Goldfinger (1964)

  I think this marks the point where the Bond movies started to slide into stupid puns and Swiss cheese plots. 

James Bond (Sean Connery) is back in action, on the trail of smuggler Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe).  Unfortunately, it seems all those shaken martinis have pickled James' brains since he pretty much blunders through the investigation, getting caught time and again by Goldfinger's goons Oddjob (Harold Sakota) and Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman).  First, there's his hamhanded antagonizing of Goldfinger when Bond catches him cheating at cards, using the lovely Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton) as a spotter.  When Jill is killed by the application of gold paint (instead of just saying she was smothered then covered in paint, they make a point of telling the audience that the paint caused "skin asphyxiation"), Bond puts his personal feelings aside and goes after Goldfinger again.  He manages to get Jill's sister Tilly (Tania Mallet) killed as well before falling directly into Goldfinger's pudgy hands.  The crime lord is all set to bisect Bond with his shiny new industrial laser but Bond successfully bluffs a man so bad at poker he has to hire an escort to help him cheat.  High bar there.  Afraid of what Bond might know, Goldfinger ships him off to his main headquarters in Kentucky.  There, in between trips back and forth to his cell, Bond discovers that Goldfinger plans to nuke the gold reserves of Ft. Knox, disrupting the world economy and making his private reserves invaluable. 

Honestly, if you needed the best example of how extraneous Bond is to the plot of his own movie, look at the bomb diffusion scene.  After being handcuffed to the device and killing bad guys for almost all of the 5 minute countdown, Bond manages to get the case of the bomb open.  He starts frantically grabbing bundles of wires and is about to just yank out a random handful when one of the American scientists walks in, calmly moves him out of the way, and turns off the device.  Radioactive disaster averted, no thanks at all to IQ 007. 

The roles for women in this film continue to be paper-thin.  I had some hopes for Honor Blackman as Goldfinger's personal pilot.  She seemed like a morally ambiguous to downright cold-blooded character but all it took to sway her was a sweaty roll in the hay with our hero.  Because women's minds are so weak, a good hard dicking is all you need to jar that moral compass in the right direction. 

Here's hoping the next one in the line-up tries a little harder.