With the court-mandated time limit on Kevin McClory being able to film a version of his original Thunderball idea expired, and after a rocky road to get there, the screenwriter, producer and director was finally able to get his new Bond movie – the first (serious) entry to be done by a studio other than Eon – underway. Having tempted Sean Connery out of his retirement from the character, with a title suggested by Connery’s wife at the time, and with a decent budget, could McClory and studio Warner Bros do better than Eon/Moore’s Octopussy, asks Greg Smith?

Never Say Never Again occupies a distinct place in the Bond legacy for obvious reasons – as the only (non-spoof) Bond movie to date to not have involved Eon productions, it is perhaps somewhat of a historical curiosity. That it had all the behind the scenes drama attached, and that it managed to entice back original Bond actor Connery to the role one last time, all just elevates its curiosity value further. But is it actually any good, and indeed how much worse could it be than Octopussy, a movie which arguably wasted all of its potential on cheap gags?

From the off, it’s clear that this movie is trying to set a very different tone from the Eon run. Leaning into the fact that their leading man was in his 50s at this point (unlike Eon who were still desperately pretending that their own Bond, Moore, was a young man despite being three years Connery’s senior), the movie takes an air of Bond being near the end of his professional life. M, played here by Edward Fox, has no faith in the 00 division, and this isn’t helped when Bond fails an elaborate training mission which forms the movie’s opening scene, played out as the title song is heard rather than before it. The very opening, before we zoom in on Bond, has a similar aesthetic to any number of 80s thriller TV shows, belying the fact that this is a movie with a movie’s budget. Red text announces the various people involved, wobbling shakily towards the camera, overlaid on helicopter scenes of various fairly generic looking bits of terrain. There’s none of the sense of majesty, of real feel to the locations, even of the overblown pomp, of a Bond film. This feels like it’s going for a more grounded aspect.

That carries through into the plot as the film commences. Bond is ordered to a health spa to get some R&R and treatment, as well as to detox from his rich diet of alcohol and various expensive foods. Bond is missing a step, and M wants him fighting fit, though quite why when the movie makes it clear M wants to shut down the 00 program is unclear. It all lends though, to this sense that Bond as we knew him is a relic, a thing of the past which has little place in the modern era, and it wouldn’t of course be the last time that a Bond movie played with this idea. It’s all very unmistakeably 80s though, and if you didn’t know when it had been made, every fibre of the aesthetic would clue you in soon enough.

In keeping with the movie’s desire to remain a little more grounded, although SPECTRE are involved here, it is in a much more restrained plan, albeit one that is a little more fantastical in some of its logistics and then (ironically) a little duller in others than the earlier Thunderball. Here, pilot Jack Petachi has been given some sort of magical eye surgery to make his retina identical to that of the President of the United States, allowing him to bypass security measures to install live nuclear warheads in place of dummy ones on a training run. Unlike Thunderball, this patsy isn’t actually flying the plane, his job simply to perform that switch. Also unlike Thunderball, rather than the amazing and ambitious sequence of landing the plane in shallow water and then allowing it to sink, with all the attendant shots of divers going down to recover bombs etc, here the missiles are simply launched and fall into the water to be recovered. It’s an odd inversion, and I’m not entirely convinced it works. This is compounded by the relationship between Petachi and SPECTRE agent Fatima Blush, charged with watching him until the task is completed. Here, Petachi is a drug addict controlled by his habit, and Blush is a sadistic torturer who alternates between literally dominating her charge with slight BDSM overtones and then acting seductively. Unfortunately, this is fairly typical of female representation throughout the movie, but Blush is perhaps the worst aspect of this.

It all starts reasonably promisingly – Blush (silly name aside – and it’s hardly the worst in Bond canon) is a competent, ruthless agent of SPECTRE who manipulates Petachi successfully to do her organisation’s bidding and then disposes of him. Inbetween, of course, she sends an agent to dispose of Bond who fails. Taking this rather personally, she elects to try herself, after having a quick roll around below decks with the secret agent (because of course) before trying to kill him with… radio controlled sharks? This is one of the moments where the plot derails from gritty 80s spy drama to Austin Powers-esque nonsense – the fact that the sharks don’t actually have lasers attached to their heads as well notwithstanding, of course. But it’s not in Blush’s failures or even the outlandish nature of her plans that I have the biggest issue, but in her ultimate demise. After a reasonably well-filmed chase sequence involving Blush and lots of nameless baddies in cars and Bond on a motorcycle, Blush corners Bond and has him at gunpoint at her mercy. Straining under the sheer levels of handwavium it has to deploy to get Bond to use the other gadget he received at Q Branch, the assassin demands that Bond write down that his liaison with her was the best of his life, her conceit earning her death at the hands of Bond’s rocket-firing fountain pen. Oh dear.

