clunky bit about female drivers, unfortunately), but it has yet to introduce a single female character who doesn’t want to sleep with our hero.

The film moves along at a serviceable clip, but it seems half an hour too long, thanks to the obligatory shoot-'em-up conclusion, filmed on the largest sound-stage in the world, but nevertheless the dullest sequence here.

It's the submarine barn and Richard Kiel's steel-toothed Jaws you remember from this one; the ostensible hero is just a fleshy blur.

Gadgets abound, especially a Lotus sports car that transforms into a submarine. But the scene-stealer is 7'2" Richard Kiel as Jaws, a shark-eating man with steel teeth.

As the Bond series moves deeper into the 1970s, the emphasis moves away from the inventive scripts that made the best Sean Connery films fine examples of the spy genre and toward the kind of feats of daring and visual spectacle that abound in The Spy Who Loved Me.

The film has its moments - Kiel's indestructible heavy racks up a good score - but the rest is desperately weak.