Has James Bond Finally Met His Match?
Starring: Roger Moore, Christopher Walken, Tanya Roberts, Grace Jones, Patrick Macnee, Dolph Lundgren
Director: John Glen
1985 | 131 Minutes | PG
“Wow! What a view.” – May Day
“…to a kill” – Max Zorin
A View To A Kill is generally believed to be one of the worst James Bond movies ever made. I’m far from a 007 connoisseur so I can’t say for sure where it ranks whether that be the absolute worst or whether that be third worst. It ain’t the best, though. That’s for sure.
Agent 007, James Bond (Roger Moore), must stop Max Zorin (Christopher Walken), a French industrialist, aiming to corner the world’s microchip supply by triggering a massive earthquake in California’s Silicon Valley.
First off, we’ve got to touch on the Bond theme. Each Bond movie has one and, let’s be honest, most of them suck. Most of them are super outdated feeling within just a year or two of release and are the type of music you skip when listening to Pandora. A View To A Kill has a catchy tune by Duran Duran that is definitely dated sounding but still a lot of fun.
A View To A Kill marks Roger Moore’s final Bond movie. He apparently publicly objected to being Bond at the age of 57 but, seeing as how the Bond contracts kept him locked in an underground labyrinth, with his only hope for escape being the completion of his agreed upon movies, he went ahead and filmed it before disappearing from the public eye until the release of JCVD’s The Quest. In all seriousness though, Moore did look a little bit old but through the wonder of makeup was made to appear much younger than he probably would have otherwise.
Christopher Walken’s Max Zorin is a classic Bond villain and he lives up to the evilness that you would expect from someone named Max Zorin. He also has the beefy Grace Jones by his side to inflict pain on anyone who gets in his way.
But of course, the real star of A View To A Kill is Dolph Lundgren. One of the main reasons I had wanted to watch this was his very brief appearance. It was his first movie and he played such a minor role but I just had to see it. I don’t even think he said a thing, just stood there and then fired a gun all awesome like.
As a whole, A View To A Kill is far too cheesy of a Bond movie for my tastes. There’s an instance where Bond’s car is sheered in half by a collision with another car. He keeps driving his half car, as only Bond could do, but it’s one of many instances where I was left rolling my eyes while watching.
A View To A Kill also had the distinction of introducing many people to snowboarding in the beginning of the film. But it just feels like a case of – all the cools kids already knew about snowboarding and a few years later this movie came out and blew the minds of old folks who had never heard of it. It reminds me very much of the parkour featured in Casino Royale… only a lot lamer.
The movie takes place in the exotic locales of Britain, Paris and San Francisco. Ooooooo. Every other Bond movie has him jet-setting all over the globe and here he is in the good ole U.S. of A, Britain, where he is based out of, and Paris, which we have seen exactly a billion times before in other movies. I will give them credit, though, the final Golden Gate Bridge battle was a lot of fun and avoided any potential jokiness that the majority of the movie had suffered from.
Any series running this long is going to have a few disappointments along the way. It only took the X-Men and Spider-Man franchises 3 movies to hit their very, very low points. The thing is, though, if I am in the mood for a James Bond movie, I’m not likely to go fishing for my copy of A View To A Kill anytime soon.
Action Movie Fanatix 