Moneypenny can’t be Lois Maxwell of course, because this isn’t Eon, so the makers substitute in a far younger model in Pamela Salem, apparently not prepared to lean all the way in on the whole theme of an ageing Bond. Other female characters include Nicole, a CIA agent working with Felix Leiter who gets fridged by Blush, Domino, played by Kim Basinger, sister of Petachi and lover of main bad guy Largo who is oddly passive the entire film until almost the very end (we’ll get to that) and the inspiringly named ‘Lady in the Bahamas’ (the genuine credit) who Bond encounters after escaping Radio Controlled Shark Death and then has a quick bunk up with in her hotel room, thus avoiding the bomb Blush has planted in his room.

Basinger’s part is odd because as I say, she spends most of the movie being oddly passive. Bond’s first encounter with her involves him posing as a masseuse when she visits the spa to get some information out of her, and she seems utterly unmoved by the revelation of his not being staff when it comes (it’s difficult to see this sort of scene making it past a first draft these days, and rightly so). She also seems oddly passive in the face of her lover Largo, who literally tells her that he’ll murder her if she leaves him, but which she seems to take as a joke. Even when Bond reveals to her that her brother is dead, at the hands of her lover, she responds in a reasonably detached way. After ending up being sold to passing Arabs by Largo (yes really) when he finds that she has betrayed him(ish), she finally gets to actually do something when she murders Largo at the end just as he’s about to get the upper hand on Bond. It’s a rare and completely unflagged moment of agency for a character who spends most of the film simply reacting (sort of) to things done around and to her. It’s through no fault of Basinger’s (who I maintain is an underrated actress), it’s just simply clear that McClory really had little idea of the character as anything other than a plot device – she’s there to be kidnapped/rescued/fall into bed with Bond as required. This means the agency of her ending feels a little unearned, as does her apparently having convinced Bond to settle down and leave his old life behind at the end.

Villain wise, although we have Max Von Sydow doing a surprisingly restrained turn as Blofeld, the real nemesis here is Maximillian Largo, SPECTRE’s Number 1 agent and billionaire businessman. Klaus Maria Brandauer received a great deal of praise at the time for his work as the character and it’s true that he exudes a kind of creepy, barely restrained manic energy which really helps the viewer to loathe him. The issue is that this entirely believable psychotic side is undermined by the various bells and whistles the script sees fit to attach to the plot. Showdowns with the villain are of course a staple of the Bond Oeuvre, but the ‘video game connected to electric shocks’ part is just stupid, not just because the visual FX of the time simply weren’t up to it but also because the whole scene makes no sense whatsoever. Why would the game exist? How does it actually work? It doesn’t matter, because the purpose is for Bond and Largo to flex at one another, ostensibly to have a simple dick-measuring contest, with an undercurrent of fighting for Domino’s affections.

It’s also not entirely clear what Largo’s particular value is to SPECTRE, beyond being really rich. He demonstrates no particular talents or abilities that might have elevated him beyond his peers other than sheer ruthlessness. His plan to keep Bond prisoner to slowly starve to death and be picked clean by vultures seems laughably misguided, though again is necessary so that Bond can use the other Chekov’s Gun in his Q Armoury. Then there’s the overly complex plan to hide the second nuclear warhead in the Tears of Allah (also awkwardly inserted in as a reference earlier in the film so it could be deduced later) for some reason, when the first is beneath Washington DC (and defused off camera). It’s all just… daft, and whereas that might be staple for a Bond Movie Villain Plot, it jars rather oddly with the tone of Largo as a character, and the movie’s attempts to be more serious elsewhere.

Adding to that silliness of course we have Nigel Small-Fawcett, a comically inept foreign office representative played by Rowan Atkinson who belongs in an entirely different type of film. Fawcett also plays no actual narrative role beyond ‘occasional comic relief’ and it’s really quite insulting that he survives the movie while Nicole ends up dead.

As for the stunts, well Connery wasn’t getting any younger so any fight sequences involving him are necessarily not all that involved. The motorbike chase sequence is average – nothing about it lingers much in the memory once watched – while the leap from a clifftop on horseback lingers for the wrong reasons, with easily the most laughably bad visual FX of the entire enterprise. Ironically, the opening sequence of Bond’s ‘training’ mission is the best of the movie, which isn’t great overall.

Add in the missing elements (gadgets are thin on the ground, no Bond theme, only one instance of ‘Bond, James Bond’, no sense of respect between Bond and his superiors) and it all just rather becomes an extended 80s TV movie of a thing. Budget issues were widely known and Connery apparently didn’t speak to producer Jak Schwarzman. Director Irvin Kirshner, who had recently directed arguably the best Star Wars movie ever, also disliked Schwarzman, and the movie is hardly reflective of his talent, though again budgetary issues and an inconsistent script that fails to better the original movie it shares source material with won’t have helped either.

It’s just a tonally inconsistent mess which looks much cheaper than it should and shies away from taking any real risks on the back of what could be an interesting concept. Along the way it ticks all the wrong boxes of the franchise and avoids doing any of the good ones as well. Thank goodness that when Connery said never again this time, he meant it.