For modern audiences raised on Daniel Craig’s brutal, emotional Bond, Never Say Never Again feels surprisingly prescient. Craig’s Bond in No Time to Die (2021) is also an aging warrior, weary of the game, facing irrelevance. Connery did it first, in a cheap wig, with a video-game-obsessed villain.
exists because one man sued Ian Fleming, another writer stole a script, and a Scottish former milkman decided that “never” was just a suggestion. It is the film that shouldn’t exist, starring the man who said he wouldn’t return, fighting a villain from a book he didn’t originally write.
“Bait,” Bond said. “She’s proud. She will respond to a challenge.”
Upon release, the film was a box-office success, earning over $160 million worldwide.
The final underwater climactic battle, while ambitious, lacks the visceral punch of Thunderball . The absence of John Barry’s iconic score is deeply felt; Michel Legrand’s lounge-jazz soundtrack is interesting but often feels misplaced, lending a soft, 1970s TV-movie vibe to scenes that need bombast. And the film’s climax—a bizarre, handheld laser-tag fight in a medieval fortress—is anti-climactic compared to the usual explosive finale.
