Operation: Watch All the James Bonds: Episode 3: Thunderball

Episode 1: Dr. No and From Russia With Love

Episode 2: Goldfinger

After the brilliant and cacophonous circus act that was Goldfinger, I was more than ready to charge head-first into more crazy Bond adventures. I really knew next to nothing about the next few films going in. Thunderball and You Only Live Twice are talked about relatively little compared to the first three. I suppose there’s a good reason for that. Particularly in the case of Thunderball, I can totally understand why it's not as beloved. The goofiness and buffoonery seems to increase exponentially with absolutely no intention of looking back. Is that a bad thing? Fuck no! For many this would be a drawback, but for me, without the craziness, there's literally no other way this movie would be enjoyable.

Seems like everyone wants a piece of Bond. A very specific piece.

Thunderball is…odd. I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy it, because I did, but it’s painfully obvious how it tried to emulate the tone and style of Goldfinger. It succeeded in some respects but failed in other, more critical areas. There are scenes of Thunderball that are almost un-fucking-believable in their entertainment value, but they’re surrounded by a jumbled mess of a story.

That brings me to my major gripe with this film. I had no fucking clue as to what the hell was happening at, let’s say, basically any given moment. The story occasionally comes together for brief moments but then quickly collapses under its own weight and wanders off like a 90 year-old dementia patient. I think it has something to do with Bond trying to recover some nuclear warheads that SPECTRE stole. The editing is so terribly inconsistent that it makes large parts of the film incoherent. It just kind of lazily goes from scene to scene without much set-up or explanation. It’s really not a great story to begin with, but what it does with it is incredibly weak.

You only WISH you could be this cool.

Thankfully, there’s some great, great stuff to make up for it. Take the pre-credits sequence for instance. Bond attends a funeral of a man who killed some of his colleagues. But WAIT. The guy is actually attending his own funeral dressed as his widow, even though if he had a wife she would probably be there herself and if he didn’t have a wife it would’ve have aroused suspicion that “she” was there in the first place BUT WHO THE HELL CARES! There’s a great fight between the two of them, and then Bond escapes on a sweet jet-pack that he uses exactly once. It’s a hell of an opening, and even though it’s disconnected from everything else in the film, it’s honestly one of the best moments.

You wanna know what the actual best moment is? Watch this shit right here. Hooooly shit. Who knew that the roughest sex that James Bond would have in a movie would be with a table? This scene had my dad and I laughing our asses off. How anyone thought that this scene was anything other than literally the dumbest thing of all time is beyond me, but God bless whoever is responsible for this making it into the movie.

Uh....yes, please.

Claudine Auger as Bond girl Domino is mesmerizing. She’s not a good actress or anything, but she is astoundingly beautiful, and I learned after watching the film that she is a fan favorite. Yowza, I can see why! I was entranced by her presence in every scene she was in. Bond and Domino shag several times throughout Thunderball, as is customary, but if Connery didn’t get some of that in real life back then, I feel sorry for him. He, of course, uses his "charms" to get a few side girls in this movie, too. The best of this occurs when he threatens to get a woman fired from her job if she doesn’t sleep with him. Awe, so sweet! Blackmailing like a true gentlemen.

While I did appreciate much of the action, Thunderball seems to have some kind of weird underwater and shark fetish. Bond ain't afraid of no sharks! In fact, he usually likes it when they use a little teeth. There are a LOT of scenes in water, though. Sometimes it’s scuba-diving and riding the backs of giant sea turtles, others it's stealthing through the villain's private shark collection, and many times it's just murdering fools, but it becomes just plain obnoxious well before the end. I'd be surprised if less than a third of the film took place in or underwater. This most notably comes to a head in the climactic underwater battle between a bunch of evil henchmen and CIA that Felix Leiter brings in. This battle goes on for what seems like an eternity and a half. I truly think its lasts a good 10 minutes or so. There’s no accompanying music in this version, just bubbly noises and a bad stabbing sound effect every time someone gets shot with a harpoon gun (which happens several dozen times). There are some really sweet kills in this scene, but like, Jesus, dude. It could’ve been cut in half and then maybe it would’ve felt right. It’s ambitious, to be sure, but to the cost of dragging down the end of the movie considerably. I also feel like it was this scene, or maybe the whole movie even, that inspired the underwater mission with harpoon guns in No One Lives Forever.

Pre-fight massages. What are best friends for?

I guess I don’t have much more to say on Thunderball. As of writing this, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve watched it, and I’m having trouble remembering a lot of it. Much of what else I do remember isn’t worth more than a few chuckles. I don't recall anything about the main villain other than he had an eye patch. I did like the Blofled roundtable scene that basically served as many of the major gags in the Austin Powers films. There is also an excessive use of sped-up editing to make action scenes move faster, which never doesn’t look hysterically terrible. I’d honestly have to say that it’s an overall forgettable Bond film that has a few major highlights. At the same time, I did have a lot of fun watching it, so I can’t NOT recommend it, but it doesn’t quite reach the heights of its predecessors. Connery still brings it and makes even the more bland moments fun. He one-hands a harpoon gun and nails a guy to a tree, then follows it up with a one-liner that's cornier than my shit after eating a Sante Fe burrito: "I think he got the point". I can't NOT love this dude. I'm gonna miss him when I get done with his films.

And at the behest of @bisonhero

Title sequence assessment: The Tom Jones song “Thunderball” is actually really great. Definitely has a distinctive Bond-like quality to it. Jones’ classical crooning is absolutely perfect for this piece. The sequence itself is female silhouettes dancing around the screen, this time underwater. At one part, it is heavily insinuated that a harpoon gun shoots one of the women right in her vagina. Very subtle stuff, as always. The title sequence makes me feel like I'm floating on a raft made of large marshmallows off the coast of Honduras while the disembodied voice of an inebriated Gary Busey reads me Witcher 3 patch notes. Overall, great opening to an otherwise okay movie.

Coming soon: The several reasons why I adored You Only Live Twice. Thanks for reading!