Thunderball

Pre-existing Prejudices: None. I remember next to nothing about Thunderball, beyond Tom Jones’s attempts to drown out timpani on the theme song (“so he strikes! DUH-DUH-DUH-DA-DUUUUUH! Like Thunnnnnnnnnnnderball!”), and the inevitable fact that it’s the one with all the underwater action sequences. So a fairly clean slate, then. Let’s see how it goes!

The Actual Movie

We open on a funeral, which is at least a new start for a Bond movie. Bond appears to actually be on point here, and it’s a reasonable fake-out that the flag covering the coffin has the initials JB on it – but not Our Mr Bond, of course, but instead SPECTRE agent Jaques Bouvar (yes, we’re in France). Cut to – country house and Bond guessing that Bouvar’s “widow” is actually the man himself in widow’s clothes after faking his own death… Bond works this out because he opens the car door himself, whereas the widow would have waited to have it opened for her. What, women can’t open car doors? What the fuck, Thunderball?

This means veils and fisticuffs between Bond and an apparent drag artist, and seeing Connery trying to take down someone who looks like they should be on Ru Paul’s Drag Race is incredibly funny, though definitely not intentionally so. We’re back to poor speeded-up footage, and it’s a not-great fight sequence. Still, Bond visibly kills someone by hand (choking out Bouvar with a poker) rather than a clinical kill which is appreciated. And now… he escapes on a jet-pack. It’s not a great means of escape (and involves some bad rear projection), but the DB5 is back, and now comes fitted with water cannons rather than exhaust pipes. Water the chances of that? (ho-ho)

Tom Jones has replaced Shirley Bassey as the Welsh bellower de jour.

So we remain in Paris, which you know because there’s a view of the Eifel Tower. The people speaking French in what is clearly the French capital didn’t give it away then… Man With An Eyepatch opens…ohhh a sliding wardrobe in an office! So we’re immediately back with SPECTRE, and the white cat is apparently still in control while its headless handler keeps it well stroked (oh fine, it’s Blofeld again, poorly disguised by a plastic partition to hide his identity), and everyone is still known by numbers. Mr Eyepatch is Number Two, not inappropriate. We get to see SPECTRE justice. Electrocution, then a handy sliding chair. A bit of a plan explained, then we cut to…

… a health clinic. That might prove to be every bit as exciting as that round of golf in the last film! Bond spots a tattoo that might be a plot point, then he calls Moneypenny so she can have a couple of extra lines this time out. Bond is allegedly on leave, so it’s a bit of a coincidence that this is where the action takes place, as he investigates Tattoo Man. It’s all OK but fairly mediocre and not really engaging. Then he meets the nurse/physiotherapist, who gets a forced kiss despite her clear lack of interest, but the commitment to this actually being a health farm seems strangely charming. Then Bond gets put on a spine stretching machine for his back, then someone in bandages turns it to maximum as he makes a bid for the world’s crappest assassination attempt. Again bad speeded-up footage and zoomy cameras that make it seem more like Bond is fucking a table, rather than in any actual danger. The nurse/exploitation object rushes back in to apologize, and he forgives her for the thing she didn’t do with a fuck in the steam room, but it’s all a bit tacky. Next, we’re off to a steam closet, of the type that only exists in movies when people need to be trapped in one for some reason, with a broom pushed through the door handles. Bond then gives his suddenly-very-compliant physiotherapist a rub down with a mink mitten (not a euphemism, though it also basically is), but this is all taking so long. Get to the point! There’s going to be a point, right?

Some woman we haven’t met and don’t know is in bed with a pilot, who is in short order killed by his own duplicate. Clunk, clunky-clunk clunk. This is then explained in far too much detail, as the replacement pilot tries to extort more money from the caper. He’s meant to be flying an RAF plane on a training mission with two live atomic missiles on board because that’s a totally normal thing. We get a cut between the loud noise of the flight taking off and Bond nearby, which is fairly well handled, then Bond sees someone being brought into the health spa (yes, he’s still there) so goes for a snoop.

