When Roger Moore's second outing as 007 burst on to cinema screens only a year after the successful "Live And Let Die", fans were set to enjoy a James Bond film with the same lead actor as the previous film for the first time since "You Only Live Twice". But according many critics at the time, the only continuity in the series worth mentioning was the steadily declining quality of the films.

Time Magazine offered a cutting review of "The Man With The Golden Gun" on January 14th 1975, a few weeks after the film had limped off the starting blocks at the box-office.

"This is a James Bond caper and, as in the previous eight, there are plenty of fancy gadgets. Two are worthy of special note. One is a car that converts into an airplane (a bit of a bore; flying autos have already shown up in Popular Mechanics). The other, also a car, is less flashy. It merely moves in the air between the banks of a river and spins three times like a huge eggbeater before coming to rest, upright, on the far side. Now that is not as elaborate as the ability to take wing, but there is something elegant in the simplicity and unexpectedness of the spin."

"The best Bonds also had Sean Connery, whose absence is sorely felt here. An actor of considerable resource, Connery played 007 with just the right combination of conviction and detachment. He also had a self-mocking aplomb that would be hard to duplicate. His Bond is definitive.

Roger Moore, who first played 007 in Live and Let Die (1973), lacks all Connery's strengths and has several deep deficiencies.

He has all the worldliness of a floorwalker, and looks as if his last adventure were spending two weeks in a Swiss clinic getting a facelift."

There is the usual action (fights, pursuits, assignations), the usual bantamweight grotesqueries. Scaramanga's evil henchman is a dwarf, and Scaramanga himself (Christopher Lee), an unusually unimpressive villain, would be a dead cinch to spot on a beach since he has three nipples. Nothing much happens to any of these characters that has not happened before, and better. Maud Adams and Britt Ekland do, however, make a couple of mildly decorative, active heroines in a series notably short on them (Diana Rigg, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, being the sole other exception)."