Which one is this? The renegade.
Who’s who in this one? Connery (Bond); Fox (M); McCowen (Q); Salem (Moneypenny); Casey (Leiter).
Where did you first encounter this one? On TV when I was growing up, probably aged 10 or 11.
Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? Klaus Maria Brandauer as Maximilian Largo, who, like the other Largo, wants to ransom the world with stolen nuclear weapons. Also, in a cameo, Max Von Sydow as Blofeld.
Who are the Bond girls? Kim Basinger as Domino, Barbara Carrera as Fatima Blush, Prunella Gee as Patricia Fearing, and Valerie Leon as “Lady in the Bahamas.”
Opening number? A weird state of affairs. Having no access to the normal Maurice Binder title sequence, Lani Hall’s awful disco-pop title track plays over an action sequence of Bond invading a drug warren in the South American jungle, which turns out to be a war game. A mural of 007s replaces the gun barrel gag.
What’s memorable about this one? Connery at 52 is the only real takeaway.
What did you rate it out of ten, from memory? Oh, a 2 probably. I hated Thunderball already – and the creepy remake of Thunderball starring creepy old man Sean Connery? Forget it!
What do you rate it now, having seen it again? I’d say it’s a 3 – not as good as Thunderball (itself a 4), though somewhat fun for its novelty and through-the-looking-glass refraction of the “real” Bond franchise.
You’re never quite done with James Bond, as I’m discovering now, and Sean Connery discovered as early as 1983 (though really, he should have done away with all protestations of “never” after he returned to the franchise for the first time with 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever). I’ve time-warped from Connery’s intended last mission in the British Secret Service with You Only Live Twice to that appalling footnote in the Bond saga, 1983’s non-Eon Bond film Never Say Never Again. It’s something like an Elseworlds riff on the James Bond franchise – or a Batman Year 100, or Daredevil End of Days, or what have you. The point is: Sean Connery is James Bond in Never Say Never Again, and in Never Say Never Again, James Bond is an old man. It is, admittedly, a fascinating idea, if anyone had taken it seriously.
As the lore has it, Kevin McClory – Never’s producer, and one of the original writers of Thunderball – ended up with an intractable legal stake in exactly one James Bond adventure, the aforementioned Thunderball. And so, even after Eon Productions successfully reclaimed enough legal title to that property to make their own Thunderball motion picture, McClory spent the next fifteen years trying to get another movie of Thunderball off the ground – long titledWarhead and then James Bond of the Secret Service, and then eventuallyNever Say Never Again. I can’t work out exactly what McClory was thinking. Presume for a moment that Thunderball is the best James Bond story ever told (it isn’t): what was the best-case endgame for the project that became Never Say Never Again? Did McClory expect to found a secondary, parallel series of Bond pictures, with a pentagenarian Connery at the lead? Or did he think that a single Bond picture, with a return by Connery, was worth a small fortune all on its own, and that the fifteen years’ investment on his part would bag his retirement fund? Or did he just want to stick it to Ian Fleming, out of pure spite?
There’s no lack of prestige behind the camera on this one. Never Say Never Again is the first picture with which Irvin Kershner chose to follow The Empire Strikes Back; it is the first picture Douglas Slocombe photographed afterRaiders of the Lost Ark. And of course, Sean Connery is back as James Bond 007 – here a semi-retired former agent, who (under the auspices of a new regime at MI6) has spent more time teaching than doing. Connery’s performance is Never Say Never Again’s most startling element – for what it does address, and what it doesn’t. Connery does indeed play a sad-sack fiftysomething 007, who is not without his dignity – and a briefcase full of vodka, caviar, and foie gras, with which to withstand a directorial mandate to cut out the red meat and alcohol. But Bond can no longer reasonably seduce the chickadees at the sanatorium to which he is sent in the first act, and must instead be treated with that most loathsome brand of condescension: the dear old horndog.
It’s fair to say that Connery isn’t playing Bond at all at this point; he’s playing Sean Connery. Still, it is disconcerting to see the predatory edge gone from Bond’s smile when speaking to women. Is James… bashful? I suppose the whole enterprise would be worthwhile if Connery gave either a) his definitive performance as Bond, or b) a really fascinating insight into what an older Bond would be like, but he accomplishes neither. Connery’s elder James seems (perhaps accurately) like a man desperately trying to ignore his aging reality.Never Say Never Again has less to say about the advancing seniority besetting our hero than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Kersh has more visual panache than the average Bond director and loads the film with sight gags, but the inevitable reality of Never Say Never Again is that it is dreadfully thin material to begin with, resulting in a movie without a single memorable beat, and more than a few outrages of shlock over style. (Barbara Carrera’s villainess Fatima, who single-handedly invented the sideboob, has a talent for overwrought assassination schemes – first throwing a boa constrictor into an agent’s moving car, and later attaching a homing beacon to Bond’s scuba tank so that he can be hunted down by cybernetic sharks! What: she’s never heard of a handgun?) If 30-year-old Kim Basinger wants to fuck 52-year-old Connery, we’re all adults here and I can’t say I blame her, but the sexual chemistry in the film is oogie nonetheless. Klaus Maria Brandauer as the disposable Eurotrash baddie does the unthinkable and makes Adolfo Celi seem menacing, challenging Bond to a fight to the death over a tabletop video game. Remaking Thunderball may have been a stupid idea, but doing it with this piss-poor a sense of invention is outright foolish.
Anyone planning a Ghostbusters 3, Indy 4, Die Hard 5 or Star Wars 7 need look no further than Never Say Never Again. The title, itself, is a précis of the problem, tossing away with debonair impudence the importance of endings. We need endings; they are a fundamental psychological stopgap in our enjoyment of mythic stories. Market lucrativity be damned; we abandon closure at our peril. “Never Say Never Again”, that notion of ceaseless possibility, is bullshit. Say never, people: say it. The world needs it.
From A to Bond counted down the Bond movies, in alphabetical order, every day of the week leading up to the release of Skyfall. Wisely, the TIFF Bell Lightbox is not playing Never Say Never Again, and the DVD seems to have gone out of print. If you want to see some proper James Bond movies, though, the entire series is available on blu-ray.