The Brother of Bond: OK Connery (#SFWApro)

Italian “spaghetti Western” director Sergio Leone commented once that the Italian movie industry can’t restrain itself: if a genre’s hot, it’ll make movie after movie until it kills the market.
As nothing was hotter than James Bond in the 1960s, it’s no surprise Italy turned out (IIRC) 300-plus Bond knockoffs. While my viewing of the Bond series the past three years didn’t extend to clones, there’s one exception to that rule. Because what could be more of a Bond movie than one where M and Moneypenny recruit James Bond’s brother (played by Sean Connery’s brother Neil) to fight against SPECTRE’s Number Two?
Oops! No, that’s not it at all because that would be a violation of copyright laws. Instead, 1967’s OK CONNERY AKA Operation Kid Brother, is about Col. Cunningham (Bernard Lee, the original M) and his secretary Miss Maxwell (Lois Chiles, the original Moneypenny) recruiting “the brother of that agent Zero Zero Something” to fight Mr. Thai (Adolfo Celi, SPECTRE’s Number Two in Thunderball, the second-in-command of the Thanatos crime cartel. Oh, and Domino from Thunderball, Daniele Bianchi, plays the Bond Girl here too—sorry, the Connery Girl!
In the opening, Thai’s remote-controlled car smashes into a plane carrying key information for Miss Maxwell. Then we cut to Connery playing Dr. Neil Connery, whose brilliant surgical and hypnotherapeutic techniques have restored a Japanes burn victim to normal. When Thanatos agents try to kidnap her, Connery proves he can fight as well as his brother, and has Jedi mind tricks on the level of Doctor Who‘s Master, able to freeze someone motionless with a few seconds hypnotic focus (I’m going to take a wild guess this has nothing whatsoever to do with the real Connery’s skill set).
It turns out a British agent implanted a buried message in the young woman’s subconscious warning about Thanatos’ plan to seize “the atomic nucleus” which will power up what we’d now call an EMP, enabling the crime cartel to shut off power all over Europe. Initially reluctant to follow in his brother’s footsteps, Dr. Connery gets dragged into the game by his interest in Maya (Bianchi). The usual thrills, double-crosses (Thai has no intention of staying Number Two at Thanatos), booby-traps and makeout sessions expected of a Bond-style film then follow (“I see nobody in your family is a ‘rank amateur.'”). At the end, Connery and Maya get to ride off into the sunset; when Col. Cunningham tries to talk him into more spy work, Connery freezes him with a hypno-blast.
There’s not much else to say about it. It’s competently made, if entirely formulaic, but Connery has none of his brother’s talent and his character is way too over-the-top to take seriously. He reminds me more of James Coburn’s super-spy Flint than Bond. But if you’ve seen all the Bonds and you want something in the same vein … well, I still don’t know I’d recommend this. Then again, it’s better than the 1967 Casino Royale.