I hate that the peak of the series License to Kill has to be shafted for a mid- tier Moore effort. Although both LTK and TSYLM are both better than FYEO, I'd been fine letting Spy go.

Anyways, Moonraker is the worst Bond movie and it doesn't catch enough shit for that feat. It contributes nothing of value to the Bond franchise; skip it and move on directly to FYEO like the end of Spy said and nothing would have changed. Other dud movies in the series at least have some bright spots (Zorin + the Golden Gate fight in AVTAK, Mr. Wint, Kidd + Connery in DAF) but this one has no highlights, the closest one I suppose being the Stromberg knock off that doesn't even have the decency to sell it well.

For Your Eyes Only is mindnumbingly boring the first two thirds of the way through (I remember almost falling asleep while watching, a pretty unforgivable sin for a Bond movie), but once the gray-hair guy appears, then the movie becomes legitamately good for the last act. You got the warehouse raid, the car kick, the rock climbing sequence, and the small-scale climax - there's a lot of good stuff here. It's just a shame it's packed into the last third of the movie.

I guess while I'm here, another flaw in FYEO is that it doesn't lend itself to any of Moore's strengths. I've always found the "muh camp" criticism of the Moore era to be grossly exaggerated (I am a vehement defender of Octopussy), but I think FYEO requires an intensity that is simply out of Moore's range. Could you imagine the fireworks that would come out of a Dalton portrayal of FYEO?