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Never Say Never Again is better than some of the Eon productions. A View to a Kill certainly comes to mind.
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Lorenzo Semple wrote the screenplay. He also wrote the awful 1976 King Kong, so I went to see it with mixed expectations: excited about Connery but not about Semple. The film has its charms: the opening would have been one of the best pre-titles Bond sequences except that it played with the song over it instead of an appropriate score; Connery was good, much better than DAF; the premise of an aging Bond was fresh but quickly dispatched. Like the Moore films it was too jokey and the characters paled in contrast to their Thunderball counterparts: the villainess was too over-the-top, as was M, Algernon, and so on. Rowan Atkinson was out of place. And the updating actually dated the film: the video game sequence. I really like Legrand, in general, but not here.
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From my Rejected Film Scores website: http://rejectedfilmscores.125mb.com/supposedly.html NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN -- ?????. In the book The Complete James Bond Movie Encyclopedia, which I do not have and am only using an excerpt from, the producer (Jack Schwartzman) was not happy with Legrand's score, and brought in another composer. The excerpt does not name who, but says he had wanted James Horner, but Sean Connery vetoed that idea (coincidently just two years later Horner scored a film Connery starred in). [Michel Legrand.]
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To me the film just does not play like a real Bond film. It lacks the travelogue sweep, the plot is muddled and in the end I felt it came off more like something in the vein of "Our Man Flint" than 007. There's no real reason for this movie to exist as nothing else than Connery and McClory giving Cubby the middle finger
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I disagree: giving Cubby the middle finger would have been a bonus. The Bond franchise started wobbling with Diamonds Are Forever and appeared to have no clue how to right itself--seriously flirting with legit spycraft in one film, flapping about in outer space in the next. If another party could come along and do it right--so much the better. Unfortunately, NSNA was too flawed, though it is a much better film than Octopussy.
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My personal feeling is that NSNA is one of those remakes that's better than the original. I don't know how many times I've watched Thunderball, but it always falls flat for me, even when I finally saw it theatrically a couple of years ago. NSNA has a lot wrong with it (Connery is far too old and looks it, Nigel Small-Fawcett is an unwise attempt at comedy relief, and these incarnations of M and Q just don't work), and Legrand's score is a major minus, but I do like the song, Barbara Carrera livens things up enormously, and the bike/car chase is decent. Some years ago, someone was selling DVDs they'd made of NSNA that had a more traditional music score. Somehow they'd got hold of a copy of the film without Legrand's music (except for the tango) and had tracked it with cues from all the Eon scores (eg Gumbold's Safe from OHMSS over the switching-the-bombs sequence), including a modified Thunderball title sequence with History Repeating as the theme song. It did make the film feel a bit more like a "proper" Bond film to some extent, but the trouble is those cues are so familiar that some of them are distracting.
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Also: it is common nonsense to say that an entertaining film is always worse than a dreary serious one. It all depends on how well it is made. And if both kinds are great (like „Condor“ and „Live and let die“, for example) one can enjoy both.
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It's presumptive to say that the 70s Moore films are entertaining just because they are light, or that "light" equals entertainment while darker spy films do not. What is entertaining is up to each of us, and none of us speak for all. Personally, I didn't find Moonraker or any of the Roger Moore films entertaining. And keep in mind--not just my opinion--that many of the best films of the 70s were darker and entertaining. Just a few off the top of my head: Godfather Godfather 2 McCabe and Mrs. Miller The Conversation The Exorcist Network One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Nashville Apocalypse Now Chinatown Taxi Driver A Clockwork Orange The Deer Hunter Barry Lyndon All the President's Men The Devils Night Moves The Friends of Eddie Coyle Badlands Cries and Whispers Carnal Knowledge The Parallax View The Conformist Cabaret
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