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Sean Connery as Bond. (ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES)

Never Say Never Again (Deluxe Edition)

IT doesn't happen often, so you have to appreciate it when a DVD's extras actually acknowledge the weaknesses of the movie.

So it is with this oddball Thunderball rehash from 1983. It's a project that came outside the usual Bond production channels as a result of Ian Fleming losing the rights to Thunderball in a lawsuit: its story was based upon a screen story Fleming had written with two collaborators, who sued. The rights landed in the hands of producer Jack Schwartzman (the husband of Talia Shire and the father of Jason Schwartzman), who convinced Sean Connery to return to the role for one last spin, even as the series' legit producers were making the Roger Moore outing Octopussy.

In the extra docs, the screenwriters and director Irvin Kirshner frankly talk about the failings of the script, especially in the snooze-inducing third act. In a chapter about the film's "Bond girls," star Kim Basinger is conspicuously absent, which is just as well as Kirshner complains about how she was taking direction from her then-husband, makeup artist Ron Snyder-Britton, instead of him. (Kirshner says he had Snyder-Britton thrown off the set). As Domino, Basinger reminds us that another way of saying "willowy beauty" is "pretty wooden."

But Barbara Carrera is present in that doc because, as the psychopathic Fatima Blush, she was one of the better Bond femme fatales.

In addition to Carrera, the film's other positives include Alec McCowen's droll take on Q as a bitter bureaucrat ("Now you're on this, I hope we're going to have lots of gratuitous sex and violence") and a young Rowan Atkinson as a bumbling government functionary.

If the film doesn't have the cachet of the original, at least Kirshner knew to minimize the tedious underwater footage that makes Thunderball such a hard slog to watch these days.

One last warning: With its music by Michel Legrand, Never Say Never Again not only has the worst musical sound track of the Bond films, it may be the worst musical soundtrack ever. 2-1/2 stars

Quantum of Solace (Two-Disc Special Edition)

IN an elaborate fight scene in this 22nd official 007 movie (as opposed to Never Say Never Again), Daniel Craig's James Bond literally tangles with a traitorous fellow agent amid ropes, pulleys and shaky scaffolds.

Funny thing: After you watch that scene four or five times, it actually makes sense.

If it didn't hang together on the first viewing, blame director Marc Forster, who resolutely fails to keep the action sequences simple and straightforward, along the lines of this film's immediate predecessor, Casino Royale.

But Forster does maintain the rather grim tone of the former, which is appropriate, as this is a direct sequel wherein Bond freely exercises his licence to kill in pursuit of the organization -- Quantum -- responsible for the death of his compromised fellow agent Vesper Lynd. That mission takes him to Haiti, where he encounters a beautiful would-be assassinatrix named Camille (Olga Kurylenko) on a parallel revenge mission to terminate the Bolivian dictator who killed her family. That puts her at odds with her boss, Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a harmless-looking mastermind who wants to reinstall the dictator in return for a parcel of Bolivian desert. Greene's seemingly eco-friendly corporation is one of presumably many fronts for Quantum. (Think SPECTRE with high-powered PR.)

Though a comedown from the previous movie, the movie has spots of real ingenuity, including Bond's disruption of a secret Quantum board meeting held during the performance of an opera. One supporting character's death by oil suffocation, while chilling, is a rather brilliant amalgam of Bond mythology (with a specific nod to Goldfinger) and contemporary realpolitik.

The second disc of DVD extras feels mostly like travelogues discussing in excessive detail the locations of the film.

What would have been more helpful is a shot-by-shot deconstruction of that scaffold fight scene. That way, it could make sense to everyone. 3 stars

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

10 DVD Rentals

1. Role Models

2. Transporter 3

3. Punisher: War Zone

4. Milk

5. Twilight

6. Australia

7. Body of Lies

8. Beverly Hills Chihuahua

9. Changeling

10. Rachel Getting Married

-- Rogers Video, week ending March 22

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 26, 2009 E4