23 replies to this topic

[SecretAgentFan]

NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN (re-watch)

 

They say that the brain starts to completely re-wire during your teens - which might explain some strange behaviour.

 

I actually loved this rival Bond film during my teenage years and preferred it to OCTOPUSSY.

 

But now I don´t know why.  Sure, it´s got Sean Connery.  And it´s got some decent gags and one-liners, a deliciously nutty villain, an even more deliciously nutty female henchman (or should I say henchwoman?), and I still love the title song.  And yes, I did feel entertained, although at 134 minutes the film could easily have been trimmed by 20 minutes and made more effective.  Strangely, the film already has some jarring transitions which made me wonder whether the original cut delivered to the studio had been much longer.

 

In the end, the film works for me just because of Connery.  The story is not more involving than THUNDERBALL was, and since that plot is already too familiar with me too much felt mostly redundant.  Also, with a fantastic cinematographer like Douglas Slocombe why does NSNA look so drab?  There are some nice shots in there - but the locations are subpar, they look cheap and unspectacular, very unbondian.

 

Knowing that behind the scenes was lots of turmoil, Connery probably regretted saying yes once more, but if the whole enterprise had been started to prove that EON was not the only company which could produce a great Bond film... well, in the end McClory & co. did not win this bet at all.  

 

By the way, being in my 40´s now, I know for sure: OCTOPUSSY is the better film.  By far.

 

It´s good not to be a teenager anymore.

 

Well, in that respect.

[Major Tallon]

I'm pretty sure I'm odd man out on this film (and a lot of other Bond-related topics!).  I'm going to make a drastic confession here.  (Long pause.)  I enjoy NSNA.

 

I'm afraid I'm unmoved by major complaints that some fans have had over the years.  No gunbarrel!  No Bond theme!  Lousy soundtrack!  As I've said several times, there's a certain thrill about seeing the gunbarrel at the start of a Bond movie, but it's really peripheral to my enjoyment of the film.  Same with the theme.  And of all the times I've watched NSNA, I've never been distracted by the soundtrack, unlike the soundtrack for "Goldeneye," which I regarded as odd and discordant from the first time I watched the movie.  The movie also has a duller look than most of the EON entries, but for me anyway that's not a major criticism, and I thought the Monte Carlo sequences were filmed very nicely.

 

And, of course, the story is a remake of "Thunderball," an unavoidable fact of life given the legal battles surrounding the story.  Accepting all that, I'm happy with the film.  Connery looks better and fitter than he did in DAF, and there are some nice set pieces.  I enjoy the battles at Shrublands, Bond's battle with the shark, and the motorcycle chase, all of which I found thrilling.  Largo and Domino are bland characters here, but Barbara Carrera is a terrific villainess.  I'm not a fan of the video game sequence, and I'm more critical of the movie's final third.  I thought the North Africa setting, Bond's escape with the laser watch (an example of why I'm critical of the films that over-rely on gadgets),  and the ensuing chase on horseback through the fortress were rather dull. 

 

I also admit to mixed feelings about improbable screenplay elements.  I'm not overly bothered about Q's attack on Octopussy's palace using a hot air balloon, but the geography of the final sequence has always bugged me.  Did they calculate how fast the Disco Volante would have to be traveling to sail from North Africa to Suez, transit the Canal (where the authorities could quite easily intercept it), and make it to the Arabian coast, and to complete this journey within the movie's timeframe?  The speed would make the Disco's speed over the reefs in the final reel of the EON production pale by comparison.  I've no idea why this particular "improbable" bothers me so much, but it's always stuck in my mind.

 

So, while NSNA is hardly above criticism, it has many plusses, and I enjoy watching it. 

[Call Billy Bob]

I'm afraid I'm unmoved by major complaints that some fans have had over the years.  No gunbarrel!  No Bond theme!  Lousy soundtrack!

Maybe I'm just too OCD or anal retentive, but these are some of the exact reasons I can't stand to watch NSNA again. To me, it's like watching one of those awful Asylum direct-to-video knockoffs. How this was directed by the same guy who directed the best Star Wars film is beyond me...

[Major Tallon]

Fair enough, but it was obvious from the outset that this rival production wouldn't have the EON trappings.  If they're crucial to any fan's enjoyment, ok, but for them the film was going to be a failure before the cameras ever rolled.

[Call Billy Bob]

Fair enough, but it was obvious from the outset that this rival production wouldn't have the EON trappings.  If they're crucial to any fan's enjoyment, ok, but for them the film was going to be a failure before the cameras ever rolled.

