Never Say Never Watch Never Say Never Again Again

Big Gay Longcat and Expensive Luxury Cat review James Bond: Never Say Never Again

1983 was a good year for fans of Bond, James Bond. Not only was that the year that Octopussy came out, there was also a second Bond film released, starring Sean Connery again.

Its title supposedly refers to Connery saying "never again" when he was asked if he wanted to come back and be James Bond, although the addition of the "never say" suggests that it may actually have been based on what his agent said when telling Connery how much they were going to pay him.

It starts with the theme song and titles, which already seems strange because by now we cats are all well used to there being a pre-titles sequence in Bond films - this is the first one without such a sequence since Dr. No. But when the theme song continues over some scenes of Bond on a mission, it becomes clearer - this film is combining the usual pre-titles bit with the titles, perhaps to save time so we can get to the main plot sooner. That's a clever idea.

Don't get used to us saying that about this film though, mew.

Bond has some fights with a bunch of mannys, and then he rescues a scantily clad lady, but then she stabs him. It cuts to M (Edward "the Jackal" Fox, who has recently done a very good job of infiltrating British Intelligence) watching Bond's fight on video. It turns out that this was a training exercise (in which case Bond and the manny we saw him garrote were really getting into their parts) and Bond is not actually ded. M says Bond got killed twice when on the training course, while Bond argues he only got killed once - this may or may not be a deliberate reference to You Only Live Twice, we can't be sure. Then Bond gets sent to a health clinic to get the main plot started, just like in Thunderball.

To save time repeating the phrase 'just like in Thunderball' over and over, it is worth pointing out at this stage that the reason this film has so many bits that closely resemble bits from Thunderball is that that was the only James Bond story the makers had the rights to, so they had no choice but to copy Thunderball. Expensive Luxury Cat gave Thunderball a rating of Expensive and Luxury, so let's see if this film can do any better.

I think as well as having the rights to remake bits from Thunderball, they must also have had the rights to remake scenes from the BBC TV sitcom Porridge, because there's a bit at the health clinic when a nurse asks Bond to "fill this beaker" for a urine sample and Bond replies

"From here?"

There is then a shot of the nurse looking embarrassed at the corny material.

It cuts to the baddys. SECTRE Number 12 arrives at a secret underground lair and we see...

SECTRE Number One! He is being given pets by his latest Blofeld, this time played by Max von "Ming the Merciless" Sydow (no doubt Number One had to replace the last one after Bond dropped him down a big chimney). The SECTRE mannys tell each other some exposition, which we already know because we have seen Thunderball before. A rare case of the audience knowing the exposition before the characters do.

At the health clinic, Bond spots Number 12 beating up a manny. This manny is Jack Petachi, played by Gavan O'Herlihy, best known to us cats for playing Captain Leroy in Sharpe's Eagle. Bond clearly knows he's onto something - perhaps he has also seen Thunderball before?

Number 12 recognises Bond and sends a manny to kill him while he is exercising. They have a big fight which is mostly played for lols, such as when mannys appear to be cheering on the baddy but they are actually just watching TV. This is otherwise quite a traditional Bond-vs-a-big-manny fight, although this being post-Moonraker it is obviously not as good as any fight involving Jaws. It does go on for a while, though, and they do properly wreck the place before Bond eventually defeats the baddy by throwing Chekhov's his urine sample in the baddy's face, lol.

Jack does his bit in helping the baddys to steal two nuclear missiles, then Number 12 kills him by making his car crash using a snake. She then rescues the snake and blows up the car to make sure. 

The nuclear missiles look a lot more high-tech in the 1980s than in the '60s - in fact they look a lot like the big missile from Superman 3, which was made in the same year and (by a curious coincidence) also had Gavan O'Herlihy in it. They fly straight to the baddys but instead of blowing them up they just land in the water where the baddys can get to them.

Number One sends his ransom demand to NATO Headquarters, where the British are in charge for some reason. Blofeld does the talking, but as the camera is on Number One the entire time, it is clear who is really in charge. The Foreign Secretary (who, despite what his title implies, is British) orders M to put "the double-ohs" on the case.

There are some scenes with "Max" Largo and Domino, both of whom have one name the same as in Thunderball and one name different. There is quite a good moment where we see that undeneath their laughing and friendliness Domino is really Largo's prisoner, but it is not exactly played with any subtlety.

