Never Say Never Again

While Roger Moore was swinging through trees in Octopussy, Sean Connery came back one last time to play Bond in a competing, non-Eon film. This transpired because of the courts ruling that screenwriter Kevin McClory owned the rights to the plot of Thunderball and the characters of SPECTRE, Largo and Blofeld who appeared therein. While being tied down to the format of a remake naturally limits the new ground to be broken here, to McClory's credit he did do this with it:

Any movie starring Kim Basinger's cameltoe is alright with me.

Sweaty Baesinger aside, this is literally just Thunderball in the 80s, with Bond playing Largo at a goofy ass vidya gaem and jumping a horse off a tower, which has some truly amazing effects.

OH NO I AM FALLING OFF A TOWER ON A HORSE

Look at it it's BLUE

Perhaps the biggest wasted opportunity here is to bring some closure to Bond's endless fight with SPECTRE. Blofeld appears (played by Bergman favourite Max Von Sydow) but doesn't do anything, while another, but boringer, iteration of Largo is the main villain. Why even use Blofeld if he has no impact on the plot? McClory only had the rights to this one plotline so it's not like he was being saved for a sequel. It would have been easy enough to have Blofeld fly out to meet with Largo to oversee the success of his plans only to run into Bond one final time, and would have given him a more fitting sendoff than the gag death of his stand-in in For Your Eyes Only.

What a waste.

This is really a footnote in the series because while it's decently entertaining, it's mostly nothing you haven't seen before, so here are some more pictures of Kim Basinger.