I can look at it as an entertaining film, sure. Just don't tell me it's a Bond film.

[Grard Bond]

Hum... No gunbarrel, (almost) no Bondtheme, no typical Bondscore.... one could be talking about the much praised Skyfall.

 

Why doesn't matter the lack of all those things with that movie, but is it decisive for liking/disliking Never say never again?

Edited by Grard Bond, 13 May 2015 - 03:21 PM.

[Call Billy Bob]

There is a gunbarrel in Skyfall, just at the end. And I think it has a great Bondian score.

NSNA feels like Bizzaro World to me - it's familiar, but feels so, so wrong.

[David_M]

I don't think it's necessarily a problem that NSNA doesn't have the trademarked Eon elements (I kind of like the multiple "007s" opening onto the action instead of the gunbarrel, for instance, and I don't miss the theme as much as I thought I would).  The problem is that NSNA ends up trying to BE an Eon Bond, or at least to play in the same sandbox, and it's a hopeless effort.

 

Where it deviates from the Eon formula, it's strong: specifically, in its presentation of a Bond who's getting older and feeling it, and who's lost favor with his new, clueless, yuppie "whippersnapper" boss.  This is a concept that's full of possibilities, but it ultimately remains undeveloped, and goes nowhere.  Bond is shipped off to Shrublands to get back into shape, but as we can plainly see he's never really OUT of shape, so that's a dead end.  He smuggles in caviar and champagne, so obviously that's a "diet" that works for him.  It might have been more interesting if M had been at least a little right about something; maybe Bond really is slowing down, more out of disaffection and disillusionment than anything. Maybe he's finding that it was a curse to survive all those old dangers, because he's hung on into a less exciting era.  Maybe matching wits with Largo brings back the joy of living for Bond.  All of this is hinted at -- sort of, I guess -- but it's not exploited as it could have been, and should have been, to make a really good film.  Where is the thrill of seeing Bond "return" before our eyes, seeing him get his mojo back, if you will?  Instead it feels like Bond is the same at the beginning as he is at the end, which incidentally is the same way we left him back in 1971.  He is an eternal and never changing monolith, just biding his time until this new twit of a boss gets replaced with something better.  Even then, there's no payoff, as he never gets an "I told you so" moment with M.

 

Except for that one new angle, NSNA chickens out and sticks to Eon formula, only a smaller budget, with less interesting cinematography and more boring music.  All those years of bitching about "Roger Moore comedies" and "Why can't we have Sean back," and what do we get?  Pee-pee jokes.  The "Fill it?  From here?" joke is straight out of Benny Hill, for Pete's sake.  All the whining about gadgets "taking over" and what do we get?  A gadget-laden (well, sort of) motorcycle and one of Dick Tracy's "flying trash cans."  Press releases and interviews promised a return to the spirit of FRWL, but ultimately that promise was only kept in one way:  it feels like it was made on a 1963 budget.

 

NSNA is not a BAD movie, per se, but on the whole it feels like one of those TV reunion movies: it's nice to see an old favorite again, but ultimately it just proves you can't go home again.  I'll probably always be disappointed in that one, because I expected a glimpse of an alternate reality where Connery's Bond kept going, and what I got was Sean Connery trying to do a Roger Moore Bond, only without the budget.  If the film had had the guts to go it's own way, it might've amounted to something, but by trying to duplicate Eon's formula, with one (or two) hands tied behind its back, it was doomed to fail.

[AMC Hornet]

I went in prepared to accept the absence of the trademark EON elements and to judge the film on its own merits, so I was not as disappointed as a lot of others.

 

What did disappoint me was the lack of a 'wow' finish, but I accepted that Kershner didn't want/couldn't afford to recreate the undersea brawl from TB, concentrating instead on a mano y mano confrontation between the main characters. Fair enough.

 

It was an interesting experiment, and it was nice to have a Bond film in theatres around Christmas again - which is why I still only watch it in December.

 

It's a curiosity, it's a remake, it's a 'rogue' production, it doesn't fit in the EON chronology, but it's still a Bond film, and I was disappointed that it wasn't followed up by S.P.E.C.T.R.E. as promised in '85. (Still, all things come to he who waits.)

[Major Tallon]

I don't understand the complaint that NSNA isn't a Bond film.  It's recognizably based on a novel by Ian Fleming and features an agent of the British Secret Service named James Bond.  And for anyone who asks, yes, this means that I consider "Casino Royale 67" to be a Bond film, though I'm no defender of that mess.