The level of contrivance here is high. Bond finds the abandoned dead body of the pilot that’s just been placed on the spine-stretching rack table from earlier… then he sets off a fire alarm… god get on with it al-fucking-ready! Then we’re back with the plane, and gas is fed into the breathing equipment of the crew to kill off any lingering extras, and the plane is stolen then landed/crashed into the sea – eventually. This is all taking far, far too long. Once on the water, the plane deploys its landing gear and sinks, all somehow without anything of actual interest happening. Nearby, a SPECTRE boat launches divers and kills the duplicate pilot, who’s handily trapped by a seatbelt – oh the surprise. The atomic bombs are stolen. Very slowly. There’s a lot of impressive but not especially interesting underwater stuff going on. It takes an age to get to the point that there’s a sub and the plane is hidden and… urgh. This just goes on and on. Then we’re on the sub where the missiles are being loaded and it’s still difficult to care.

Finally, around ten years later, the sequence is over and we’re approaching an exotic island, and Number One is still being controlled by a white cat. Yet still we cut back to the health farm and Bond making his DB5 exist. A car following Bond is taken out by some bikers and bad speeded-up footage. Bond makes it to the office at last.

“Every double-0 in Europe has been called in” (that should be exciting, huh? No), and we’re into the world’s most fancy conference room, where M is holding court. We meet a Home Secretary for the first time in a Bond movie, as Blofeld attempts to blackmail the government for 100 million pounds. We are now 40 minutes into the movie and everything that’s happened so far could have been done in under five. Bond asks to get set to Nassau to pursue the case, and M tells him he’s not surprised because he knows of “your enthusiasm for watersports”. Heh.

Then we’re off to the Caribbean and swimming: “You swim like a man” Bond tells a girl he meets, who will turn out to be handily connected to the movie’s villain, as this is Domino, the Bond female protagonist of the movie. “So do you” she archly replies. It’s all there… Then they’re off to the beach and yes, it’s a beach. Now we’re onto a swimming pool, and … you know, this film is crap so far. Some flirting is mildly more successful: “What sharp little eyes you have” Domino tells Bond. “Wait till you get to my teeth” he replies, but this is generally better than the last movie at least, and not a pun in sight. Next, off to the baccarat table to meet with Largo, he of the eye patch earlier in the movie. Everyone knows he’s called Largo, but there never seems to be a point when he actually tells anyone his name or introduces himself, which is not helpful for the audience. Lots of bad SPECTRE (of defeat) puns make up the thus-far pun shortfall though. Then off to dancing and a bit of plot revelation but still nothing all that exciting.

Bond heads off to a hotel room and finds a tape recorder inside a book. Bit of stuff, then a henchperson is found in the shower and defeated. The henchperson is sent back to Largo, who feels him to the sharks, so now we know he’s bad, in case being a member of SPECTRE and having an eye patch didn’t rather remove any doubt. After which we meet the third Felix in four films, played almost anonymously by the marvellously-named Rik van Nutter – really, Felix could be anyone in this movie. Q gets to go on location to explain This Movie’s Gadgets, which is nice for him, so look out for those little toys later! Despite Desmond Llewelyn’s best efforts, we’re now an hour into the movie and still waiting for something interesting…

Back to London and more threats. Stuff is discussed. Then we get to see the vision that is Sean Connery in a wetsuit – try to restrain yourselves. We get some more underwater action, but it’s still not exciting. Then… almost excitement! A chase, hand grenades thrown in the water, boats through the middle of catamarans. Yeah… almost exciting. It’s not that it’s badly done, it’s just not engagingly done, and of course, Bond is perfectly fine. The wetsuit he’s wearing is orange, by the way, which is…. not discreet. After the attack, he swims ashore and gets into a car with a speeded-up-footage problem, driven by a woman with a whacking great SPECTRE ring. So we know she’s no good, though the character is decent. On to a bit of a helicopter run with some nice aerial photography, and some clay pigeon shooting, we see the shark pool above, why are we supposed to care about this? Later Bond shows off a bit doing the shooting, but it’s not any better.

