Casino Royale felt like a horrible fever dream. As much as Connery and his Bond aggravate me at times, they’re familiar and a fair bit predictable. You Only Live Twice is the next Bond film on my roster and the second to last Sean Connery film with Eon Productions. And that’s a problem when your film has the same names and characters as those from a popular franchise, and viewers can barely make the connection between the satire and its source. The characters are mostly unrecognizable, like this is supposed to be satire, a parody of Fleming’s work in the same way that the later Austin Powers films were, but the connection is flimsy. It certainly only paid the barest of homages to Ian Fleming’s original story for Casino Royale, with Bond going up against Le Chiffre and his gambling addiction.
Normally, I try to give a quick blurb about the plot before tearing the film to shreds but I’m honestly not sure what the film was about this time around. Now, I really have a dark and often uncomfortable sense of humor, but there were parts of the film where I couldn’t even make that obviously fake laugh of discomfort as I watched it. It was misogynistic, racist, creepy, and just plain rude.
The plot – as it existed – was disjointed and ridiculous with the whole main thread was derailed with a third of the film to go.
