This was Sean Connery‘s one-off return as James Bond after over a decade out. His last outing as Bond being in 1971 with Diamonds Are Forever and he was already looking aged compared to his debut with Dr No in 1962.
Never Say Never Again was one of only two Bond movies ever produced outside of Eon Productions – the other being Casino Royale (1967), although that was just a dull satire so struggles to even qualify as a Bond movie.
Never Say Never Again gets off to a respectable start, as a health farm used by MI6 agents seems to have been infiltrated by some enemy Spectre agents. It gets a bit slow and messy and the movie progresses, but the action & intrigue pick up nicely in the second hour, before dying down again and becoming very slow and tedious towards the end.
Interesting gadgets afforded to Bond by Q in this movie include a special motorbike and a fountain pen that shoots.
There are some scuba scenes in this movie too – one of them involves Bond needing to deal with a bunch of sharks.
Cast members
Sean Connery rolls back the years to deliver a strong performance as an aging James Bond.
Bond girls in this movie include Barbara Carrera as Fatima Blush, and Kim Basinger as Domino Vitali. They both do a fair job.
The main antagonist, Maximillian Largo, is played quite convincingly by Klaus Maria Brandauer.
Bernie Casey does a decent job as Felix Leiter from the American CIA.
We also get a minor part by Rowan Atkinson (Mr Bean) who entertainingly plays Bond’s assistant in one scene.
Rating
In summary, Never Say Never Again is a respectable movie, funded by Warner Bros, and almost of competes with the usual Bond standard, although I’d say it’s comfortably Connery’s worst Bond movie. It’s in dire need of editing to make it more concise, and some better cinematography because the angles are really lazy from time to time while the sound effects only prolong the boring bits. Because Connery’s getting so old here, he doesn’t have so much of his usual smooth & charming demeanour – although he’s still trying, it’s not so convincing any more – he looks more like a grandfather than a bachelor now. He’s still a great actor though. All things considered, I’d probably rate it So-So, slightly lower than Roger Moore’s worst Bond movie which was probably For Your Eyes Only (1981) which I rated Lower-OK.
Fun fact
Never Say Never Again also goes down in history as being the movie where Steven Seagal was hired to teach Sean Connery some Aikido, and during the course of training, Seagal broke Connery’s wrist! This may have set the filming of this movie back a bit, and it may have also set Seagal’s career back a bit too – he never made his own movie debut until Above The Law (1988). As with most broken joint injuries, Connery’s wrist never fully healed. In fact, he never actually knew his wrist was broken until over a decade later, when he discovered it was still broken in 1995, according to an interview on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 1996.