Modesty Blaise

Losey captures with comedy the same chill of modernity beneath the Mediterranean sun that Antonioni captures with melodrama.

Not merely a spy spoof, based on a book and a comic strip about a femme James Bond type, the colorful production gives the horse laugh to many different film plots and styles.

under the non-stop stream of jokes lies a bitter edge of malice, directed not only against the genre itself but against a society which trusts its politicians and its generals.

Too much of it is just foolish, labored and sometimes painful camp.

The whole film -- redolent with pop-and op-art imagery -- suggests nothing less than an Arthur Freed musical on acid.

Joseph Losey didn't really do frivolous. Which is probably why his attempt at spoofy pseudo-Bondery is so direly unfunny.

At a running time of just under two full hours, the boredom becomes as exaggerated as the wallpaper.

I waited 20 years to see this movie, and boy was I let down! Terence Stamp was cool, though.