Look I’m meant to be taking notes here, but if I do I’m just going to describe what’s on screen because none of it is interesting or anything other than literal. Woman attacked etc…

Right, let’s try to get back on point. Power needs to be out on part of the island, woman hostage, horrible dress. Some stuff, a fight, Bond ends up in Shark Tank, breather sure came in handy. Again, well well-shot but dull. He escapes, ends up in bed with someone. One hour twenty-five – nothing interesting yet… tick-tock baby…

Yes! Wait! Something interesting! Volpe kidnaps Bond and he escapes her through a carnival! This is actually interesting, and in a change from using stock footage, we instead have some stock music (from Dr No, though it’s more effectively used here). Bond enters the Kiss Kiss club. Let’s hope there’s some bang bang to liven things up. Oh, but there is! The killing of Volpe is really well handled, and the climax of the drums matching the shooting is a terrific piece of writing and direction. About fucking time, even though it means we lose one of the only interesting characters so far.

Bond finds the camouflaged plane – “shoot one of the sharks, keep the others occupied”, Bond tells Leiter, as he goes to investigate the plane, slowly and underwater. With lots of sharks, which you really would expect to up the drama quotient. Again, well shot but not exciting. Domino’s there too, and apparently, they have sex underwater – “I hope we didn’t scare the fish” – which is some feat with both in full wet suits, then to the beach where Bond “has to hurt her again” by explaining her brother is dead. So Domino at least has some motivation to hate Largo here, which is something.

Yes, more underwater fighting as Bond sneaks in by taking out (yet another) henchperson. Stranded Bond waits to be rescued by Felix. Which he is. He’s able to communicate the target for the atomic bomb is Miami, which I guess is important, though it doesn’t play that way on screen. It could have been a municipal park for all the shock that’s communicated. Then we are back underwater yet a-fucking-gain… For the love of fish… Some impressive parachute stuff with lots of people jumping out of planes then swimming off underwater but it’s the same old story… technically impressive but doesn’t engage. Now, an underwater fight, #4,146. You know the one. Well shot, obviously, but just so so dull! The fight goes on for ages. It’s hard to write about because it’s just a lot of people thrashing about underwater.

Bit of a fight between Bond and Largo, then Largo makes his escape. Bond follows. Largo gets in the ship and Bond grabs hold underwater. Largo’s yacht is surrounded, and “makes smoke” which makes it seem more like it has a really bad gas problem. The rear of the boat gets jettisoned – decent effect, actually – and blown up while the front bit makes its getaway with big aquaplanes, as Bond clambers on board. Big fight on the bridge, though we’re back to terrible rear projection again and speeded-up footage – sorry to bang on about it, but it’s just very badly done, the scenery outside appears to be passing at the speed of a jet plane, not a boat.

The fight is good enough, the rest just over-eggs the pudding. Eventually, Largo is killed by Domino, so finally a woman in this movie has some agency. “I’m glad I killed him,” she comments. “You’re glad you killed him!” said the just-saved Bond, as lots more speeded-up footage in the background suggests things are coming to a head. Bond, Domino and Largo’s pet nuclear scientist (he freed Domino before the big fight on the bridge) jump out of the boat, but only Bond and Domino get into the dingy – he’s never seen again, which seems a bit harsh for the character that actually allowed the plot to resolve itself. The two of them are then rescued by Skyhook, probably the best bit of the movie and it’s about three seconds from the end credits.

And it ends on the Bond theme rather than Mr Jones, in a failed attempt to kid on what we’ve watched was in any way exciting or worthwhile.

In Conclusion: Christ, Thunderball is dull. That’s the overriding sensation sitting down to actually watch the film. At a punishing two hours and ten minutes, Thunderball is the longest of the four films so far covered, but it does absolutely nothing interesting with its extended running time. At an hour and a half, Thunderball could be a fairly taut action movie, but there’s just so much bloat here that any time the film comes close to building up momentum it will switch to another extended underwater sequence and it all grinds to a halt.

Yet it would be a mistake to only blame the underwater sequences here – they’re part of the problem, but they’re not the whole of it. The opening forty minutes (!) of the movie at the health spa are equally as tedious as all the laborious underwater material, and it feels like the film is just marking time until… what? The theft of the plane? That could have happened a couple of minutes in and we’d be spared endless scenes of a shirtless Connery faffing about in some corridors.

