Never Say Never Again

(Here be spoilers if you are yet to see the James Bond movies...)

The Mission
Whilst at a health reatreat, James Bond (Sean Connery) stumbles upon SPECTRE's plans to steal some nuclear missiles. He is deployed by M (Edward Fox) to track the disappearance of these missiles and follows the shady entrepeneur Max Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer) back to the Bahamas, where Bond must earn the cooperation of Largo's girlfriend to determine the location of the stolen weapons.

Jimmy Bond Yo!
Accounting for Connery's increased age (and despite the fact that he is actually younger than the current official James Bond of the time, Roger Moore), this time round James Bond is depicted as noticeably older and increasingly out of touch with what his vocation as 007 requires of him. He's shown failing a training exercise during the film's opening scenes, and is sent to a health retreat by M to help re-equip him for the field. He's still as cheeky as ever but seems at a loss in regards to diet and exercise.

Connery plays down the thuggish arrogance that had crept into his last few Bond films. His 9 year absence from the role has seemingly made the heart grow fonder - he plays Bond in a more affable than usual manner and even seems somewhat doddering at times. He's also a lot more at ease with assertive seduction than Moore's version of the character.

Bond carries a suitcase well stocked with quail's eggs, cavier, vodka and fois gras, and gets about in the Bahamas heat in a snappy white linen suit (a much better look that the safari shorts he often wore in the 1960s Bond films). He can dance a tango, ride a motorcycle, and manages to get the hang of an ultra-modern computer game called 'Domination' within a few minutes. At one point he is seen wearing dungarees though, so he loses points for that. At the end of Never Say Never Again he retires from MI6, tying into the film's implication that 007 has become something of an antique.

Villainy
Max Largo is your usual dodgy super-businessman villain. He's somewhat sleazy and unpleasant (he likes to spy on his girlfriend's ballet sessions via a two-way mirror). He even blatantly says to his girlfriend that he will cut her throat if she ever leaves him! Aside from that one scene though, Brandauer's characterisation is pretty stock-standard stuff. Largo i s a member of SPECTRE and answers to Blofeld (Max Von Sydow), who is seen only at the beginning and end of the film. Aside from his fluffy cat, this version of Blofeld bears no resemblance to past depictions of the character (probably due to copyright issues), he has a goatee and wears a regular formal suit and polka-dot bowtie. Von Sydow plays him as a rather plummy upper-class gentleman rather than a fanatical megalomaniac, which actually makes more sense when you consider that SPECTRE is meant to be a financially-motivated organisation.

Bond's other main adversary throughout the film is Fatima Blush (Barbara Carrera), SPECTRE's Number 12. Carrera is easily the most entertaining facet of the film, her character is your usual femme fatale but she plays her with such extravagance and sadistic flamboyance that it's hard not to cheer her on as she excitedly goes about her business.

Buddies and Babes
The M position has been filled by someone new, who sees the 00 section of MI6 as outdated and unneccesary. Edward Fox plays the character as a blustery police chief, which is very 1980s but also not really in tune with the more dignified Britishness of the character. The regular Q doesn't make an appearance, instead there's a cockney character named Algernon (Alec McCowen), who is evidently an old friend of James Bond's. Moneypenny (Pamela Salem) is depicted as more naive and gullible than the Moneypenny seen in the 'official' James Bond films.

Former footballer Bernie Casey plays Felix Leiter, who is now black and much more chummy with Bond than he has been in past films (he even plays pranks on him!) Bond is also assisted by a French MI6 contact named Nicole (Saskia Cohen Tanugi), and has pleasant run-ins with an unnamed tourist (Valerie Leon) and health retreat employee Patricia Fearing (Prunella Gee). Domino (Kim Basinger) is the main Bond girl in terms of the plot though, she's Largo's captive girlfriend - a rather skittish young thing with a penchant for ballet and an inner hatred for her captor.

Locations
The opening sequence seems to be set in Cuba but it eventually turns out to be a training exercise. The bulk of the film is set in the Bahamas, which is more effectively used this time around than it was in the original version of this story (Thunderball), filling the screen with coral, bikinis, steal drums and harbour architecture. The latter part of the film relocates the action to North Africa (it's unspecified where exactly), making spectacular use of a desert palace, with requisite sand dunes, vultures and arabian desert nomads.

Gadgets and Tricks of the Trade
As wiley as ever, 007 has a slew of gadgets at his disposal - a bomb that deafens and incapacitates, a watch that shoots out a laser beam that can cut through iron chains, and a knib pen that shoots a small explosive. He also pilots a weird rocketeering machine over a coral reef, and calls upon his wits to scare off a shark by spraying oxygen from his tank into its face. Bond poses as a masseuse to get information off Domino, and walks away from an explosion by disguising himself as a man riding a bicycle in his underwear (!) Finally, and most amusingly, he puts a regular cigarette case in a man's hand and tells him it's a gyroscopic bomb that will explode if the man moves.

