It’s been more than a decade since the last time I watched “Goldfinger” — my favourite, along with “Golden Eye”, “In Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, and “Casino Royale” — but last Saturday I finally found the time again.

In this the, umm, I think third or fourth Bond movie, 007 has to stop a fat old billionaire named Auric Goldfinger, who claims he wants to rob the Fort Knox, the military base where the American gold reserve was kept, back in the day when such things still mattered. This mission takes him all across the world, as usual, from Florida via London to the Alps, Germany and finally the US.

It has my favourite Bond actor in it, too, (I rank them as follows: Connery, Lazenby, Craig, Timothy Dalton, blank space, blank space, Pierce Brosnan, blank space, blank space, Roger Moore), and is generally quite entertaining. It’s before all the gadgets started showing up — the only things Bond totes here is a tracker in his shoe and a slightly modified car, neither of which were too implausible — making it moderately realistic. It’s also fun that while Bond does the spying and takes care of the villain and his number one henchman, he is unable to defuse a nuclear bomb (the scene where he fumbles over it for nearly a minute before a hand stretches in from the left and calmly flips a switch is probably one of the best I’ve seen in a while), and he has massive help from the US army in the final scene.

Beyond that, it’s also elegant. Bond and Goldfinger plays a quiet game of golf, play calm some cat-and-mouse games, and annoy each slightly, but it’s never overly tense between them. Sure, Goldfinger should have killed Bond when he had him chained in front of a laser cannon, but these minor inconsistencies are always there in Bond movies, and are rarely worth caring about. A bit annoying, still, but hardly anything more.

The final rating is a solid 7.0/10.