Never Say Never Again (1983) is often the forgotten stepchild of the Bond franchise, but it has so much swagger. Released the same year as Octopussy , it won the "Battle of the Bonds" at the box office and proved that audiences still wanted Connery.

Bond faces off against the eccentric Maximilian Largo and the deadly assassin Fatima Blush. Distinguishing Features

The official Eon Productions made Thunderball in 1965 with Connery. But the settlement stipulated that McClory could remake the film after a certain number of years. In 1975, McClory announced plans for a new Bond film, leading to a decade of litigation. By 1982, with Eon’s Octopussy already in production, McClory partnered with Warner Bros. and producer Jack Schwartzman to launch Never Say Never Again directly against the official Bond series.

Highlights include: ⚔️ The brutal fight with Pat Roach. 🎮 The video game scene that predicted esports dominance. 🧘‍♂️ Bond actually getting injured and having to heal.

Connery’s Bond in Never Say Never Again is a revelation. He is not the cocksure, invincible Viking of Goldfinger or the smug caricature he became in Diamonds Are Forever . This Bond is weathered, tired, and visibly out of shape. The film opens not with a stunt sequence, but with Bond at a health clinic in Shrublands, sweating on a treadmill, taking questionable vitamin injections, and failing a psychological evaluation. M, played with magnificent irritation by Edward Fox, tells him bluntly: “You’re a relic of the Cold War, 007. Your methods are obsolete.”