 

Back to NSNA, I'm not a fan of the "Fill it from here?" business, and I'll go further and say that I'm not sold that a man could back into a shelf of glass vials so hard as to suffer a fatal puncture.  I still enjoy the majority of the fight. 

 

Bond's basically fit before he goes to Shrublands and remains so afterward.  That's an idea they took from the novel, which, for legal reasons, they were confined to adapting, rather than come up with original story material.  M is obsessed with the "H-cure" routine and thinks it'll restore Bond's edge, being unwilling to realize that Bond's still effective, even with a bunch of free radicals in his system.  That's taken from the novel, even though something else might have made for a more interesting explanation.  These sorts of issues would inevitably crop up in the process of screenwriting, but in my view, they didn't mean that the movie shouldn't be made.

 

I'll agree that the cinematography isn't as striking as some of the EON films, but I'm not all that impressed with the look of a couple of the EON productions.  People more knowledgeable than I about such matters will doubtless have more informed opinions, but, though I criticize the look of the North African scenes (actually filmed in the South of France), I don't consider the film visually uninteresting.

 

Lots of good discussion on this thread.

[Call Billy Bob]

Lots of good discussion on this thread.

Agreed, love seeing the different viewpoints.

To answer your "Bond film" query - to me, EON films are Bond films: official, and part of a series. NSNA and Casino Royale '67 are an action film and a comedy farce, respectively, that feature a character (or characters, haha!) named James Bond and some EON-esque elements. Now, I adore CR '67. Peter Sellers is one of my comedy heroes. But I can enjoy it because it's an in your face parody rather than a serious attempt to compete with the established order. When it boils down to it, this is my number one complaint against NSNA - the rival Bond film status. Maybe if it had been released separately, not alongside Octopussy, I would view it with more respect.

[Mr_Wint]

Where is the thrill of seeing Bond "return" before our eyes, seeing him get his mojo back, if you will?  Instead it feels like Bond is the same at the beginning as he is at the end, which incidentally is the same way we left him back in 1971.

Wow. Maybe you should take a break from watching Craig-Bond Movies for a while? EON have made around 20 movies where Bond is basically the same at the beginning as he is at the end.
 

NSNA is not a BAD movie, per se, (..)

I think it is, and that is the main problem with it.
 

I'll probably always be disappointed in that one, because I expected a glimpse of an alternate reality where Connery's Bond kept going, and what I got was Sean Connery trying to do a Roger Moore Bond, only without the budget.  If the film had had the guts to go it's own way, it might've amounted to something, but by trying to duplicate Eon's formula, with one (or two) hands tied behind its back, it was doomed to fail.

NSNA had a higher budget. $36 million for NSNA and $27.5 million for OP.

In the end, the filmmakers were only tied by the book, so they had a lot of creative freedom. Neither Roger Moore or EON had a creative input on NSNA so none of them can be blamed for the final result. The fact that the filmmakers still decided to copy EON's formula tells you something about what EON accomplished during the 70s and 80s. "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"

 

[David_M]

Don't get me wrong: the fight with Pat Roach at Shrublands is great stuff, and I laughed like everybody else when it looked like the urine had killed him (before we learned it was the broken glass).  But then, I'm an unabashed Roger fan, so I'm okay with over-the-top humor.  I just want it noted that NSNA is not above using it, or anything else it can steal from the Eon formula.  To the extent that it is innovative at all, it's only to compensate for the stuff it was legally enjoined from using.

 

I concede your point about the film having to hew closely to the novel and the '65 film.  Unfortunately for McClory, he got the rights to one of the few films that did stick close to the source material, so in the end we're left with the feeling that we've seen it all before, only bigger and better. (It didn't help that the "nuclear blackmail" angle had been exploited repeatedly by other Eon entries after TB). Too bad he couldn't have got the rights to one of the novels where almost nothing made it to screen, so NSNA could offer something fresh.  In fairness, it must've been difficult coming up with new ideas only to have a lawyer say, "No, we can't do that.  It's too original."

 

I also have to say that at the time, I enjoyed NSNA, though not as much as OP.  And to the extent I did enjoy it, it was entirely because of Connery.  I remember coming out of the theater unconsciously aping Connery's swagger, and thinking, "This must be how guys in the 60s felt after seeing those old Bonds."  I think Sean invoked that "Walter Mitty" factor in a way no other Bond actor really has.  But that's something that lessens on subsequent viewings, and I think a lot of the excitement surrounding this film in '83 was due more to its "event" status (Connery's back!) than any artistic merits.  I remember 007 Magazine fawning over it at the time, whereas a recent retrospective issue of the same magazine rated it poorly.  It worked in the moment, but it doesn't hold up.

