Ransom – 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.

From the outset it’s apparent that this movie is a better production than most of Van Damme’s movies. Sudden Death is a proper movie and has a very similar concept to Die Hard.

Van Damme plays a fire marshal working at a Pittsburgh Penguins v Chicago Blackhawks hockey game where he also brought his kids, and it turns out the Vice President is having a party in the owner’s box and has a large security detail but it’s been infiltrated by a highly organised gang of crooks who hold the Vice President and all people in the arena to ransom after rigging the whole place to explode, while everyone’s watching the game oblivious. Van Damme’s character smells something’s up when his daughter gets kidnapped after she witnessed a murder, so Van Damme tracks her down and begins to get to the bottom of the whole operation.

I’m generally not a fan of political dramas, but this movie contains just the right amount of that stuff and has just about strong enough actors to make it work well between the faster action scenes.

There aren’t really any boring bits in this movie, so long as you’ve not seen it already within the last few years. But it’s also pretty standard, in a way. So I rate it Upper-OK.