Sean Connery played the role of Bond for the seventh and final time, marking his return to the character twelve years after Diamonds Are Forever (1971).

Blush works for SPECTRE, a criminal organisation run by Ernst Stavro Blofeld; her charge is heroin-addicted United States Air Force pilot Jack Petachi.

Petachi has undergone an operation on his right eye to make it match the retinal pattern of the US President, which he uses to circumvent security at RAF Station Swadley, an American military base in England.

Bond follows a lead to the Bahamas and finds Domino Petachi, Jack's sister, and her wealthy lover Maximillian Largo, who is SPECTRE's top agent.

When Largo's yacht heads for Nice, France, Bond goes there and joins forces with his French contact Nicole, and his CIA counterpart, Felix Leiter.

At the charity event, Largo and Bond play a video game called Domination; the losing player of each turn receives electric shocks of increasing intensity in proportion to the amount wagered.

[4] Fleming had worked with independent producer Kevin McClory and scriptwriter Jack Whittingham on a script for a potential Bond film, to be called Longitude 78 West,[5] which was subsequently abandoned because of the costs involved.

[14] Semple Jr. ultimately left the project, after Irvin Kershner was hired as director, and Schwartzman began cutting out the "big numbers" from his script to save on the budget.

[11] Connery then hired British television writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais[12] to undertake re-writes, although they went uncredited for their efforts, despite much of the final shooting script being theirs.

[17] When producer Kevin McClory had first planned the film in 1964, he held initial talks with Richard Burton for the part of Bond,[18] although the project came to nothing because of the legal issues involved.

When the Warhead project was launched in the late 1970s, a number of actors were mentioned in the trade press, including Orson Welles for the part of Blofeld, Trevor Howard to play M and Richard Attenborough as director.

[23] Subsequent to Connery reprising the role, Semple altered the script to include several references to Bond's advancing years – playing on Connery being 52 at the time of filming[23] – and academic Jeremy Black has pointed out that there are other aspects of age and disillusionment in the film, such as the Shrubland's porter referring to Bond's car ("They don't make them like that anymore"), the new M having no use for the 00 section and Q with his reduced budgets.

[24] Originally, Semple wanted to emphasize Bond's age even further, writing the script to include him in semi-retirement working aboard a Scottish fishing trawler hunting Soviet Navy submarines in the North Sea.

[27] For the femme fatale, director Irvin Kershner selected former model and Playboy cover girl Barbara Carrera to play Fatima Blush – the name coming from one of the early scripts of Thunderball.

"[11] Carrera's performance as Fatima Blush earned her a Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress,[28] which she lost to Cher for her role in Silkwood.

[38] James Horner was both Kershner's and Schwartzman's first choice to compose the score, after they were impressed with his work on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

These included the gun barrel sequence, where a screen full of 007 symbols appeared instead, and similarly there was no "James Bond Theme" to use, although no effort was made to supply another tune.

[55] Never Say Never Again was broadly welcomed and praised by the critics: Ian Christie, writing in the Daily Express, said that Never Say Never Again was "one of the better Bonds",[56] finding the film "superbly witty and entertaining, ... the dialogue is crisp and the fight scenes imaginative".

"[57] The reviewer for Time Out summed up Never Say Never Again by saying: "The action's good, the photography excellent, the sets decent; but the real clincher is the fact that Bond is once more played by a man with the right stuff.

[59] Writing in The Observer, Philip French noted that "this curiously muted film ends up making no contribution of its own and inviting damaging comparisons with the original, hyper-confident Thunderball".

[60] French concluded that "like an hour-glass full of damp sand, the picture moves with increasing slowness as it approaches a confused climax in the Persian Gulf".

[60] Writing for Newsweek, critic Jack Kroll thought the early part of the film was handled "with wit and style",[61] although he went on to say that the director was "hamstrung by Lorenzo Semple's script".

It makes Bond's cynicism and opportunism seem the product of genuine worldliness (and world weariness) as opposed to Roger Moore's mere twirpishness.

"[63] Writing in The Washington Post, Gary Arnold was fulsome in his praise, saying that Never Say Never Again is "one of the best James Bond adventure thrillers ever made",[64] going on to say that "this picture is likely to remain a cherished, savory example of commercial filmmaking at its most astute and accomplished.

The site's critical consensus reads: "While the rehashed story feels rather uninspired and unnecessary, the return of both Sean Connery and a more understated Bond make Never Say Never Again a watchable retread.

[75] James Berardinelli, in his review of Never Say Never Again, thinks the re-writing of the Thunderball story has led to a film which has "a hokey, jokey feel, [it] is possibly the worst-written Bond script of all".

[77] He also thought the supporting cast was good, saying that Klaus Maria Brandauer's Largo was "neurotic, vulnerable ... one of the most complex of Bond's foes"[77] and that Barbara Carrera and Kim Basinger "make lasting impressions.

"[77] Jim Smith and Stephen Lavington, in their 2002 retrospective Bond Films, lament: "The production chaos is visible on screen, with frequently mediocre editing, direction, stunt work and photography all emerging from the restricted budget.

[51][80] In the 1990s, McClory announced plans to make another adaptation of the Thunderball story starring Timothy Dalton entitled Warhead 2000 AD, but the film was eventually scrapped.

[85] McClory died in 2006;[81] MGM's acquisition of the rights to Casino Royale finally allowed Eon Productions to make a serious, non-satirical film adaptation of that novel the same year, with Daniel Craig as James Bond.