Bond meets with Algernon, who is this film's equivalent of Q. He is played by Alec McCowen, who would later get promoted to being Mr. Palfrey of Westminster. Algernon complains about the CIA being better funded than British Intelligence and having "28 flavours of ice cream in the restaurant", which is a very '80s joke. He gives Bond a watch with a laser in it, which is one of the more archetypal Bond gadgets. He says

"Good to see you, Mr Bond. Things have been awfully dull round here. Bureaucrats running the whole place. Everything done by the book. Can't make a decision unless the computer gives you the go ahead. Now you're on this, I hope we're going to have some gratuitous sex and violence."

To which Bond replies

"I certainly hope sho too."

This film has already been high on the komedy even by the standards of the Roger Moore era Bond films, but it cranks it up another notch when...

Rowan Atkinson appears. He is playing Bond's Bahamas contact, Nigel Small-Fawcett. I don't think that's a joke name, or if it is one then it obviously doesn't W-word in British English. And this film is not particularly given towards subtlety - even Largo's ship, called the Disco Volante in Thunderball, has been translated to the Flying Saucer for this version.

Number 12 water-skis into Bond and pretends not to know him, although we viewers all saw her recognise him earlier on, just before she set the big manny on Bond. She gives her name as Fatima Blush, which also doesn't sound like a joke name. Given how full of little jokes and komedy moments this film is, it seems curious that they drew the line when naming the characters - and they clearly weren't limited to only using names from Thunderball either. Bond and Blush go onto Blush's boat where they get up to some naughtiness, in what is possibly the most risqué love scene in a Bond film until Die Another Day.

They go scuba diving together, for the first of some extremely slow underwater scenes. I suppose since they were copying so much of Thunderball, they couldn't really avoid copying at least some of that, mew. Blush sends a remote control shark to chase Bond. I'm sure one of the sharks gets smaller when it is played by a glove puppet (did Alec Guinness still need the money after Star Wars?) for some shots.

Blush tries to blow Bond up in his hotel room, but he is busy getting up to naughtiness with a woman in her room at the same time and so the bomb blows up the wrong room. There is some neat misdirection where the camera cutting is intended to convince us that the bomb is in the same room as Bond, before the explosion shows it is not - simple but effective.

The scene changes to the south of France, where Bond meets Felix Leiter as well as his French contact Nicole. They spy on the Flying Saucer and see Domino, realising that she is Jack Petachi's sister. Bond poses as a masseur (well, he is in France) in order to get close to Domino and have a good old perv over her, naughty Bond! She tells him that Largo is "giving a charity ball tonight at the casino for children." I know it was the 1980s but, even so, a casino for children seems a bit much.

Bond goes to the casino where he discovers it has two parts - one a high class casino like he visits in what seems like most of his films (certainly he did in Thunderball), the other an arcade full of video games. Well, it was 1983... so it must have seemed cutting-edge, even futuristic, to have such a place.

Largo confronts Bond and they show off in front of Domino. Largo challenges Bond to play a video game with him - but one made of SFX rather than an actual early-80s video game. This is probably for the best, since the effects for this bit have dated less badly than the 8-bit games of the period, though this is never going to achieve the iconic status of a proper casino showdown between Bond and the baddy over Baccarat - or, for that matter, the Backgammon scene from Octopussy that same year.

The game is played for money to the winner and electric shocks to the loser. Largo has the advantage at first because he has played the game before, while Bond is more used to Jet Set Willy.

Bond loses all the games except for the last one, and Largo gets to utter the classic baddy line

"It seems I underestimated you, Mr Bond."

Bond dances with Domino and tells her that her brother is ded in an attempt to get her to turn against Largo - well, it W-worded for him last time.

When Bond returns to where he is staying he calls out "Nicole?" but there is no answering call of "Papa?" because Nicole has gone

Bond chases Blush in her car using a motorbike. Some henchmannys in cars join in the chase but Bond uses some gadgets in the motorbike to make them crash. Blush knocks Bond off his bike and captures him.

Before she kills Bond, she wants him to write her a note saying that "the greatest rapture in my life was afforded me in a boat in Nassau by Fatima Blush, signed James Bond 007." Bond writes with his gadget pen, and uses it to blow up Blush.

