Rest easy, Thunderball.  Your title of “Worst Bond Film to This Point” has been taken from you by Diamonds Are Forever, and oh boy, is it ever richly deserved.

According to the making-of documentary on the DVD, following George Lazenby’s departure from the series and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’s relative lack of commercial success, the producers considered a move that would have surely killed the franchise outright: drafting an American to play Bond.  (Amazingly, they later would return to the idea multiple times, mercifully never following through.)  Though this was eventually given up and Sean Connery brought back at great expense, the producers still felt a need to Americanize Bond – and so they brought him to Las Vegas.  And it was terrible.

The film is in rough shape from the opening frames, a series of quick scenes of Bond beating information on Blofeld’s whereabouts out of various nameless henchmen.  Unlike in the last film, no real effort is made to hide the identity of our “new” Bond, with Connery striding out only about a minute in.  Immediately he looks too old for the part – Connery was 40 by this point and his hairpiece is only more obvious.  (Although Roger Moore is three years older than Connery and played the part as late as 14 years after this, so...)  At least when Moneypenny hits on him later she doesn’t look like a cougar anymore.

Old.  Real old.

Anyway, Bond tracks Blofeld to a lab where he seems to be producing doubles of himself, and kills him after a lame fight sequence.  Say, do you think the “lab where Blofeld is producing doubles of himself” might play a role in the plot somehow?  M hits us over the head with it when he very directly tells Bond that “Blofeld is dead!  Finished!”  Which, in case you’ve never seen a movie before, means that Blofeld is neither dead nor finished.  Incidentally, does it seem weird that there’s really no mention of why Bond is just so hot to kill Blofeld?  Given that they changed actors, even to an actor who was already known as Bond, you’d think the least they could do is have Bond say something like “That’s for Tracy” as Blofeld slides into the hot mud to his evident doom.  Presumably On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was not being retconned out, even if Bond had aged ten years.  (Out of grief, no doubt.)

Bond is brought in on a diamond smuggling case, and then we’re taken to a day-for-night desert and introduced to Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint, the two most annoying villains of the series so far.  What could possibly have been the idea here, other than sheer camp?  (It also reminds me of the Greg Giraldo joke about how long the odds must have been for Siegfried and Roy to get together – “Here you have a gay lion tamer who hooked up with another gay lion tamer!”  In this case, you have a gay assassin who managed to get together with another gay assassin.  Also, one of them is the worst actor in the history of anything.  When the making-of doc informed me that Putter Smith, who plays Mr. Kidd, was a jazz musician who had never acted before, let’s just say you couldn’t exactly have knocked me over with a feather.)

The whole sequence here – which presumably shows the diamonds going from the diamond fields all the way to Blofeld (spoiler!) – makes no sense and really dooms the film right from the start.  So we start with workers smuggling diamonds off the fields in their mouths.  This dentist then takes them under the pretense of oral surgery, paying the workers off for their efforts.  He then is expecting to meet someone else, but is instead met by Wint and Kidd, who take the diamonds and kill him.  They proceed to meet a man in a helicopter who was expecting the dentist and give him a bomb which destroys the copter as it flies away.  Then they take the diamonds to this old woman who runs some sort of religious school and tell her to take the diamonds to Amsterdam.  Later, in Amsterdam, we see that she’s dead, after dropping the diamonds with Tiffany Case.  She, in turn, is planning to give the diamonds to a smuggler named Peter Franks, whom Bond steps in to impersonate and who is supposed to get the diamonds to Las Vegas, where (eventually) they get to Blofeld.

Now all that makes sense enough, I suppose.  Except why are Wint and Kidd involved at all when they appear to be nothing more than Blofeld’s hitmen?  I guess the idea is that with these diamonds serving to complete Blofeld’s laser satellite, Wint and Kidd are killing everyone in the chain.  But the old woman says to Wint and Kidd, “How nice to see you again,” and asks, “Where to this time?” of the diamonds... which only makes sense if they’re usually part of the operation, not if they’re only here to terminate the members of the supply chain.  And if they’re always part of the chain, the dentist and helicopter pilot shouldn’t be so surprised to see them, right?  Also, who thought that one-liner-dropping gay assassins were a good idea?  Eesh.

Screw these guys.  They suck.

So Bond meets Tiffany Case, an extremely confident, assertive woman who will later become completely weak and stupid under Bond’s spell.  She informs him of the job, and checks his fingerprints, a test Bond passes thanks to some sort of artificial fingertip skin from Q.  The real Franks shows up and Bond fights him in an elevator (in a scene that the producers clearly thought would be more exciting than it is) and eventually kills him, then switches wallets with him.  When Tiffany checks for ID, she finds Bond’s Playboy club card and says, “My God!  You just killed James Bond!”  So... Bond is famous enough that even a smuggling intermediary in Holland has heard of him in spite of the fact that Bond himself notes earlier in the film that MI-6 would ordinarily never be called in on a smuggling case.  And we saw in You Only Live Twice that his picture was on like the front page of the newspaper when he supposedly died.  Yet Tiffany has no idea what Bond looks like even though she knows the name and at least enough about him to know that “you don’t kill James Bond and sit around waiting for the cops to arrive.”  Who are the people in these movies?

