Thunderball

Skippable, and it is the first Bond film to be too long. At a hundred and thirty minutes it is twenty longer than Goldfinger and has less happening, largely because so much of it takes place underwater, where the pace of everything is halved and telling one diver from another is close to impossible.

The scale was the selling point. SPECTRE hijacks two nuclear weapons and ransoms them, which was a genuinely frightening premise in 1965, and the production spent heavily on sea work, a jetpack in the pre-titles, and an underwater battle involving dozens of divers. It was the most commercially successful film of the Connery run and the one whose spectacle has aged worst.

Adolfo Celi's Largo is a solid villain with an eyepatch and a pool of sharks, and the Nassau sequences are handsome. Bond's behaviour toward a nurse at the health clinic in the first act is the moment most modern viewers stop the film, and it is not a misreading.

Its real legacy is legal. The story originated in a disputed collaboration with Kevin McClory, who retained rights that eventually produced Never Say Never Again eighteen years later. Skip it unless you are watching the Connery era complete.