You Only Live Twice (1967, PG)

Rating: ****

Sean Connery must be pretty tired of playing the role of 007 James Bond.  He said this would be his last Bond flick, though he returned for the 1971 Diamonds are Forever and the remake of Thunderball called Never say Never Again.  Nevertheless, Connery comes in a very convincing manner, similar in league with the previous three Bond adventures, though still not with as much bravado.

You Only Live Twice is a Bond movie where James Bond dies.  Astonishing it sounds, but we later find out that it was for reasonable purposes.  Bond fakes his own death to mislead his enemies, giving him a slight advantage over them.  MI6 sends 007 to Japan, where MI6 believes someone is trying to start World War III between America and Russia.  So many Bond flicks will involve the same matter, Bond stopping an almost inevitable Third World War...or worse.

This is the first Bond flick that's set in an Oriental setting, in this case Japan.  The cinematography works quite well, particularly when we are given a few shots of Japanese volcanoes.

Out of all the Bond movies thus far, You Only Live Twice remains to me, anyway, one of the more entertaining Bond adventures.  Honestly, I can't say why.  Maybe it was that You Only Live Twice is a likeable Bond movie, an enjoyable one at that, and one that is slightly more epic then it's forerunners, on strict Bond terms.

There are a lot of highlights in You Only Live Twice.  A shootout in a Japanese shipping yard, a car chase scene through the streets of Japan, an air battle where Bond takes out several helicopters in his own little chopper, sequences at a Ninja training school, we finally see the face of Bond's arch nemesis Ernest Stavro Blofeld, and a final, culminating battle between Ninja's and the bad guy's private army literally inside a volcano.

You Only Live Twice is not one of the best Bond movies.  I could go on with a list of flaws, but the only thing that really needs to be mentioned is that You Only Live Twice is not a classic, when it almost should have been.  This could have been in league with From Russia with Love, Goldfinger and Casino Royale, the best Bond movie eer made, but perhaps the fact that it was not a classic could be due to the unenthusiastic performance by Connery.

For now anyway, You Only Live Twice goes down as one of the most entertaining and likeable Bond movies in the franchise, and for an action film, that's a good thing.