Bond, Part 1b

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about how I'd decided to watch all the James Bond movies in order. At the time, I was asked, what about Never Say Never Again? This was the unofficial Bond film of 1983, the strange result of a lawsuit which ruled that while one studio retained the rights to the Bond franchise, another studio could exploit the rights to make a movie based on the novel Thunderball, previously adapted into film.

I can say that Never Say Never Again did improve slightly upon the original. But since I only rated Thunderball a D, that's not saying anything. In fact, the movie doesn't even manage to be as good as the "real" James Bond movie released the same year, Octopussy. And that movie was a real stinker, so I think you can see where this is going.

Sean Connery is still able to toss around a quip like he is the James Bond, and don't you dare accept any substitute. But in this movie, he doesn't seem capable of much more than words. The fight sequences are truly awful -- not just on his part, but for the entire stunt crew.

The acting is fairly shoddy outside of the leading man. Kim Basinger is an awful waxwork, probably hired only for her ability to dance and do the splits. Klaus Maria Brandauer plays the sociopathic villain Largo with the intensity of a child pretending in the backyard. Barbara Carrera plays an odd female assassin named Fatima Blush that appears to have been a direct inspiration for Famke Janssen's character in Goldeneye -- but she doesn't come close to the joy and abandon of that later performance.

The original Thunderball had huge problems with pacing, which this movie manages to steer clear of for a short while longer, by at first bearing almost no resemblance to Thunderball. It's a full 30 minutes before any plot element I can recognize from the original appears, and such connections remain few and far between for a long time after. But finally, this film does succumb to the same boring, plodding underwater "action" sequences in which no one can really move quickly because they're underwater. You start feeling ready for it to be over right about the time it's only half over.

I could go on and poke at the terrible score (a mix of all kinds of dated styles), the awful "villain challenges Bond to play video games" sequence, the strange appearance of a before-anyone-knew-him Rowan Atkinson, bizarre concepts like "death by constrictor snake thrown into your moving car," and so on, but I think the point is made. Ultimately, this movie's only triumph is in managing to hold on maybe 20 minutes before sliding downhill, where Thunderball began it's decline after the first 10.

I can't imagine what they threw at Connery to get him to do this. I rate it a D+.