Bond-arama: No. 0022 A View To A Kill (1985)

A View To A Kill is like three movies rammed together, and none of them are good. The first is a silly excuse to base-jump the Eiffel Tower. The second is a pointless game of cat and mouse between Bond and a crooked horse breeder. The third is a pedantic police chase. Add in an effete Bond, a litigant for a Bond girl, and a weak villain, and this movie just fails all around. That’s why this is Number 0022 of 0023 on our countdown.

Plot Quality: A View To A Kill comes in three parts. The first involves Bond witnessing the assassination of a French private detective. Unfortunately, silliness knows no bounds here. For example, rather than meeting Bond somewhere secure, the detective meets Bond at a restaurant atop the Eiffel Tower. Why? Because it will look cool when his assassin dives off the Tower and parachutes to the ground. Naturally, Bond gives chase and the scene further embarrasses the film as Bond ends up splitting the crappy car he car-jacks in half and somehow manages to drive around Paris in only the front half of a car as people do desperately unfunny double-takes.

With this silliness out of the way, Bond travels to France to observe Max Zorin (Christopher Walken), a wealthy horse breeder and owner of Zorin Industries. Bond’s purpose is to learn how a microchip made by Zorin Industries could end up in the Soviet Union, but the film kind of forgets this. Instead, Bond investigates how Zorin can breed horses no one is supposed to be able to breed. To help him with this, he adopts the see-through alias of St. John (pronounced "Sin-Jin") Smythe, a wealthy fool, and brings along Sir Godfrey Tibbett (Patrick Macnee), a horse expert, as his chauffeur.

This part of the film comes closest to being a Bond film, so long as you don’t think about it. For one thing, while Bond sneaks around in traditional Bond style, he’s actually skipped his assignment to investigate the horses – Zorin uses drugs to cheat. That makes this entire part of the film irrelevant to the plot. He also decides that a woman must be a plot point for no apparent reason. Her name is Sutton and Zorin is trying to buy her business and there is literally no way Bond should see her as relevant to his mission. Bond seduces Zorin’s henchwoman May Day (Grace Jones) to avoid detection, and Zorin goes along with it even though he knows Bond’s true identity. May Day then kills Sir Godfrey in one of those “how did he not look in the backseat” kind of murders when they could have just shot him, and Zorin tries to kill Bond when he could just ship him home in disgrace. Finally, this part of the film end without a transition.

The final part of the film is utter nonsense. First you meet Bond’s irrelevant CIA contact. He’s a Chinese nerd who sells fish at San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf as a cover. But there’s no reason whatsoever for him to need a cover. And he ultimately does nothing before he gets killed. Bond meets Sutton too and the sparks do not fly. They decide to break into San Francisco City Hall at night, even though Sutton apparently can get what they want during the day. Incredibly, Zorin shows up just then and frames them for murder and arson, which forces Bond and Sutton to flee the cops on an old fire engine. A painful, generic, incompetent chase scene ensues with lots of zany crashy cop car fun. Bond and Sutton then go to Zorin’s mine, where Bond cracks wise about “women” blech and their high heels, before Zorin shoots his employees to prove he’s insane. We now know Zorin’s diabolical plan. He intends to cause an earthquake by flooding the mine with seawater. This will flood Silicon Valley, which will allow a group of foreigners to take over the microchip market. Soon, everything in the world will be made in China!! Mwoo ha ha! Oh, wait. Anyway, after they escape the mine, Bond chases Zorin, who is on a blimp floating over San Francisco, and kills him in a fight on top of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Bond Quality: Where to begin? This was Roger Moore’s final Bond film and, to put it bluntly, he was too old. His age was already becoming a problem in For Your Eyes Only and here it was just too much. Ironically, age itself wasn’t even the problem – Liam Neeson (60) is older than Moore (57) was and yet he plays kick-ass heroes. The problem was that Moore seemed old because he comes across like a British pensioner. He walks, he doesn’t run, and he walks gingerly. He waits his turn to speak, he doesn’t dominate the conversation. He avoids physical fights, choosing instead to let the women and children around him fight instead. And his snarky one-liners come across as pissy rather than tough because he never earns them. Essentially, he walks through the film like a snotty British tourist.