 

Also, before I forget:  at the end of the film, when the mysterious figure in the blue suit is skulking around the pool and Bond tosses him in the water, I really, really, REALLY wanted it to turn out to be Roger Moore (instead of Rowan Atkinson).  That would have been such a great gag, although I guess it would've broken the fourth wall and ruined the film for sure.  Plus it would've gotten Roger fired from his job, no doubt.  But considering his next gig was AVTAK, that might not have been such a bad thing, either.

[David_M]

 

 

Wow. Maybe you should take a break from watching Craig-Bond Movies for a while? EON have made around 20 movies where Bond is basically the same at the beginning as he is at the end.

 

Well, that was kind of my point.  Eon was locked into the formula at that point, but NSNA needn't have been.  If they wanted to give us something "different" (and interesting) they had the ingredients right there: an old guy in the lead role.  Maybe Eon could pretend Roger wasn't getting older, but it was obvious Sean had put on some years since we last saw him, so why not use that to advantage?  

 

And for the record, the only Craig Bond I've watched more than twice is CR.  I'd rather have the old formula than the new "this time it's personal...again" routine we get lately.  But having said that, I prefer "real" Classic Bond to NSNA's "imitation" Classic Bond.

 

 

 

NSNA had a higher budget. $36 million for NSNA and $27.5 million for OP.

 

Wow, that's a depressing factoid.  Where the hell did it all go?  Sean's salary, I guess.  Or maybe it's one of those cases where the "budget" includes all the legal fees and payouts to scriptwriters for decades of false starts.

 

Now I have new appreciation for Roger's claims that with Cubby, "You see every cent up there on the screen."

[trevanian]

I've never seen that 36 mil figure, but I could see how it went to at least the high 20s very fast ...

 

NSNA had really bad weather problems ... they were so tied up by them at one point that just to have something to shoot, they built the submarine interior in the lobby of their hotel! That kind of thing can drive a budget up really fast (witness Kersh's own EMPIRE, blizzards which poor Gary Kurtz took the blame for, or DARLING LIL.) There's also a lot of money involved in stuff that got partway down and abandoned (Domino's plunge into the pool was supposed to be a follow-on shot from a falling tv communicator, tossed by Bond from a copter, after he tells Blofeld on the other line, 'wrong number - this is 007' and Blofeld is fatally mauled by his cat ... that's all stuff you can find from VFX super David Dryer's interview in CINEFEX  issue 15, plus they show a nearly completed matte shot of Largo's estate with the ship and old fort all in one.)

[DaveBond21]

It was the first Bond movie I ever saw in the cinema, for my 9th birthday.

 

I enjoyed it then but I've only seen it maybe 3 times since.

[David_M]

 

 

Knowing that behind the scenes was lots of turmoil, Connery probably regretted saying yes once more,

 

I'm not so sure.  Prior to NSNA, Connery's career wasn't exactly setting the world on fire, thanks to stinkers like "Meteor" and "Wrong Is Right," plus "not exactly bad, but nobody watched it" fare like "Five Days One Summer" and "Cuba."  I don't know if it'd be fair to say he was in a career "slump" exactly, but at the time I certainly thought his days an "A-lister" in box office blockbusters was long over (though I greatly enjoyed "Outland," personally).

 

NSNA put him back on the map, big time.  It's like he cashed in a marker he'd been keeping in a back pocket like a "get out of career Hell free" card.  Once he was back in the public consciousness, and signed with CAA, and made the canny decision to segue to "father/mentor" supporting roles, we got "Red October," "The Rock," "The Last Crusade" and so on, and along the way an Academy Award.

 

Maybe it's just me, but I can't help feeling that NSNA was some kind of turning point in all that.  Whatever complaints he may have had about how he was "robbed" by Eon and the Bond series, in the end, I think he leveraged Bond to give his career a second wind.  So in that sense, it went very well for him in a way that makes the film's artistic merits pretty irrelevant.

[SecretAgentFan]

Well, Connery hated the way the production spiralled out of control.  According to "The James Bond Legacy", he and the assistant director took over from Schwartzman when principal photography was plagued with problems and Schwartzman proved to be not up to the task.  They both never appeared at any premiere together, and two years later Connery went to court in order to sue him for his profits.  Also, Connery probably hoped for his film to beat "Octopussy" at the box office, which did not happen.  In the end, it must have been a pretty bad experience for him, and he is quoted as saying that filming NSNA felt as long as all his other Bond films together.

