YMMV / Never Say Never Again

• Angst? What Angst?: Domino gets over her private shock and humiliation at having been felt up by Bond in the guise of a masseuse rather quickly. With a smile.
• Billing Displacement: Max von Sydow is billed third, despite only appearing in a handful of scenes. He's billed ahead of Barbara Carrera and Kim Basinger, despite both having much more screen time. It's possible the billing was decided before Von Sydow's role was edited to nothing.
• Complete Monster:
  • Ernst Stavro Blofeld, ruler of Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion (SPECTRE), commits the organization to murder, terrorism, and more with a mass body count from all the criminal activity. Regularly murdering his own minions, Blofeld is the mastermind of numerous murders to allow Maximilian Largo, his right-hand man in SPECTRE, to obtain nuclear bombs. Blofeld then blackmails the world with the promise that he will wipe entire cities off the map if his ransom isn't met, with full intent to carry out the threat.
  • Maximilian Largo is the bombastic millionaire responsible for carrying out Blofeld's global extortion scheme. To acquire the missiles, Largo has his mistress Domino's brother hooked onto heroin to make him subservient and has him launch the missiles, later having him killed for serving his purpose. Largo would also have an ally of Bond drowned and her corpse left for Bond to discover. Witnessing Bond kiss Domino, Largo retaliates by trying to have her auctioned to some lecherous Arabs. During the film's climax, Largo escapes with the last nuke, leaving his men behind to deal with Bond's allies.
• Director Displacement: Though this is often cited as a Kevin McClory film, the actual producer was Jack Schwartzman with McClory receiving an honorary Executive Producer credit, while Irvin Kershner was the director.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Despite the film's overall quality being hotly contested, many people will readily agree that Max von Sydow made for a fantastic Blofeld, and wish that he had been able to reprise the role in an official film — which sadly was rendered impossible not only by legal issues, but by the fact that Blofeld (or rather, a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo of him) had been Killed Off for Real two years earlier in For Your Eyes Only.
  • Alec McCowen's Q, despite only having a single scene, gets a lot of love for being an entertaining subversion of Desmond Llewelyn's iconic portrayal, being much more of a Knight in Sour Armor that outright celebrates Bond's willingness to misuse his gadgets. A common criticism of the film is that it skims too close to the tropes of the EON series, so this film's version of Q is held up as a good example of how to put a spin on a familiar element.
• Fetish Retardant: While "fetish" might not be the exact term, the scene where Bond poses as Domino's masseur to feel her up is played in a playful tone typical of Bond films, but her reaction to finding out he was a fake — tearful and looking as though she feels very violated — makes the scene a lot more uncomfortable. It gives her quick forgiveness of him later all the more Mood Whiplash.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Felix Leiter here is played by a Black actor, Bernie Casey. The Eon film series would later also have Leiter portrayed by a Black actor, Jeffrey Wright, during the Daniel Craig era.
  • Rowan Atkinson appears as a bumbling MI6 operative. He would go on to parody James Bond with Johnny English.
  • Q offers Bond a pen that shoots miniature missiles. He would eventually update this to a pen grenade in GoldenEye.
  • Bond offers a woman foie gras. A different incarnation of Bond would not approve.
  • Patricia Fearing, the therapist at Shrublands Clinic, is played by Prunella Gee. After retiring from acting in 2004, Gee has worked as a therapist in real life since 2006.
  • One would seem to think that Fatima Blush is a prototype for Xenia Onatopp from GoldenEye as an Ax-Crazy Femme Fatale who's obsessed with having her way with Bond, despite being an Expy of Fiona Volpe from Thunderball.
  • This would not be the last time Klaus Maria Brandauer (Largo) would romance a Bond Girl; he would later play Otto Preminger in the Made-for-TV Movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, in which his character has an affair with the title character, played by Halle Berry, who would later go on to play Jinx in Die Another Day.
  • This film was intended to have a follow-up called S.P.E.C.T.R.E., which never came to pass. Many years later, however, we would get a Bond film titled Spectre after all.
  • For the Italian audience: Largo's voice actor will voice Felix Leiter in Licence to Kill while Blofeld's will voice Sean Connery in The Rock.
• Just Here for Godzilla: One of the film's draws is certainly the return of Sean Connery. Another one is to see the performance of Barbara Carrera, who is clearly having an absolute ball playing Fatima Blush, and it shows.
• Love to Hate: Klaus Maria Brandauer's performance as Largo was well-received, with Roger Ebert saying that he brought "poignancy and charm" to the character, and Gene Siskel praising him as a more human character than most Bond villains of the era.
• Narm Charm: Bond blowing up Fatima Blush with the miniature pen missile is ridiculous, and she even has time to see it sparking in her gut; however, literally being blown up in a fireball is still a horrible way to die.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Never Say Never Again is probably best described as a decades-long legal mess full of personal drama and development troubles, one that eventually managed to produce a viewable film at the end of it.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Bernie Casey, former NFL Pro Bowl player, would later be known for appearing in the Revenge of the Nerds movies.
  • Nigel Small-Fawcett is played by Rowan Atkinson, a few months after Blackadder debuted and years before Mr. Bean made him a household name.
  • An Uncredited Air Force Officer is played by Christopher Malcolm, who would later be best known for playing Justin in Absolutely Fabulous.
  • General Miller is played by Manning Redwood, who would later be best known for playing Bob Conley in A View to a Kill.
• Squick: Largo forcing a kiss on Domino. Why, oh why, did they have to use a take where you can see a string of drool stretched between their lips as he pulls away?
• Strawman Has a Point: The audience is supposed to view the new M as an Obstructive Bureaucrat after he chews out Bond for failing a training exercise and orders him to a health clinic. But consider the following: M is dealing with an ageing senior field agent who's gotten careless in his training, who drinks and smokes excessively, gambles frequently, is open to all sorts of STDs from all his womanizing, and has a diet of "Too much red meat and white bread, and too many dry martinis". No Reasonable Authority Figure would allow their field agents to carry on like this, even for James Bond.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: The most common complaint about the film is that it's a retread of Thunderball made by a different studio, thus lacking many of the film series' trademarks.
  Mr. Mendo: If this looks like a ripoff of a better Bond film... it's because it is!
• Unintentional Period Piece: The prominence of Atari consoles (Yes, really...) in Largo's casino does its share in firmly cementing this as a film of the early Eighties when Atari reached the peak of its popularity. The film came out in 1983, the year of the infamous Video Game Crash of 1983 that nearly sank the entire industry; Atari was the leading developer of that market before the crash and would never regain its former dominance afterward.

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