Jaws is a fictional assassin in the James Bond franchise. He was played by Richard Kiel and first appeared in the movie The Spy Who Loved Me as a henchman to the villain, Karl Stromberg. He would later appear in the sequel Moonraker as a henchman to the villain Hugo Drax. However, in this second appearance, his character was changed from that of a ruthless and unstoppable killing machine to more of a comedy figure. He eventually turns against Drax and helps Bond to defeat him, and also gains a girlfriend.
Jaws gets his name from having strong steel braces covering his teeth that could bite through virtually anything. During filming Kiel would only wear the steel teeth for a couple of minutes because they hurt so much. In addition to having steel braces, Jaws was also 7 feet, 2 inches tall and extremely strong which forces Bond to be especially inventive while fighting him. For example, in combat, Bond found himself caught in an unbreakable death grip by Jaws who was about to fatally bite him; Bond only escaped by using a broken electric lamp to send an electric shock through the assassin's teeth to stun him. Furthermore, he has an uncanny ability to survive any misfortune seemingly completely unscathed and come back to challenge Bond again. He is able to survive the destruction of Drax's space station in Moonraker and he and his girlfriend are rescued by a team of space marines.
Video games
Jaws somehow reappeared again in the 1997 James Bond video game, GoldenEye 007, for Nintendo 64. Only that after he survived the explosion of Drax's space station, he dumped Dolly and worked once again with the Drax Corporation, only that now he was in charge of the corporation in the Aztec Complex, succeeding in the deceased Sir Hugo Drax (died when sucked out of space by Bond in the 1979 film, Moonraker). He helped also the Drax members still alive and worked along in the coporation, helping to steal a NASA shuttle and make it a Moonraker shuttle, saying that NASA had unaccounted shuttles during the Moonraker mission, due to NASA thinking the Drax Coproration went out of business after Drax's death, despite fragments of the company still were accounted.
They soon decided to launch their shuttle, but it was aborted when Bond knew about this, when he went back to the Aztec Complex to stop the next unscheduled launch which were a problem to the new world cause with an unknown military payload. In the 1979 film, he worked with Dr. Holly Goodhead, in the game, he worked alone.
Despite all this, he "killed" Jaws and stole his Security Smart Card to make the shuttle launch back to NASA instead of outer space to an unknown station to fulfill Drax's dream. The station was not metioned, but it was going to head to a station. However, there we no pilots aboard the shuttle, and were now ordered to kill Bond now that their launch had been postponed. The pilots were not seen in the game, but Bond killed the pilots and sent back the shuttle automated back to NASA after it was launched by Bond with help of a DAT and the Guidence Data. The Drax Corporation then went out of business offically after the capture of the remaining Drax members, the Drax launch facility was torn down after that.
The Drax Coporation logo still appeared in the game on the walls, the shuttle, and the yellow uniforms by the Drax members still working. The shuttle was Moonraker 4. And in the game, the mission was not the "perfect" human race as in the movie, it was for Bond to stop their next launch. The entire mission map reused some shots in the movie as in the game such as the computer room where the launches were in the movie were occurring, the walkway where Jaws pushed Bond to the exhaust room to Holly Goodhead under Moonraker 5 and the airvent. The launch room was different, however. Bond didn't go to space in the game. Also, a note that there were no women in the main game, only men. But a GameShark code, can make women appear, but their orders will have to kill Bond instead of assisting.
In 2004, Jaws appeared again in the video game Everything or Nothing, working for the game's villain, Diavolo. Richard Kiel is credited despite having no dialogue because his face and body was used to create the game model.
Tidbits
- In The Spy Who Loved Me, Jaws battled a shark and won, drove a car off a cliff into someone's roof, and fell off a moving train and survived. Furthermore, in Moonraker Jaws survives a fall from an airplane without a parachute in the opening credits; later in the movie, he survives a high-speed crash of a tramway car down Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro and a fall from a Brazilian waterfall (shot at Iguassu Falls). After every accident, a signature move by Jaws is to get up, dust himself off, and walk away.
- Unlike most henchmen and villains, Jaws appeared in two movies and survived both.
- While Jaws was in two James Bond movies, he actually only had one short line of dialogue. In Moonraker, towards the end of the film, he turns to his girlfriend Dolly (Blanche Ravalec) and says "Well, here's to us".
- Both Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker were adapted as novels by Christopher Wood, who also co-wrote the screenplays for both films. In his books, he provides additional details regarding Jaws, including the fact that he is Polish and that his real name is Zbigniew Krycsiwiki. Since neither fact is mentioned in either movie, this is not necessarily considered canon. Wood contradicts his own continuity when one compares his scripts and his novelizations; in the novelization of Spy Who Loved Me Wood writes that Jaws' tongue had been removed. Yet, in Moonraker, as stated above, he speaks.
- Although Jaws appears in two movies, Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, neither of these is based on the Ian Fleming book by the same name. No character named Jaws ever appears in a Fleming Bond novel.
See Also
Last updated: 05-15-2005 22:18:53
