A View to a Kill (1985)

We’ve really had just about enough of Roger Moore around these parts.  From boring to offensively bad, Roger Moore’s tenure as James Bond has really disappointed after the initial promise he showed in Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun. After seven films and twelve years, A View to a Kill marks Moore’s last outing as 007, and it’s mixed feelings all around.  The film itself isn’t bad, but one gets the feeling that Moore has wasted too much time getting here.

After uncovering something to do with a computer chip, James Bond (Moore) seeks out the chip’s manufacturer, cyber-wunderkind Max Zorin (Christopher Walken).  Bond poses as an equestrian, then a journalist, to uncover the truth about Zorin’s mad scheme.  Along the way Bond is aided by fellow agent Godfrey Tibbett (Patrick Macnee) and heiress Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts) and foiled by Zorin’s Amazonian bodyguard May Day (Grace Jones).

A View to a Kill has a poor reputation among the Bond canon, though I don’t think the film is irredeemable.  I’m a fan of films where Bond has to put clues together to uncover a case, and this film plays that up quite well with a number of seemingly disparate plot threads – computer circuitry, illegal horse breeding, Nazi eugenics – that all come together with a satisfying cohesion.  It’s especially fun to see Moore puzzle through the matter with Macnee, the original John Steed, by his side; the two do a neat kind of “Grumpy Old Men” routine that riffs nicely on the shared espionage background between the two.

Having said that, Moore is really just too old to keep doing this sort of thing.  It’s clever when the film attempts to confront it, but once Macnee leaves the plot we’re asked to forget Moore’s age and regard him once more as the spry agent Bond ought to be.  But it’s a brutally unsuccessful move, made all the more apparent by how clearly youthful both Roberts and Jones are.  When Moore’s Bond beds both, it’s like catching a lusty grandfather in bed with a cheerleader; it feels both wrong and uncomfortable.  The other type of physical scenes also flounder due to his age, especially the ones involving complex stunts like another ski jump.  (You were right, Spy Who Loved Me:  nobody does it better.)

Fortunately, the film has an amazing antagonist in Christopher Walken.  Let that sink in:  Christopher Walken is a Bond villain, and it’s everything you’d expect from that sentence.  Walken is at his mid-80s nuttiest here, emphasizing all the wrong syllables and cocking his head at peculiar angles to give his character a fully off-kilter vibe.  Though the film relies on a clue-based structure, there’s no question that Walken, with his albino afro and shifty-eyed glances – is the villain, which allows him to surrender entirely to the character’s hammy quirks.  Best of all, Walken funnels that goofiness into full-blown psychosis; where some Bond villains have trouble toeing that line, Walken makes Zorin both engaging and terrifying, even without that curious subplot where (spoilers?) he’s revealed to be a Nazi test tube baby.

Perhaps even more than Walken’s performance, what helps A View to a Kill is its uncanny and unmistakable resemblance to the franchise’s finest hour – Goldfinger.  The basic plot outline is the same:  mad billionaire with lethal sidekick cooks up scheme to destroy resource and increase his own wealth.  While A View to a Kill never makes the connection explicit, with nary a reference in sight, reappropriating the successful formula carries with it a tried-and-true aspect that isn’t very surprising.  That is, it already worked in Goldfinger, so A View to a Kill doesn’t see a need to reinvent the wheel.  It’s ironic that we saw the same thing happen with Never Say Never Again, which rebranded Thunderball, though View to a Kill takes the remake angle a step further and at least does more than merely change the scenery.

And honestly, after all the missteps we’ve seen in the Roger Moore era, it’s subconsciously refreshing to be reminded of Goldfinger, arguably Connery’s and the franchise’s gold standard.  We’ve been through so much with Moore that I almost forgive the sin of uncreativity because it means we’re moving on to something new and different.  Plus, tell me the idea of Goldfinger starring Christopher Walken isn’t tempting.

A View to a Kill is rated PG.  There are several scenes of implied nudity (bare shoulders and backs), and in one scene a man machine-guns a crowd while another character is killed by an explosive.

Roger Moore may be out, but James Bond and The Cinema King will return in a review of The Living Daylights (1987) on April 7, 2014!