Bond teams up with Felix to explore the Flaying Saucer. Bond finds his way on board and gets captured in a moment that is so contrived it is as though the writers just couldn't be bothered writing a scene that moved the plot from Bond killing Blush to getting captured, so just had him turn up and get captured.

Largo treats Bond as his guest and lets him roam about the ship, so he certainly knows how to act the part of a baddy. Bond asks Domino about the "Tearsh of Allah" which is very convenient because she is the only person apart from Largo who knows about it, and she shows Bond the necklace that Largo gave her earlier on. This contrivance can't even be blamed on Bond having seen Thunderball because this bit isn't from that.

Bond kiffs Domino knowing that Largo is spying on them. Largo goes mental with an axe while Bond uses this distraction to send a message to M saying that the Flying Saucer is headed for North Africa. There's another missed opportunity for a lol here when M takes Bond's warning seriously and doesn't question why Bond is messaging him about UFOs. Or perhaps after the scene ended M was straight on to Ed Straker at SHADO?

Largo leaves Bond and Domino imprisoned, but Bond escapes with the help of his laser watch. He rescues Domino and they escape on a horse, leading to another chase scene when henchmannys pursue them on their own horseys.

This all builds up to a completely absurd bit where Bond rides the horse off the top of the castle to plunge into the water below, in what is possibly the most ludicrous use of CSO in a Bond film until Die Another Day.

Bond and Domino travel on Felix's submarine to the next part of the plot. Bond thinks that the Tears of Allah necklace must be relevant due to the Law of Conservation of Narrative Detail, and he deduces that it is really a map showing where Largo has hidden the nuclear missile. Oh, and there's only one missing nuclear missile now, because the other one got recovered off-screen, mew.

Bond and Felix use some experimental, top secret jetpacks to secretly land near Largo's base while causing as much noise and drawing as much attention to themselves as possible. To be fair, this scene is both better than the equivalent use of the jetpack in Thunderball and considerably less ludicrous than the horse scene from earlier. Mind you, almost anything would be. There's still no actual need for it, since it is followed by some tedious underwater scenes as Bond and Felix follow Largo and his henchmannys to their base.

There is a brief cutaway to Number One and his SECTRE mannys celebrating their upcoming victory, perhaps to make up for the dullness of the underwater scenes.

Number One is even prematurely drinking a toast to their success. Or maybe he was just thirsty?

Bond and Felix start a gunfight that takes care of most of the henchmannys, but Largo gets away with the missile.

Bond has a slow-motion underwater fight with Largo, and then while Bond tries to stop the missile from being launched, Domino turns up and shoots Largo. I think she had to do that only because she does it in Thunderball, since she was otherwise nowhere near this scene until the very last moment. This is a very poor climax to the film, and a rubbish ending for this version of Largo.

It cuts to Domino and Bond relaxing. They hear a manny approaching them and sinister music plays, so Bond throws him into the pool. Then it turns out it was only Nigel Small-Fawcett. Well what does he expect if he's going to have sinister music playing whenever he sneaks up on somebody? He pleads for Bond to come back because 

"M says that without you in the service, he fears for the security of the civilised world."

Is a resigned Bond really that much of a security risk? If only there was somewhere that they could put their former agents...

Bond says

"Never again."

To which Domino replies

"Never?"

It's not quite a title drop to end the film on, but it is not exactly subtle, especially as the theme song starts to play as soon as she says it, which includes the title as lyrics. But then, 'not exactly subtle' has been this film's entire modus operandi.

Bond breaks the fourth wall when he winks at the camera as the final shot.

Expensive Luxury Cat's rating: Expensive but not Luxury

But who will turn doggys into cats on Halloween now?

RIP Tim Curry

The Serpent Queen, season two (2024)

This second (and final) season of the historical drama about Catherine de' Medici is, remarkably, far less historically accurate than the first season, and yet manages to be even better than it.

The writers have clearly decided to put story well ahead of any attempt at faithfulness to the actual historical events that are supposedly depicted, and you'd probably get a more accurate depiction of France in 1572 by watching the Doctor Who story The Massacre, despite the presence of a time travelling alien in that.

Or at least you could if that wasn't one of the missing 1960s stories, mew.

The season begins with a time skip of 10 years since the end of the first season. This helps to cover the replacement of a couple of key actors, although Alexandre Willaume, who they got to play Montmorency in this season, is about as different from season one's Barry Atsma as Brian Croucher was from Stephen Greif, so fair to say it wasn't entirely successful.

