Hijacking – Action Hero Movies

Thunderball is the 4th movie in the James Bond saga and the fourth time Sean Connery plays the leading role – he does a good job as usual.

This movie gets off to an interesting start, with a cross-dressing agent trying to trick James Bond, who kills him and takes time to throw some flower over his body before running away and escaping from the rooftop via jetpack to his bag-of-tricks car. We then begin to hear the Thunderball theme tune by Tom Jones, all within the first 5 minutes.

It’s good to see Desmond Llewelyn back as Q, around the 1 hour mark.

This movie is a bit slower, more monotonous and more one-dimensional and yet still messier than Goldfinger, but not devastatingly so.

The main antagonist in this movie is Emilio Largo (Spectre’s “Number 2” agent) played fairly well by Adolfo Celi although he’s probably a bit podgy and effeminate for such an active top agent in such a physically demanding role.

There are several women in this movie but none get significant enough screen time or deliver a significant enough performance to be particularly worth mentioning here, although it’s good to see the return of Martine Beswick after the strong impression she made in her minor role (in the gypsy girls’ cat-fight) in From Russia With Love – two Bond movies ago.

Derailed is train hijacking movie a twist – the twist being there’s also a contagion released on the train. It’s a bit like Under Siege 2 in how there’s an elusive good guy (Van Damme instead of Seagal) taking out all the hijackers one by one. And it’s a bit like Transporter 2 in how it pushes contagion theory with all the usual trappings.

It gets off to a low budget but attention sustaining beginning, then it gets extremely one dimensional in the second half when the contagion is released. Still, with decent acting and interesting cast members, I rate this movie somewhere between So-So and OK. On a par with other semi-weak Van Damme movies like Cyborg, Death Warrant and Double Team, all of which have a similar balance of entertainment and unpleasantry in their own unique ways.

This movie also features Van Damme’s real life son, Kris, who plays Van Damme’s character’s son in this movie, and shows off some of his own high kicks early on.