Never Say Never Again (1983)

Never Say Never Again, released in 1983, is the movie that saw Sean Connery back in the rôle of James Bond twelve years after Diamonds Are Forever. The story of how this movie came about is more interesting than the movie itself but we’ll get to that later.

This is of course a remake of Thunderball which had been the most comercially successful of all the Bond films.

SPECTRE have hatched a plot to steal two American thermonuclear warheads. They naturally intend to use the warheads to blackmail the governments of just about every country on the planet.

Bond meanwhile has been sent to a health farm. There’s a new M in charge of the Secret Service and he’s a health nut. He also disapproves of the unconventional methods of the Double-0 section. Bond witnesses an odd scene at the health farm - one of the female nurses beating up a make patient.

By now SPECTRE’s threat has forced M to recall Bond to duty and send him to the Bahamas. I confess I wasn’t clear why the Bahamas was chosen as his destination.

Bond encounters a beautiful glamorous young woman improbably named Fatima Blush (Barbara Carrera). They go scuba diving together, they have sex and she tries to kill him. The audience already knows she’s an assassin working for Maximillian Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer). Largo is the SPECTRE agent in charge of the nuclear plot.

Bond meets another beautiful young woman, Domino (Kim Basinger in the rôle that made her a star). There’s a curious connection between Domino and that odd incident Bond witnessed at the health farm. Domino is Largo’s mistress. Largo has a huge yacht on which he keeps his many valuable and beautiful possessions and he certainly regards Domino as a possession. Largo is not pleased when he sees Domino being kissed by Bond and obviously enjoying it.

Largo’s yacht is one of the keys to the solution of the puzzle of the present whereabouts of those warheads. Domino is another. Fatima Blush makes numerous attempts to kill Bond. The story builds to an action finale in a series of desert caverns.

The story of this film starts in 1958 when Ian Fleming wrote a screenplay in collaboration with several other writers, most notably Kevin McClory. The screenplay failed to attract any interest so Fleming turned it into a novel with the title Thunderball. And as a result was sued by Kevin McClory. The rather complicated legal settlement allowed McClory to act as producer on the film version of Thunderball but it also allowed him to make further film adaptations of the novel after ten years had elapsed.

By the late 70s McClory had managed to interest Sean Connery in starring in a new film version, which would become Never Say Never Again. This resulted in more legal battles with Eon Films (the makers of all the other Bond films) determined to prevent the making of a rival Bond film which they believed would damage the box office prospects of their own Bond films. They had Octopussy scheduled for release in 1983 so their concern was understandable. The upshot of the court battles was that Never Say Never Again could be made quite legally, but only under certain conditions. It had to be based directly on the Nobel and could not utilise any ideas from the 1965 Thunderball movie. That caused lots of problems when it came to writing a screenplay and many different writers worked on that screenplay. Eventually a workable script was prepared and shooting began.

The script is not the problem with Never Say Never Again, but it’s a movie that does have a lot of problems.

First off, the music by Michel Legrand is awful and the title song is instantly forgettable. The second problem is Connery. Connery was far and away the best screen Bond because he brought a real edge to his performances that no other actor has even come close to achieving and combined this with a subtly tongue-in-cheek approach. Unfortunately in Never Say Never Again that edge is missing. Connery’s performance, surprisingly, is rather lifeless. He also looks too old. He was actually slightly younger than Roger Moore but he looks older. Connery was 52 but at times he looks 62.

The third problem was studio cost-cutting. Director Irvin Kershner had a couple of very cool gadgets planned for the movie, most notably the flying motorcycle. The studio decided that was too expensive. That’s unfortunate because we get this huge buildup to the unveiling of the secret weapon Bond has stored in a crate but when it’s uncrated it’s basically just an ordinary common and garden motorcycle. The flying rocket platforms are a major letdown as well. The gadgets in this movie are truly lame.

It would have been better to do what was done in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and dispense with gadgets altogether and rely on spectacular stunts. That worked in OHMSS because the action scenes in that movie were superb. The action scenes in Never Say Never Again are rather feeble. OK, the underwater sequence with the sharks is pretty good.

Irvin Kershner claimed that he wanted to focus on the characters rather than action. That’s a valid approach for a spy movie, but in order for it to work you need some interesting divided loyalties and some potential betrayals. There’s none of that here.

The one real plus is Barbara Carrera. She’s sexy and deadly and sadistic and huge amounts of fun.

Kim Basinger looks very pretty. Klaus Maria Brandauer is an OK villain. Edward Fox is amusing as M. Rowan Atkinson adds comic relief as a bumbling Foreign Office flunkey.

Overall Never Say Never Again just never catches fire. It’s not a terrible movie but it’s no more than a very average spy thriller and people expect a lot more from a Bond movie. Maybe worth a look if you’re a Bond completist.