Over the years I've avoided Never Say Never Again, mainly because some people have said it's the worst James Bond movie. However, one evening when I felt in need of some fairly mindless entertainment, I decided to watch it. At the risk of damning with faint praise, I certainly don't think it is the worst Bond film. It's not bad. The real problem is that it doesn't make the best use of some excellent ingredients.
The story of how the film came into being is more interesting than the actual storyline (the same is true of the spoof version of Casino Royale in 1967). It was an outgrowth of the long-running litigation involving a hard-nosed guy called Kevin McClory and Ian Fleming and Eon Productions. McClory was a minor figure in the film world when he met Fleming. A writer called Jack Whittingham wrote a James Bond film script with some input from McClory but it got nowhere. Fleming used this material for his novel Thunderball, a foolish plagiarism that McClory exploited to lucrative effect for the rest of his life. There's a less than flattering obituary here.
Following his court success, McClory was entitled to reuse material from the novel of Thunderball (but not the film version) and became executive producer of Never Say Never Again, which competed with the 'official' Bond movie of the time, Octopussy. There was enough money sloshing around to lure Sean Connery back to resume his most famous role and to hire Lorenzo Semple Jr (whose CV included The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, two excellent films) to write the script. But the director, Irvin Kershner, wasn't happy, and he hired the British comedy writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais to work on the script (they weren't credited, possibly a good choice on their part). John Barry declined to write the music, so Michel Legrand - another film composer of the highest class - was brought in, and the theme song was performed by Lani Hall.
The result was an uneasy compromise. There are some good ideas in the storyline, as Semple sought to make a virtue out of necessity - i.e., the fact that Connery was an older man - but some of the attempts at humour introduced in the rewrite were thin. A young Rowan Atkinson has a disappointingly feeble cameo role, and Edward Fox, another actor I like, struggles with the role of M, who is written as a buffoon. Clement and La Frenais have done some fine work over the years, but their contribution to this film seems more reminiscent of their 1985 movie Water, which...well, didn't deserve to make a splash.
There are some good action scenes, although some of the underwater action at the end is...well, underwhelming. I am a lifelong Michel Legrand fan, but his style was not suited to a Bond movie, and the song (which isn't bad, though not one of his best) is misplaced over an action scene at the start of the movie. However there are compensations. Kim Basinger and Prunella Gee are very glamorous 'Bond girls' and Klaus Maria Brandauer is okay, if not quite menacing enough, as the villainous Largo. Above all, Connery eases his way affably through the movie, making the best of it and reminding everyone that, when it comes to James Bond, arguably nobody does it better.
