Thunderball

The first word that comes to mind when thinking of Sean Connery’s fourth outing as James Bond is “tedious”. The second word is “frantic”. That’s a really odd combination, but Thunderball manages to pull it off. This is what I would call the first outright failure of the Bond films.

It’s also the first that’s explicitly built around a gimmick. That gimmick is, of course, its underwater action scenes. Looking up the posters of the film for this post, I was struck at how even those blared on...