Bondathon: Thunderball

Discipline, Dak...discipline.

Every series has its blunders. Star Wars has The Phantom Menace, Harry Potter has Half-Blood Prince, Indiana Jones has Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Lord of the Rings has Desolation of Smaug. It's normal for a franchise to hit a low point. You can't keep them happy forever.

Over it's 53 year history, the James Bond series has had its fair share of blunders. Movies that were just so terrible, or at least defined so by most fans. Each actor has his own blunder during his run as Bond, some even have two. Most people will agree that Sean Connery's blunder of a film was Diamonds are Forever.

However, I'm not most people.

Thunderball is atrocious. It's boring. It's too long. I can't sum it up more than that. Okay, maybe I should elaborate why. Sean Connery's back again as Bond in the fourth film within the series. The plot goes as such: Spectre agent number two, Emilio Largo, played by Adolfo Celi, has acquired two atomic bombs from a sunken Vulcan bomber and is holding the British government at ransom, and Bond has to go find the bombs and retrieve them before Largo can come through on his promise to blow up London or Miami. It really isn't that bad of a premise, so how does it fall through?

Well. a lot of the fault falls within the premise itself. Due to the fact that the missiles were stolen from a sunken airplane, a lot of the action scenes take place underwater. Now, normally I'm fine with a few underwater scenes in a movie to mix things up, but this is not the deal with Thunderball. Over a quarter of the film takes place underwater or near the water. To make matters even worse, these underwater scenes are what make the film so boring. They're slow, they're largely uneventful, and if an action scene does happen to take place, you lose concept of what's going on. Many points during these scenes I would mutter to myself, "Okay...was that Bond who struck the goon...or did he strike Largo? Did that goon kill Bond? Was that Largo that got blown up?" It's so incomprehensible, it isn't even funny.

Okay, are the above water scenes at least good? Not really. They end up making even less sense than most of the underwater scenes. Bond seems to just be retracing his steps for most of the movie. 

I guess I can add insult to injury by saying I actually fell asleep for ten minutes during my watching of this movie. It just feels like it's that long and dull.

The final blow to it all falls into the hands of the actors and actresses. Connery is starting to show his age around the time this one came around. He just seems rather bored in a lot of the scenes or overly stressed. Celi doesn't make for a convincing villain, most of his character traits just feel too much like a henchman. The Bond girls are largely wooden and are as unbelievable as ever. If there is one redeeming factor, it's Luciana Paluzzi as Fiona Volpe, the sexy femme fatale of the film. But, sadly, she doesn't live to see the final battle.

Thunderball easily takes the bottom of my list of Bond films in order of preference. I never understood why people like it so much, and I doubt that I ever will. 

Luckily for me, I get to review one of my favorite films in the series next week, which, surprisingly, isn't a favorite for the majority of Bond films.

Thunderball gets a 2 out of 5 stars.