Saying that, though, one aspect of Thunderball that’s noticeably better than Goldfinger is Connery himself. The humour of Thunderball is much toned down compared to its predecessor, and as a result, Connery’s performance improves noticeably. This isn’t the high point of From Russia With Love, but Connery seems more invested in the role, and the result is a much more even performance. He looks the part too – there’s a lot of swimming and action in Thunderball and Connery’s Bond looks like he could handle the physical side of it – this isn’t Daniel Craig’s abs of steel, but there’s no question that, looking at this Bond on screen, he could do everything this story asked of him.

So it’s a bit of a shame the film doesn’t ask a bit more of him, then. The story here – steal a couple of nukes, blackmail the British government into a ransom for their return – would seem too simple to get wrong, yet SPECTRE’s plan is a classic piece of James Bond Logic rather than real-world logic, and unlike a lot of James Bond Logic plans, this one doesn’t fall apart after you finish watching the film and start thinking about it, it falls apart right there while you’re staring at the screen (quite possibly in disbelief). Lots of Bond films skate by on shaky Evil Bad Guy Plans but get away with it through interesting characters or a propulsive plot but there’s nothing propulsive at all about Thunderball, which just highlights how convoluted things are.

It seems obvious to point out but SPECTRE’s plan to steal two atomic missiles is insanely complex, involving a duplicate pilot that’s had two years of surgery to become identical to the pilot of the plane that will carry the missiles. Lucky the RAF didn’t rotate out the pilots a couple of weeks earlier, otherwise the whole plan would be stuffed. Then there’s the theft of the plane itself and the gassing of the crew, then there’s landing the plane on water, then letting it sink, then getting the bombs out with an inevitably-endless underwater sequence, then it’s camouflaged… if they can do all that it doesn’t seem like raising the money they’re trying to extort out of the British another way would all that hard for them. Especially since we’re also presented with the AGM Of Doom, as the white cat Blofeld gets a run-down of all the money coming in from various nefarious SPECTRE deals. It’s ridiculous, in other words, and not really in a fun way, it just appears rather stupid.

So if the main plan is a bust, and the pacing is a bust, can the supporting cast sweep in and save the movie? Sadly, not really. Domino retains some interesting characteristics – kept in a gilded cage by a man she clearly fears but can’t escape – that makes for a bit of a change from the run of female protagonists we’ve had so far, and she gets some real agency as she takes out Largo at the end of the film and saves Bond’s life in the process. The set-up here is a little clichéd, with Bond just about to be shot before she takes Largo out, but nevertheless points where they’re deserved, and it’s great to see a female character retain her agency and equally not get bedded by, or ever really show any particular interest in, Bond himself.

This is a bit of an in-theory victory, though, because Claudine Auger is a pretty bland on-screen presence, and doesn’t really have the range to deliver the cowed-but-defiant performance the role really needs. This is thrown into sharp relief because elsewhere in the movie we have SPECTRE agent Fiona Volpe, played by Luciana Paluzzi, who lights up the screen every time she’s on camera, and who works very well with Connery in their moments together. She’s a terrific femme fatale – not an original observation, I know – and her death at the Kiss Kiss Club is the highlight of the movie. An interesting, engaging female character? Yeah, there was no way she was making it to the end credits.

Oh, and as for Largo, our movie’s ostensible Big Bad? Kind of a bust too. He ticks a lot of the Bond villain clichés – eyepatch keeps sharks in a swimming pool, you know the sort of thing – but as played by Adolpho Celi, he doesn’t quite have the presence to stand out. Say what you will about Gert Frobe’s fabulously fruity performance as Goldfinger, but he certainly filled up the screen. Largo just can’t compete. He’s not awful, but as the supposed Number Two in SPECTRE, you’d expect something a bit more… more, somehow.

