Thunderball (1965)

Director: Terence Young

Starring: Sean Connery, Adolfo Celi, Claudine Auger

More Info: IMDB

Tagline: Look Up! Look Down! Look Out! Here Comes The Biggest Bond Of All!

Plot: James Bond heads to The Bahamas to recover two nuclear warheads stolen by SPECTRE agent Emilio Largo in an international extortion scheme.



My Rating: 6/10

Would I watch it again? Not alone

I've always had a difficult time with this one. For starters, it comes right after GOLDFINGER and that's just a bad place to be. The pre-credit sequence is decent for a Bond knockoff but not for Bond. It's just...underwhelming. I'm guessing that the rocket pack was a kid's dream forty years ago and it probably had everyone salivating for the rest of the film. The credit sequence is great. It's the first one (of many) that uses silhouetted nude women. THAT says Bond. Again, I'm sure kids were going apeshit. Between the rocket pack and the "I think I saw a nipple" credit sequence probably had them running for the bathrooms.

"Don't let this pink shirt fool you..."

Tom Jones singing the title tune? OH FUCK YEAH! Testosterone, I'd like you to meet Testosterone. Perfect match. The rest of the film has some nice moments with Bond being Bond but at 130 minutes it drags in more than a few places. I've seen this a few times and I always feel that I've over-stayed my welcome with some of the locations. There's simply a bit too much time spent over here, and there, and underwater, and so on.


One major annoyance is found in Felix Leiter, played by Rik Van Nutter. 13 credits to his name and only four more after THUNDERBALL. When you see him you'll understand why. He's terrible. Not only is his acting stiff, the character was written poorly. Here he's just Bond's chauffer taking him wherever he wants to go. There's even a scene where Leiter is standing below the outside balcony (on a busy street, mind you) waving his arms all over the place and yelling up to Bond to get his attention. HELLO! He's a fucking CIA agent!!! He's about to be Plume'd. What I want to know is how he got the gig to begin with. Turns out he was just two years into his marriage to Swedish hottie, Anita Ekberg. She hit international fame with La Dolce Vita (1960). It's not too much of a stretch to see that maybe that had something to do with his casting.

Celi does a good job as the main baddie, Emilio Largo, but he's nothing compared to Gert Frobe's Goldfinger. It's just disappointing that they finally hit upon the magic formula and blow it with this one. Here's an interesting bit of trivia...I'm a huge fan of the novels and in the novel, THUDNERBALL, Fleming lists my town, Pensacola, Florida, as one of the locations targeted by Largo's nuclear weapons. Cool.

"Remember this scene. There's an identical one coming up in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (1971)"

The film certainly doesn't live up to the tagline unless they're referring to the running time. THUNDERBALL is OK but it's as if GOLDFINGER was the desert and then the waiter brings the appetizer with THUNDERBALL. And with the next one, YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967) we get the soup and THEN we get the main course with ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (1968). Soup's on, I guess.

Scorethefilm will return with his thoughts on...

YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE (1967)