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I was thinking back to my first interactions with the James Bond franchise, and I landed on For Your Eyes Only from 1981, which was made all the more memorable because Mad Magazine crafted a spoof of it shortly thereafter, which I had committed to memory. The double entendre went way over my little brain, but I soaked up the action, gadgets, and globe trekking. That, and Bond, James Bond was smooth as glass in the midst of chaos, which made him even more cool.
All of that is a roundabout way to say that Diamonds Are Forever wasn't really on my radar, other than maybe the song, and some clips on various James Bond highlight reels over the years.
On a first viewing, having watched about a dozen other Bond spectacles, was that this one felt a bit campy. Connery's Bond is THE Bond for many fans, and after being in that role for almost a decade by that point, he's a towering figure, however, there were moments where I'm like, "Bond shouldn't be getting his butt kicked by these two goons." Perhaps they wanted him to seem a little less superhuman at this point in the franchise, but he was missing "something."
While some of the opening missions are all over the top action, this one seemed a bit "pedestrian" by comparison, with Bond zipping around the globe and basically beating people up to get some important nugget of information about infamous Bond villan Blofeld. Wasn't the whiz-bang that we've come to expect from other Bond opening segments. (I've since learned that it was ranked in the bottom tier of openers)
The plot centers around the theft of diamonds, of course, but through the course of the movie, it becomes clear that the precious jewels are to be used for more nefarious purposes.
