The fourth James Bond adventure shows signs of cracking as 007 becomes gadget-crazy. The film opens with a bang at 007’s funeral and ends the pre-credit sequence with Bond exiting on a jetpack (a real device, not a prop) is impressive and some fun is had at the health farm sequence, but it all quickly goes down faster than a Thai hooker at a bachelor party. Two nuclear warheads are hijacked by SPECTRE to blackmail the world, and it's Bond's mission to foil the plot. Unidentifiable frogmen and one tedious under water shot after another brings the film to screeching halt. The film’s bad guy is helped none by Emil Largo, played with zero charisma by Adolfo Celi, lacking the most rudimentary of menace and twisted charm. Voiced by another actor, he's instantly forgettable, his henchwoman, Fiona Volpe dies in a classic way however. A clever enough story, but it’s the underwater sequences that bring the film to a snail’s pace making it the only Bond film that excites and bores me at the same time. A budget bigger than the three previous Bonds combined, is all for nothing.
Producer Kevin McClory, who initiated a lawsuit after the film's release, became a thorn in EON's side as he claimed "Blofeld" and other parts of the Bond universe as his. He later won his judgement but unfortunately his gift to the world was the pseudo-remake, but even more dreadful, 1983's "Never Say Never Again." John Barry’s score and Tom Jones title tune are as good as they are campy. This was Director Terence Young's last go around. Nevertheless, the film was an enourmous hit; with inflation adjusted it made the equivilent of over $400 hundred million- the top earning Bond until “Moonraker” and one of the highest grossing films of the decade.