1965 - Thunderball
Alternate Title - Waterballs
PG - 130 minutes
Director - Terence Young
Stars - Sean Connery, Claudine Auger, Adolfo Celi
This movie opens with Bond punching a cross dresser which turns into the most sloppy fight scene in movie history. Bond escapes the scene using a jetpack instead of a simple rope because everything he does has to be severely unnecessary.
Spectre is again the villain in this movie. They immediately make their presence known in the movie by having basically the equivalent of a corporate Monday morning meeting where they discuss new ideas and personnel issues. Bond should be careful, they appear to be fairly organized.
Most of this movie takes place underwater so you know it has to be exciting. Nothing screams action like this calm water setting. The main villain, Largo crashes a jet and steals a suitcase of bomb fuses from it before covering it with a net disguise so nobody can see it.
It should be noted that I had reached the halfway point of the movie and this is all the plot development that has happened. There are several scenes in this movie in which Bond just casually chats with other characters that go nowhere.
Yet another movie where Bond just hangs out with the villain as if they were best buds. I’m starting to think he gets off on the attention.
Bond finds the crashed jet and this all leads to an epic underwater war where men are literally shooting each other with harpoons and using knives to cut the tubes to their enemies oxygen tanks. I don’t get it. Not the scene but the idea of this being exciting. Half of the scene you can’t even see because of bubbles so what your left with is slow motion swim-fighting.
I like Largo as a villain but he really had nothing to do in this movie. He is only in a few scenes and then he dies in the lamest way when he is harpooned in his back before his boat crashes. What a waste of a decent villain. Bond and the girl are then sky hooked out of the ocean in a scene later used in The Dark Knight. I’ll let you guess which one of these movies executed the idea better.
Overall, I would not recommend this one. It’s just boring. Maybe it was my hatred for movies with aquatic settings or maybe it was the fact that nothing fucking happened for 2 hours and ten minutes. Half of the time Connery is in short-shorts and you swear you’re just staring at his balls and ass-cheeks. Ocean movies are just BORING. There are only like 4 ways to die in them so it gets repetitive. Every bad guy that dies is from the following options; their oxygen tank tube is cut, they are harpooned, they are blown up underwater which means no explosion or anything cool or Bond just punches them in the face to death, apparently.