 

Granted, NSNA was not a flop, but it did not meet the expected outcome at all.  And as far as I understand, it was "The Untouchables" in 1986 which rescued Connery´s career and gave him a second chance at high profile films in supporting roles.

 

But as I pointed out: I like the film and find it enjoyable.  Just not as much as the EON films.

[David_M]

Forgot about all that nastiness with NSNA, but then Connery was forever falling out with directors and producers and suing people left and right, so it probably didn't make much of an impression on me.

 

I wouldn't disagree "The Untouchables" is the film that put him on top, in terms of everyone and his brother suddenly wanting him for everything.  But I still think that without NSNA to remind the world that he was still alive and working, DePalma might never have offered him "The Untouchables."  

 

I grant you that might just be coming from the point of view of a youngster who didn't know better and had a different concept of time (for me in 1983 it had been "forever" since Connery was a top star, but now that I'm older that time span wouldn't seem so great), but from the blunt, callous view of a teenager, Connery was, to me, very much "yesterday's news" at the time, the guy who "used to be famous for James Bond."

 

I've always thought Connery had kind of a bumpy ride after quitting Bond, with some great artistic triumphs ("The Man Who Would Be King" and, depending on your POV, "Robin and Marian"), several misfires and some stuff he seemed to do because it interested him personally, but not necessarily any ticket buyers.  Doing NSNA struck me as partly a surrender and partly a shrewd calculation: give everyone what they've been pestering you about non-stop for a decade, but parlay the resultant press frenzy into something that works for you.

 

Brosnan and Dalton have had similar post-Bond careers, with ups and downs but not yet getting that "second wind" Connery finally did.  Roger left too late and ran out of time for a comeback (plus he's usually shown very poor judgement in choosing non-Bond projects).  Connery may very well be the only ex-Bond to manage a second career phase as big or bigger than his Bond phase.  The jury's still out on Craig, obviously.

[Mr_Wint]

I agree that NSNA was a smart career move by Connery. No matter what we think of it, NSNA was a hit and that definitely opened up doors to other roles in the 80s.

You could also blame Connery for how the film turned out. It seems like he had a lot of creative control. For instance, it is claimed that Connery rejected James Horner (!) and instead brought in Michel Legrand.

[glidrose]

There's also a lot of money involved in stuff that got partway down and abandoned (Domino's plunge into the pool was supposed to be a follow-on shot from a falling tv communicator, tossed by Bond from a copter, after he tells Blofeld on the other line, 'wrong number - this is 007' and Blofeld is fatally mauled by his cat ... that's all stuff you can find from VFX super David Dryer's interview in CINEFEX  issue 15, plus they show a nearly completed matte shot of Largo's estate with the ship and old fort all in one.)

http://www.the007dos...Say-Never-Again

And yes, I did feel entertained, although at 134 minutes the film could easily have been trimmed by 20 minutes and made more effective. Strangely, the film already has some jarring transitions which made me wonder whether the original cut delivered to the studio had been much longer.

Yep. Jack Schwartzman said they had at least half an hour of footage that got cut from the final print.

[David_M]

Thanks for that link! A fascinating read, and it took me back to 1983, when the press had such a massive hard on for this film it obstructed their view entirely.

"Arguably the best Bond film, ever," indeed. LOL

[trevanian]

Thanks for that link! A fascinating read, and it took me back to 1983, when the press had such a massive hard on for this film it obstructed their view entirely.

"Arguably the best Bond film, ever," indeed. LOL

Cinefex made the same silly claim about CASINO ROYALE when it came out, too (and until QUANTUM and SKYDUMP, NSNA and CR were the only Bond films that got full coverage in the mag; they did a feature on John Richardson covering several Bonds he worked on, but no standalone pieces. I lobbied for THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH and AUSTIN 2 to be covered when I switched from freelance and went on staff at the magazine for about 30 months, but to no avail.)

 

I'm amazed they got an okay to reprint it online, because Cinefex frowns heavily on anybody doing that EVER. I think there's a Wing Commander website and an Edward Norton fansite that have my Cinefex articles on WC and FIGHT CLUB on them, but on high-interest franchise stories, like TREK and STAR WARS, Cinefex shuts down copy&pasters really fast.

[quantumofsolace]

http://www.denofgeek...say-never-again