Even the direction can’t help out here – this is Terrence Young’s third, final and weakest Bond directorial outing. The underwater sequences may be long but they look amazing, so real points and credit are deserved there, but for the rest… yeah, we’re back to poor and overly-used rear-projection and speeded-up footage that renders parts of the film more Benny Hill than James Bond, with parts of it just seemly incredibly random (and that’s without playing the Where Did That Fucking Jet-Pack Come From game). The pacing issues, too, can be at least partially laid at the director’s feet, with just so much material that could be lost, and the tight, instinctive and developed style he used so effectively on From Russia With Love is nowhere to be seen here. There’s a… literalness to everything here, and no subtlety at all.

But above all, it’s that pacing that sinks Thunderball (sorry, that one wasn’t even meant to be a pun). Everything here is Just. So. Slow. We take far too long to get to the main plot. Even Bond’s involvement in it is a massive coincidence since he just so happens to be staying at a health spa where something shady is going down and when we do get there it barely seems worth the bother. A major western city being threatened by an atomic bomb should be tense, or at the very least exciting, but the danger never feels like it’s actually real. It’s just something people mention from time to time to remind you it’s a plot point, not an actual threat. It’s great to see Connery a bit more engaged this time out, and it’s nice that, whatever else you can say about the movie, it’s not just a more-is-more re-tread of Goldfinger, which it very easily could have been given how successful that movie was.

By far the weakest of the four Bond films so far, there’s just nothing that Thunderball does better than any of its predecessors. Even the Bahamas location isn’t enough to distinguish it – on-screen it just looks like a more extensively shot version of Jamaica from Dr No, and though Dr No wasn’t a remarkable film, it was a steady one that got things off to a reliable start. From Russia With Love had a distinct, Cold War aesthetic to define it, and Goldfinger soared so far over the top that it succeeded in spite of itself. What does Thunderball have that can compete with that? A stupid, overly complex plan to steal a couple of bombs, an eye-patch cliché of a villain who wouldn’t need major retooling to fit into Austin Powers and endless, dreary underwater antics where a bunch of identically-clad wet-suited men hack away at some other identically-clad wet-suited men.

What a crap film.

What Percentage Of This Film Could Be Cut? An easy 25%, going up to maybe a third. The first forty minutes of the movie could be delivered in about five, and the endless, endless scenes in the health spa play more like a spy version of St Trinians than they do a proper thriller or adventure story. And the underwater sequences… my Gods do they go on. They’re technically astounding – clearly shot, excellently directed and exquisitely detailed – but just really, really boring to watch time after time. The problem with doing lots of action sequences underwater is very obvious, and it’s this – everything happens very slowly underwater. That means you can have an effective moment of hide-and-seek – one scene, shot around a wreck with Bond slipping inside and then out the other side to bomb the two henchpeople that followed him, manages to be effective because it’s a tense little cat-and-mouse moment. But for the rest? The reason action works is because lots of things happen fast, and the reason the underwater action sequences in Thunderball fail to hold the interest is because they’re the exact opposite of that. This is definitely when a less-is-more approach would have been preferable – a few shots of really impressive underwater activity would have shown off what the film could do without becoming tedious or repetitive. Instead, we have something like a quarter of the film below the waves. Talk about (here comes the bad pun) wrecking your own chances…

Quip Level: After Goldfinger’s quip overload, mercifully Thunderball earns itself a Low. Only a few slip by, and it’s amazing how much more effective they are for being used relatively sparsely. Even the most obvious – “I think he got the point” quips Bond after killing obviously-gay henceperson Vargas with a spear gun late in the movie – works because we’ve not had hundreds of equally corny one-liners preceding it. Learn this kind of restraint going forward, Bond movies!

2025 Cringe Level: Mostly about an Ouch, give or take. We get another scene of Bond forcing himself on a woman (in this case the physiotherapist at the health spa) after she’s made it extremely clear she’s not interested, then immediately after he’s giving her a rub down with that notorious mink mitten. It’s ugly and unnecessary. Still, Domino earns points from being a little (only a little, mind, but still) more complex than any of the “Bond girls” to date, which, OK, isn’t a high bar to clear but it’s a step in the right direction. And the fact that it’s her who both saves Bond at the end and kills off the major villain of the piece gains some degree of credibility for the character.