Licence to Kill
Bond's first kill of the film is a massive thug who attacks him at the health retreat... the two duke it out and Bond seems to be losing up until he throws his own urine at him (I'm serious) and the thug falls backwards into broken glass and other fatale medical paraphenalia. Bond also causes a car full of Largo's henchmen to crash during a chase, kills Fatima Blush with his explosive knib pen, and throws a man out of a prison window in North Africa.

Shag-Rate
Whilst James Bond seems to be slowing down in the action stakes, it's more than apparent that he's still no slouch with the ladies. He convinces Pat Fearing to spend the night with him at the health spa, shags Fatima on a boat en route to a coral reef where she plans to kill, gets busy with a fishing tourist, and does the deed with Domino at the film's end.

Quotes
LARGO (drinking from sacred water): The tears of Allah. Sweet, like money.

NURSE: Mr. Bond, I need a urine sample. If you could just fill this beaker...
JAMES BOND (on other side of room): From here?

ALGERNON: Now that you're on this, I hope we're gonna have some gratuitous sex and violence.
JAMES BOND: I hope so too.

FATIMA: How reckless of me, I made you all wet.
JAMES BOND: Yes, but my martini is still dry.

LARGO: So... you lose as gracefully as you have won?
JAMES BOND: I wouldn't know, I've never lost.

How Does It Rate?
Once you get over the oddness of a serious 'unofficial' James Bond film with its own attempts at being iconic (such as the 007 typeface in the opening credits, and the re-jigging of the series' MI6 mythos), it's a fairly average film, and an unwelcome retread of Thunderball's already pedestrian plot beats. Thankfully, the filmmakers take the opportunity to address Thunderball's shortcomings with some improvement - the health retreat sequence (roughly 40 minutes of Thunderball) is shortened to just a couple of scenes, and SPECTRE's MO makes a lot more sense and doesn't seem as cliched. Also in this film's favour is that it doesn't have any of the silliness of the late 1970s Roger Moore Bond films.

MI6 is shown to be now be at the mercy of budgetry concerns and restricted funds (note the ramshackle Q division, a far cry from the gimmicky sequences seen in most of the 'official' James Bond films). I did find it odd though that the film would suggest that Sean Connery's return to the role somehow means that Never Say Never Again is a more legitimate heir to the 1960s Bond films than Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, etc. If this is indeed meant to be a modern sequel to those films then wouldn't 007 notice that he already went on a very similar mission to the Bahamas back in the 1960s?

Never Say Never Again is also incredibly dated due to it's 1980s-ness... Bond plays a 'hi-tech' electronic strategy game that looks like a glorified version of battleships, there's an array of arcade machines in a reputedly high class casino (WTF? Did this really happen back in the early 1980s?), and there's also some very dodgy blue screen work for the air scenes. The worst offender of all would have to be the freeze frame ending where Bond winks at the camera, his head framed in the '0' of '007'. You couldn't make up a more corny final shot than that! Overall it's a pretty mediocre film, mostly due to the fact that the story of Thunderball (which the filmmakers were required to use if they wanted to make this unofficial James Bond film) was never all that hot to begin with. It's nice to see Sean Connery as James Bond again, but the 1980s needed a fresh face in the role - something that both this film and the three 1980s Roger Moore films failed to capitalise on. As mentioned earlier, the one highlight of this otherwise taciturn film is the over-the-top performance of Barbara Carrera as Fatima Blush.

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DIRECTOR: Irvin Kershner
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham and Ian Fleming. Based on characters created by Ian Fleming.
KEY ACTORS: Sean Connery, Max Von Sydow, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Kim Basinger, Rowan Atkinson, Edward Fox, Barbara Carrera, Bernie Casey, Prunella Gee, Alec McCowen

RELATED TEXTS:
- The James Bond film Thunderball was originally co-written by Ian Fleming as a screenplay rather than a novel, hence the copyright issues that led to this 'unofficial' version being made 15 years later.
- Rowan Atkinson has a small role in this film as a comic relief character. Many years later he would be a star in his own right, and would parody the James Bond series with his own film, Johnny English.
- Director Irvin Kershner is probably best known for directing The Empire Strikes Back.
- Never Say Never Again was cinematically released at the same time as the 'official' James Bond film, Octopussy.

AWARDS
Golden Globes - nominated Best Supporting Actress (Barbara Carrera).