The Bond Girl(s): The Bond girls are kind of hard to like in this one. On the one hand, you have Grace Jones as May Day. She’s butch. She’s unattractive. Her acting is horrible. In fact, she’s basically reprising her role as Zula from Conan the Destroyer. And while she does have some chemistry with Christopher Walken, she has no chemistry with Bond even when he’s trying to seduce her.

The main Bond girl is Tanya Roberts as Stacey Sutton. Roberts is a never-was and the character she plays suffers from some serious flaws. For one thing, it’s hard to care about her “plight.” She’s the granddaughter of an oil tycoon whose company is being taken over by Zorin, and when we first meet her, Zorin is offering her a huge check worth more money that any of us will see in our lifetimes. That is problematic because it makes it hard to see her as a victim, especially when she claims to be poor. There is no chemistry whatsoever between her and Bond either. Again, he is too old for her and acts more like a father tagging along on his daughter’s adventure.

Her manner doesn’t fit a Bond girl either. Most Bond girls are fiery with a strong independent streak, which then gives way to Bond’s charm. They typically want revenge for something and the only thing holding them back is Bond’s need to solve his case. Sutton isn’t like that. She acts like someone trying to build a legal case, someone who sees James Bond as the lawyer who agreed to help her. That makes her a client more than an object of desire.

Villain Quality: A View To A Kill goes really wrong here too. Christopher Walken wasn’t the first choice (David Bowie was), but he does a decent job given what he’s been handed. The problem is he’s been handed garbage. First, unlike every other Bond villain, he’s not evil because he chooses to be, he’s evil because he’s the product of a genetic experiment which makes him psychotic. Further, we are told the KGB gave Zorin his money and his power, which means he never earned his own villainy and we have no reason to see him as a worthy challenger for Bond. He’s basically a crazy monkey on a string who just cut the string.

Further, his scheme is horrible. For one thing, even though he’s psychotic, the scheme itself isn’t psychotic. . . he just wants to get rich. So his scheme doesn’t tie in with the reason he’s a villain. That would be like Goldfinger’s plan being to steal cars. Also, Zorin is already filthy rich, so why do this? The writers then muddy this further by suggesting that his scheme to destroy Silicon Valley was somehow a KGB operation which the KGB no longer wants him to do. But this information doesn’t connect to the film. It’s basically the writers hoping that the audience will latch onto this bit of information and infer a backstory where there is none. Also, if the KGB really wanted to stop him, as claimed at one point in the film, why not just kill him? There is no way a couple henchmen could stop the KGB from killing Zorin or dragging him back to Moscow if they wanted. Drowning Silicon Valley is a great idea, but failing to give Zorin a reason to do it and tossing in a contradictory KGB angle ruins it.

Zorin is also one of those villains with too much access to knowledge, like how his computer spots Bond as 007 or how he knows to go to San Francisco City Hall at the right time to catch Bond breaking in. Yet, at the same time, he keeps getting a case of the stupids, like when he needlessly shoots his henchmen to prove he’s psychotic. And if Sutton is such a problem for him, which is never clear, why doesn’t he just kill her? All in all, his behavior seems too random on the one hand, but too much exactly-what-the-plot-needs on the other.

Conclusion

This was a poor finish for Roger Moore, who really should have retired four years earlier. I suspect many of the problems of this film, like the lackluster stunts and the lack of chemistry with the Bond girls, is related to Moore seeming rather frail at this point. But even beyond that, this film keeps undercutting itself by never thinking through why any of the characters would actually do the things they are doing. Combine that with a villain who is little more than a petulant puppet, and you end up with one of the worst Bond films. That’s why this film is No. 0022 of 0023.