We are also introduced to a bunch of new characters - mostly Catherine's five surviving children, who are now young adults. There is also Minnie "Day Today" Driver as the English queen Elizabeth I, ahistorically visiting France to stir up trouble among the Valois court. The entirety of the English nobility is represented by one character, Lord Throckmorton (Alex Price), a heavily fictionalised version of either Cecil or Walsingham, or possibly an amalgamation of the two. Elizabeth, presenting as a superficial and 'ditzy' character but in reality at least as shrewd and manipulative as Catherine herself, is one of few characters we ever see get the better of Catherine without Catherine getting her own back later. Queen Elizabeth is one of the main antagonists through the middle of the season, to the point where she and Catherine have a 'we're not so different, you and I' scene.

The main antagonist throughout the season is Edith, a Protestant preacher who becomes the focal point of the Protestant opposition to the Catholic rulers of France. Even the Protestant nobles from the House of Bourbon become subordinate to her, as her faking of miracles secures her meteoric rise to power. Edith appears to be a wholly fictional creation of the series in order to give the Hugenots a figurehead and the series a 'villain.' Incidentally, the word 'Hugenot' is never used at any time during the series, it seemingly preferring to keep things simple by sticking to using the 'Catholic' and 'Protestant' labels.

Another secondary Protestant antagonist is Antoine's wife Jeanne, the Queen of Navarre, who is perhaps required to give the Bourbons an edge since the brothers we met in season one, Antoine and Louis, are mostly comic relief characters - and, to be fair, both Nicholas Burns and Danny Kirrane are very good at the comedy moments, this season playing to their strengths even more than the first did.

What makes this season particularly brilliant is the same kind of plot structure that is found in The Godfather - things look increasingly bleak for our protagonists and it appears their enemies have won, but then the tables are turned at the last moment (or in the last episode) with a carefully prepared strike or series of strikes when the enemy's guard is down.

Despite Catherine being very much an anti-hero, the series does a great job in making Edith and Jeanne even more despicable, so that their eventual comeuppances are suitably satisfying. Given that she was a real person, Jeanne's death is not historically accurate - but it is based on the way she was depicted as dying in Alexandre Dumas's La Reine Margot.

Something that had no right to succeed but somehow did was the way the unreliable narration was continued from the first season. In season one, everything bar the frame story was an in-character narration by Catherine (or sometimes by Mary or Rahima) to one of the other characters in the frame story, and so when Catherine sometimes seemed to address the viewers directly, we understood this was her speaking to Rahima. In this season, there is no frame story, yet Catherine continues to address the audience from time to time in order to explain her inner thoughts or motivations.

Who then is she really talking to?

It can only be that she really is breaking the fourth wall this time, and telling her story to us. Somehow it feels right, and it helps us to accept the deviations from history as all being part of the increasingly unreliable narration of Catherine as she attempts to justify her part in this bloody period of history.

The final episode depicts (although it does not name it as such) the massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve and, like earlier depictions of Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth I in the series, portrays it in a very different way from how we are used to seeing it. This is it seen from the perpetrators' point of view, and viewers are brought in and made complicit in the plotting and execution of the deaths of the Protestant leaders and their supporters, seen as necessary to prevent either a Protestant coup d'etat or a civil war in France. With Catherine as our narrator and point of view character, we see her justifying it to herself and to us.

It's a really good series, but the ending is superbe.

The Serpent Queen, season one (2022)

Made the same year as the Marie Antoinette TV series that I watched last year, this tells the story of a different Queen of France but in a quite similar style - it's another of those historical dramas that uses modern language (including copious swearing) and frequent graphic violence, sex scenes and nudity to keep a casual audience interested. The modern (21st century) incarnation of this sort of TV show can be traced to The Tudors, which began in 2007, but really this kind of tits-out edutainment goes back at least as far as I Claudius in the 1970s.

Speaking of Claudius, this is perhaps the closest that I have seen any 21st century series come to approximating the feel of that show, and this I put down to the choice of central character and the actress to play her - the titular Serpent Queen is Catherine de' Medici (Queen of France from 1547 to 1559, then Queen Mother of France until 1589), played by Samantha "Cracker" Morton. Don't get me wrong, Catherine is no Livia, because nobody is, and Morton isn't Siân Phillips neither, but that's an unfairly high bar to set anyone. Nevertheless, Catherine has that Liviaesque quality where she does terrible things to close members of her family, but we as viewers get to see why she acts the way she does, and can even sympathise with her up to a point.