Bond meets up with Felix Leiter at US Customs, addressing him by his full name, because otherwise no one would have any idea who he was.  A group of goons connected to a mortuary are there to pick up the body, and it’s a good thing that Bond had a dead body to shove the diamonds into because otherwise this part of the chain would be completely useless.  I guess all diamonds are smuggled in corpses?  (If so, it defies Tiffany’s orders that Bond-as-Franks should think of an “original” way to move them.)  The body is cremated and the diamonds returned to Bond in an urn.  Bond deposits the urn in a door in the wall and then is knocked out by Wint and Kidd, who dump him in a different coffin and push him into the oven.  I actually found myself wondering how Bond would get out of this one until the fire is turned off and the pickup man – a nightclub comedian named Shady Tree – demands to know where the real diamonds are.  Bond, quick on his feet, notes that the money he was given was clearly fake, as they wouldn’t just burn up fifty thousand real dollars, and proposes a swap of the real diamonds for the real money.

Yes please.  It's just a shame that Tiffany Case is only really half a character; once she and James hook up, her assertiveness is almost entirely out the window and the few meaningful things she does are mostly stupid.

Bond heads for the casino.  Wint and Kidd, believing Tree’s end of the job is done, bump him off.  Bond conveniently wins fifty grand – the real money – and is also introduced to Plenty O’Toole, who surely must be the worst Bond girl of the series to this point.  Among Plenty’s crimes: (a) having a ridiculous name even by Bond standards; (b) being a gold-digging casino skank; (c) speaking the line, “You handle those cubes like a monkey handles coconuts”; (d) getting thrown out of a window such that she can’t even have sex with Bond.  It’s one thing to invent flimsy pretenses for Bond to nail random women – now you’re inventing flimsy pretenses for Bond not to nail random women?  Honestly, even Tilly Masterson was more of a character than this.

The gangsters from the funeral home interrupt Bond and Plenty, toss her out the window, and then suddenly leave.  Turns out Tiffany is waiting for Bond in the bedroom.  Why were the gangsters there with her?  And even so, why would they leave for no reason?  Were they just here to ruin Bond’s best chance yet at a three-way?  Not cool, guys.  Bond arranges to have Tiffany get the diamonds and skip town with her, although the actual plan involves Felix and the CIA picking her up.  Somehow she escapes them and blows Bond off as well, passing the diamonds along to her superiors as was originally supposed to have happened.  Bond tracks her to her house, where Plenty is drowned in the pool – Wint and Kidd have clearly come by intending to kill Tiffany, but mistook Plenty (who was there because...) for her.  In a deleted scene, Plenty returns to Bond’s room after being tossed out the window into a pool, finds him there with Tiffany, somehow gets Tiffany’s address (I guess she carries business cards reading “International Diamond Smuggler” around with her) and goes there looking for her for some reason.  I can see why this was cut – it doesn’t make a lick of sense – but why even leave in her death?  Whatever.  This movie sucks.

Bond and Tiffany decide to work together and track the diamonds to a lab in the desert, where a Dr. Metz is using them to put the finishing touches on the laser satellite.  (Well, we don’t know this yet, but that’s what it is.)  Bond is found out and chased onto a sound stage where men in space suits are apparently pretending to walk on the moon.  (Okay.)  Bond hops into the moon buggy and drives it into the desert.  Thus begins possibly the worst car chase in movie history, as Bond is pursued by several cars that can’t drive in sand, then three ATVs.  Meanwhile, there is first no music, and then some weird spacey music.  I guess you can’t really play the classic Bond theme while he’s driving around in some goofy-ass moon buggy.  Bond eventually gets away, but shortly thereafter is chased around the Strip by a number of police cars in a much better car chase that almost seems like an apology for the lameness of the previous one.

This is a still frame from a car chase.  No, it is.  Stop laughing.

Bond gets away and immediately goes to the Whyte House, the casino owned by Willard Whyte, who appears to be behind the whole operation.  Breaking into Whyte’s penthouse suite, Bond finds that Whyte isn’t even there – Blofeld has been using a voicebox to pose as the reclusive billionaire.  Since no one’s seen him in years anyway, who’d miss him?  Blofeld and his double chat Bond up for a while, and then Bond kills the double.  Blofeld lets Bond leave, but gasses him in the elevator.  Rather than just, you know, kill him, Wint and Kidd drive him out to a construction site in the desert so he can be buried alive.  Naturally, Bond is able to get out and head back to Vegas.

