So many characters in Thunderball are knifed, shot, speared, strangled, gassed, drowned, fried, eaten, or blown to smithereens that one almost dares to hope that its hero will be accidentally murdered. He is not, however, which is unfortunate, since James Bond's death is the one thing that might have redeemed this exceedingly tiresome film. If Thunderball has more sex and violence than any of its predecessors, it has less suspense, characterization, and credibility, and I can discover no wit or imagination in it at all.

Earlier Bond movies, actually, tend to merge in one's memory; the new one, having been built to familiar specifications, gives every promise of being just as forgettable. Once again Bond faces a sadistic criminal megalomaniac and passionate cuties of dubious allegiance. Once again, in fact, his enemy is a member of SPECTURE, a secretive, selective group that dabbles in everything from opium smuggling to world domination. What is it up to this time? No less, it immediately turns out, than blackmailing Britain out of 100 million pounds -- the price demanded for returning two atomic bombs hidden at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Bond, I am sad to say, survives an endless series of fights and saves both the British treasury and the city of Miami, which SPECTURE was planning to annihilate to prove it wasn't kidding.

Well, nobody goes to these things looking for slices of life. Still Thunderball is unusually ridiculous, even for its genre. One might have suspended disbelief, perhaps, if its characters seemed to feel as well as act. But the sinister mastermind Largo (Adolfo Celi), his lovely but treacherous "niece" (Claudine Auger), and the slowwited CIA man Leiter (a very inadequate Rick Van Nutter) are never developed beyond the comic-book level, and Bond himself (Sean Connery again) is slick and lifeless, as always.

Except for the main titles and the cuties, almost everything in Thunderball is disappointing. The underwater scenes in the picture are well-photographed but painfully slow. The gadgetry -- one and two-man underwater sleds, a yacht that sheds its cabin to become a hydroplane, and so forth -- does not seem especially ingenious. And Bond's "dead-pan quips" are exemplified by his remark after impaling a SPECTURE agent against a tree: "I guess he got the point."