Also like Claudius, the series - at least this first season, since I have not yet watched the second - uses the conceit of a central narrator telling their story in flashback, so the idea of the unreliable narrator telling a biased version of events from their point of view is baked into the show from the start. This also includes moments where the flashback-version of the narrator's character will turn to the camera, House of Cards-style, and address the audience directly.

Where this varies from the usual form of this trope is that the narrator changes to a second and then third character - in the first six (of eight) episodes, Catherine tells her life story to her new maid Rahima, then in episode seven Rahima hears events told from the point of view of Catherine's recently widowed daughter-in-law Mary, the Queen of Scotland. In the final episode the flashbacks catch up with the 'present' of the story as Rahima joins the dots and tells Catherine what must have happened for events to have gone from A to B. This is Rahima attempting to demonstrate her intelligence to impress Catherine, so it represents one of the best examples I have seen of exposition where one character tells another something they already know, really in order to inform the viewer at home.

Mary Queen of Scots is an interesting historical figure to feature so heavily in this show - she is essentially the main antagonist for the last two episodes - because this gives us a period of her life that is rarely depicted. Most dramas I know of about her - even most documentaries - concentrate on her later life, either after her return to Scotland or even after her flight to and captivity in England. Here Mary's religious fanaticism is foregrounded, and her intolerance for the large population of Protestants in France threatens the stability that Catherine seeks to maintain, and pushes the country to the brink of civil war.

This is a series in which each episode improves on the one before. The first three tell the story of Catherine's arranged marriage to a son of the French King, and the well-worn tale of her precarious political situation until she can give her husband a son and heir. Anyone who has seen a drama about Henry VIII of England has seen this story told multiple times - even if they have only watched one version. For me the main attraction of these episodes was spotting the guest actors, most notably Charles "Golden Child" Dance as Catherine's uncle Pope Clement VII, and Colm "Chief O'Brien" Meaney is Catherine's father-in-law King Francis I.

With a plot so keenly concerned about whether the main character conceives a child or not, it is unsurprising that there is rather a lot of sex in these early episodes. I think the first gratuitous sex scene appears six minutes into the first episode. But the sex is not portrayed as glamorous  - The Tudors this is not - and only titillating to those with very specialised interests, which I do not intend to detail here. The violence we see is also, in my opinion, unnecessarily graphic (and might have been more effectively conveyed if it had been more subtly hinted at instead of shown), including an execution by four horses.

Episode three ends with Catherine pregnant and her husband now the heir to the French throne (after the death of his older brother), after which there is a time-skip that ages up the main characters (so that from episode four onwards Morton plays both 'present-day' Catherine and flashback Catherine) and allows the introduction of some new ones. Notable guest actors for the second half of the season include Rupert Everett as the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and Nicholas "Nathan Barley" Burns as Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre and high up in the line of succession for the French throne as well. A significant plot point is how Antoine and his Bourbon family are biscuits Protestants, bringing them into conflict with the staunch Catholic de Guise family, of which Queen Mary is one.

The middle of the series sees Catherine's husband Henry become King Henry II, after which it mainly concerns Catherine's rivalry with her husband's mistress Diane de Poitiers. Henry values Catherine for her intellect and political skills, but Diane is the one he likes to sleep with. Catherine does not mind that so much after a while (she still has ten children with Henry), it is Diane's dabbling in politics, siding with the de Guises for her own gain, that she dislikes. This plotline is only resolved when Henry dies near the start of part seven, after which Catherine finally has the power to banish Diane from court and end her influence. But with Catherine's son Francis now king, she immediately acquires a new adversary in the form of Francis's wife Mary.

I expect I will soon watch the second season of this, which promises to be different from the first season in that it will need to have a different setup - we have already seen Catherine's backstory, so I can't see it repeating the flashback style of the first season, and Catherine is now established as Queen Mother and Regent (season one ends with her second son Charles as king, but he is only ten years old), so she has already proved herself as the political mastermind who can get to the top of the tree, and therefore I rather expect the next season to be about her attempts at staying there.

Oh, and is that snakes-and-chessboard title sequence a deliberate homage to the start of Blackadder II?