Never Say Never Again (1983) Director: Irvin Kershner
“Are you a man who enjoys games?”
“Depends with whom I’m playing.”
After George Lazenby declined to return to the role of James Bond following his performance in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Sean Connery returned in Diamonds Are Forever but he proudly stated “never again” would he reprise his signature performance as James Bond. And so the role was given to Roger Moore who appeared in a string of successful James Bond films throughout the 1970s. However, a lengthy legal battle was in the works ever since Ian Fleming’s publication of Thunderball (between Fleming and Kevin McClory), and Warner Bros was set to release an unofficial loose adaptation of Thunderball at the same time as EON/Roger Moore’s Octopussy. However, Warner Bros still had another trick up their sleeves when they managed to acquire Sean Connery for the knock-off film after a string of cinematic flops in his own career and so the amusing title was selected Never Say Never Again. Both Bond films —Never Say Never Again and Octopussy— were naturally in direct competition with one another at the box office, and in the end both were successful but Octopussy proved victorious. Never Say Never Again featured a remarkable cast of Sean Connery, Rowan Atkinson, Kim Basinger, and others while it was directed by The Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner. Quit an extraordinary group of individuals for a James Bond spin-off film!
Sometimes these old 007 films are just so bad they are fun. The plot for Never Say Never Again is a strange re-working of Thunderball (thanks to Kevin McClory acquiring the film rights to the story) with Sean Connery, now age 52 (though still younger than Roger Moore) who clearly lost some weight for the film but he plays the role with a certain degree of ironic detachment and, as such, there is almost nothing at stake in this film. The theme song by Michelle Legrand for this film is a bizarre selection.
Never Say Never Again concerns the disappearance of two nuclear warheads at the behest of SPECTRE under the leadership of Ernst Stavro Blofeld (before he is amusingly and theoretically killed off by EON in the next canonical Bond film, For Your Eyes Only). As in the plot for Thunderball, in Never Say Never Again the main nemesis for Bond is Emilio Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer) even though he is not an interesting villain like the eyepatch-donning Largo from the earlier film Thunderball (1965). Everything about this strange adaptation is inferior to the original Thunderball. The film features an oddball slapstick car chase wherein a woman tosses a snake onto a man’s lap, Bond battles Largo over a mostly boring video game (very much a product of the 1980s), which apparently causes physical pain to its player, and Bond even rides a horse over a cliff at the close of the film. In the end, Bond saves the day by defusing the bombs underwater even though most of the plot makes little sense and takes us to exotic locales for no particular reason. While perhaps not as bad as a few Bond films, this is still another cringe-inducing installment (thankfully it is not an official James Bond film).
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