The “stupid” unmade James Bond movie that was “more Austin Powers than Austin Powers”
Austin Powers was both the best and worst thing to happen to James Bond, with Mike Myers’ shagadelic secret agent so accurately spoofing the conventions the 007 franchise had held dear since the early 1960s that there was no other choice but to reinvent cinema’s most iconic secret agent for a modern audience.
Of course, that left Pierce Brosnan in an unfortunate predicament, since The World Is Not Enough and Die Another Day were sandwiched in between the releases of International Man of Mystery and Goldmember, and it wouldn’t be until Daniel Craig’s debut in Casino Royale that the shadow of Myers’ groovy spy was finally banished.
That said, Craig admitted he had an “Austin Powers alarm” that would occasionally sound when he was shooting Martin Campbell’s reboot, with everyone on edge that they’d accidentally lean more towards the hairy-chested and snaggle-toothed parodies than the storied lineage of Ian Fleming’s literary creation.
Long before Myers had even conceived the idea, though, a Bond flick was almost made that beat Austin Powers at his own game, and it had Sean Connery at the centre of the storm. It wasn’t one of his official outings as 007, though, but the unofficial and contentious production that eventually became Never Say Never Again.
The picture was legally allowed to exist, despite Cubby Broccoli’s best efforts to stop it, albeit on the proviso that it bore at least some spiritual semblance to Fleming’s novel, Thunderball, otherwise, it would wade into choppy and litigious waters that could see the plug pulled for deviating too far from the only Bond story the film was allowed to adapt.
Putting their heads together, screenwriters Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham crafted what was essentially a thinly-veiled remake, but they did enlist Connery’s services as an uncredited co-scribe, which is where things started to get really weird when nuclear bombs and mechanical sharks entered the conversation.
“The script they came up with was Star Wars underwater,” Bond expert and historian Robert Sellers decreed. “It had these mechanical sharks with bombs on their back. I mean, it was more Austin Powers than Austin Powers. There was a big helicopter fight on the Statue of Liberty at the end. It would have been incredible. Stupid, but incredible.”
As mentioned, the reason why the batshit insane story of frickin’ mechanical sharks with frickin’ nuclear bombs strapped to their frickin’ backs didn’t become a reality was because “there were certain aspects of the script that veered too far away from Thunderball,” which made it a complete non-starter, but what a non-starter it could have been.
Dick Clement, who performed uncredited rewrites on Never Say Never Again, surmised that “this was his way of Sean saying ‘Fuck you’ to them,” the “them” being Eon Productions. To add several extra fucks to his big-screen fuck you, he sought to make what sounded like the most preposterous 007 blockbuster that had ever been made, out-Bonding James Bond by upping the ante to ludicrous levels. Sadly, it wasn’t to be, and it may well have been so silly that it would have negated the need for Austin Powers to even exist.