Get ready for another plot hole.  Bond gets a voice box from Q and calls Blofeld posing as Bert Saxby, former right-hand man of Whyte and now right-hand man of Blofeld (since Blofeld talks to him in his normal voice, presumably Bert was involved in kidnapping Whyte in the first place via a payoff from Blofeld).  Blofeld tells “Bert” that he should go kill Whyte.  Bond goes to Whyte’s house, where two women named Bambi and Thumper kick the crap out of him – until he suddenly gets them into the pool, where he is miraculously able to hold each of them underwater with one hand until they tell him where Whyte is.  As Bond and co. exit with Whyte in tow, the real Bert Saxby is there to shoot at Whyte.  Now... how did he know to do that?  Hey, movie, remember how Bond was impersonating Bert Saxby when Blofeld gave that order?  No?  It was like a minute ago.  Really?  You forgot?  Okay.  The CIA kills Saxby and all is well.

Tiffany talks to Q – somehow she knows who he is – then spots Blofeld slipping out of the casino in drag.  (Blofeld has billions of dollars and a secret underground tunnel, but this is his best idea.)  How does she recognize him?  From his cat.  How would she know this?  Clearly she wouldn’t.  The film has decided to flip into “what’s most narratively convenient” gear and it had to get Tiffany into Blofeld’s clutches somehow.  Meanwhile, Whyte is talking to various employees, none of whom had any idea they weren’t working for him, and finds out that the satellite is now in space.  Blofeld subsequently uses it to blow up nuclear missiles in the US, USSR and China.  Why?  According to Whyte, whoever pays Blofeld the most money can keep their nukes while he destroys the rest.  Metz, however, is a pacifist who wants to rid the world of nuclear weapons, so perhaps Blofeld will destroy them all anyway?  At least it’s not crop failure.

Tiffany, you confident female character, show us how you handle a gun!  Oh.  I forgot the word "female" was still in there.

Bond and co. track Blofeld to an oil rig off the coast of Mexico.  Blofeld brings Bond in and then helpfully explains the remainder of his scheme to anyone incapable of figuring it out: he’s controlling the satellite via a cassette tape.  (Of course he is.)  For some reason Blofeld lets Bond blunder around his control room, where Bond is able to switch the tape for a dummy.  Blofeld declares that Bond has “suddenly become tiresome.”  Really?  Only just now?  He’s been thwarting your plans for four movies and has already survived your assassins twice in this film alone!  Why don’t you just shoot him?

Bond slips the tape to Tiffany for some reason.  Thinking he hasn’t done it – and why shouldn’t she think that? – she changes the tapes, only to be informed by Bond a minute later that she replaced the real one.  Honestly, why did you give her the real one?  I can’t think of a single reason that makes sense other than to enable her to mess up.  Bond is dragged off to a room with an escape hatch in the floor, because Bond villains are idiots.  Tiffany goes back into the control room to try and switch the tape in full view of Blofeld, because sex with Bond has made her stupid.  The CIA choppers attack the rig and Blofeld tries to escape in some sort of submarine which his henchmen help him into – “You go on, Mr. Blofeld, we’ll just stay here and die, it’s cool” – but Bond seizes the controls and rams the ship into the control room, stopping the satellite and perhaps killing Blofeld.

But then perhaps not, because someone had to tell Messrs. Wint and Kidd to follow Bond and Tiffany onto their cruise ship, right?  They pose as waiters, but Bond recognizes Wint’s cheap cologne from when he was in the trunk of their car on the way to the construction site.  He sets Kidd on fire and then disposes of Wint with the bomb the two had brought.  The end.

Probably the most offensive scene in the movie.  We know all film that Wint and Kidd are gay, but the film never makes an issue of it, which would be to its credit if Wint's last scene didn't involve Bond yanking Wint's sport coat between his legs and Wint giving a bug-eyed smile to indicate that, as a GAY MAN, he enjoys having things shoved into that area.  Tee hee!

What a stinker.  Connery brings a little more verve back to the role, but he’s old and looks it in every scene – in later films, of course, this wasn’t as much of an issue, but when watching them in order like this it stands out.  The plot is awful – while the idea of posing as a reclusive billionaire is somewhat clever, the tedious diamond smuggling ordeal takes up far too much of the movie and Blofeld’s reappearance is almost totally pointless and ignores nearly all of what we know about Blofeld.  And why in God’s name did they hire Charles Gray – who already appeared as Henderson in You Only Live Twice, although granted for only about two minutes – to play Blofeld?  It’s bad enough he’d already been in the series as another character – this wasn’t the first time that happened and it isn’t the last, either – but he doesn’t look anything like the Blofeld we’ve seen before!  At least Telly Savalas and Donald Pleasence were both bald.

The action sequences are rarely exciting, the villains continue to violate Tuco’s Rule (“When you have to shoot, shoot, don’t talk”) and are generally not threatening, we get the worst Bond girl yet in Plenty O'Toole, the stupidest car chase in movie history... how much more could this movie suck?  At least there are a couple funny lines in the dialogue, but they’re not worth the rest of it.  It's Bond at his campy worst.  I'll buy that the producers thought audiences didn't like the "darker Bond" of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, but did they really have to respond by going so far in the other direction?

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