Never Say Never Again

Skippable, and it exists entirely because of a lawsuit. Kevin McClory had retained certain rights from the disputed development of Thunderball, and two decades later he used them to make a rival film, with Sean Connery returning twelve years after his last official outing. The title is a joke about his having said he would never play the part again.

Because it is outside the official series, it has none of the furniture. No gun barrel, no Monty Norman theme, no Eon production design, and a different actor for every recurring role. That absence is the most interesting thing about it: the film demonstrates how much of Bond is trademark rather than character.

Irvin Kershner, who had just made The Empire Strikes Back, directs a plot that is Thunderball again, with stolen warheads and the same villain renamed. The one genuine improvement is that it acknowledges Bond's age: he is sent to a health clinic because he is out of condition, and the film is openly about a man past his best, which the official series was pretending not to notice in the same year.

Klaus Maria Brandauer is a better Largo than the original had and Barbara Carrera is enjoying herself enormously. A video-game duel between Connery and Brandauer is the strangest sequence in any film with this character in it. Released months after Octopussy and beaten by it.