A View to a Kill (1985)

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'Max Zorin? The respected industrialist? Impossible!'

Director John Glen

Stars Roger Moore, Christopher Walken, Grace Jones, Tanya Roberts

Things You Might Like

• Fast and action packed
• Loads of fun but not too daft
• Moore gets his energy back
• Thrilling villain to watch
• John Steed!

Things You Might Not Like

• Lightweight compared to predecessors
• Loads of shooting henchmen
• The thought of Jones and Moore in bed

Conclusion
A View to a Kill is everything the perfect Bond film should be.  After seven attempts, Roger Moore finally gets a script he can enjoy and shows why he is a great James Bond.

5 our of 5 May Days

Luke McGrath will return in The Living Daylights

***

In 1985 the time had come for Roger Moore’s swansong as James Bond.  Some had been calling for 007’s retirement for a few outings already and the actor had lost interest in the role.  Even the producers had been looking at replacements for the past three installments.  Something had to give.

A View to a Kill sees Bond investigating Max Zorin (Christopher Walken), an industrialist building a microchip cable of surviving an electromagnetic pulse.  007 is drawn into a plan to destroy Silicon Valley, increasing the price Zorin can charge for his own products.  It’s a familiar plot but a welcome one all the same.  The world’s not at risk,  just a whole load of cash.  It’s a Goldfinger for the yuppie generation, bullion updated to microchips.  The same thing would happen again in Quantum of Solace, with water the new currency.

Comparisons to Connery’s best are apt.  A View to a Kill is pure entertainment at work.  Moore’s films have tended to alternate between the serious and the silly, For Your Eyes Only and Moonraker.  The seventh time was a charm.  Bond takes the unbelievable with a wry eyebrow and seems more energetic than any film since Live and Let Die.  The humour finally sits with the action, the romancing with the killing.

In Christopher Walken and Grace Jones, the casting directors found a pair of truly unhinged villains.  Zorin is a welcome throwback to the early days of Bond, a man obsessed with success rather than any shaky plan to dominate the world.  He isn’t trying a power-play with politicians or launching any rockets, he just wants to be even richer than he already is.  Best of all, he’s going to get his way by something a simple as a huge bomb.  There’s no submarine or volcano base, just black market explosives.  Walken is a welcome burst of energy in a line of enemies who had been getting less and less active in their own schemes (perhaps to make up for the lack of movement Moore could muster).  His fights with Bond hark back to Red Grant and Tee Hee.  Zorin is one of the most fun psychopaths ever put on-screen and one of the most memorable in the series.

Zorin’s sidekick Mayday is played with equal fervor by Grace Jones.  She’s not in the same class as Walken, but injects the same energy into her scenes.  Her dalliance with Bond is inexplicable, but forgivable.  Even her outrage as fellow henchmen die makes her more of a character than most other women on the franchise.

While some have rejected Tanya Roberts as too screamy or too bland, I like her.  She’s overshadowed by a better performance (Mayday) and a better name (Jenny Flex) but Roberts fills her role well.  She’s a rare intelligent woman, a geology expert, and has had the tenacity to fight Zorin in the courts for her land.  It’s only when the goons are sent in that she crumbles, hardly something to put down to weakness.  Her romance with Bond is more a case of box ticking than believability but they could hardly have parted with a handshake.

A View to a Kill has its problems, the story is a better idea that a script and most of the events seem randomly assembled rather than plotted.  These are more than balanced by the overall pace of the film, scenes bounce from action to action and there’s none of the slow-build that hurt Octopussy so much.  Moore’s last was his best, a real piece of pop entertainment and a lesson in what Bond does best.

Buy A View to a Kill from Amazon or pre-order the James Bond blu-ray collection.