The reviews split by era more than by taste. The critics who saw it on release call it the best Bond yet, and most of the praise since clusters in the same places: Terence Young’s direction, which keeps the pace up, and Sean Connery, stylish and confident in the part even where one reviewer suspects he is bored by it. The underwater sequences are admired as spectacle almost everywhere, and the climactic battle is singled out more than once.
The later reviews are cooler. Most find it a step down from Goldfinger, recycling earlier plots and leaning on gadgets at the expense of story, and several find the underwater scenes too long and short on thrills, however handsome they look. Sight and Sound goes furthest, calling it a polished parody with little to remember afterwards. The spread is wide, from raves to one outright dismissal, with the modern consensus settling on decent but uneven.