A View to a Kill
Roger Moore's last appearance as James Bond took place in this 1985 film directed by John Glen, maker of two previous Bonds, For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy, plus the two later Timothy Dalton outings featuring the famous secret agent. A View to a Kill, based on an Ian Fleming short story, features some of the zaniness of Octopussy and is in several spots quite funny. The villain, Max Zorin (a blonde Christopher Walken), is such an over the top violent lunatic that his outbursts of coldly dealt murder are weirdly funny in that he displays no qualms about adjusting the world to his liking. Told that Zorin is a psychopath, raised by a Nazi scientist who continues to help him with his catastrophic plans, Bond sets out to eliminate him, not bothering to attempt to save his life, even when he can try.
The movie covers horse racing, the disappearance of a thoroughbred, a young blonde woman, Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts), who gets involved with Bond but also resists Zorin's attempts to buy her father's property. Zorin has large plans for a piece of California real estate along the San Andreas Fault and in Silicon Valley, which he plans to flood, killing countless people and destroying the microchip industry. He will then substitute his own microchips--a mirror of the scheme of the megalomaniac Goldfinger in the Bond movie of that name, but with technology.
Zorin, an industrialist, flies about in a blimp. His right hand woman, May Day (Grace Jones), is a ruthless killer who proves herself a formidable opponent to Bond. This is also paralleled in Goldfinger with Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman), who, like May Day, beds down with Bond.
I saw A View to a Kill when it came out. As with its predecessor, Octopussy, I didn't like it, though I remember enjoying Tanya Roberts's lusciousness. She's blonde here (not with the reddish-brown hair she had in Charlie's Angels), her eyes are aquamarine, her voice hoarse and sexy; at twenty-nine years old she's the quintessence of gorgeousness.
Seeing the film again I appreciate it a great deal more. Being thirty-three years older, my critical faculties have sharpened. The movie has good pacing, isn't overlong, benefits from excellent action sequences, including one early on involving Bond chasing May Day up the stairs of the Eiffel Tower until she makes a spectacular base-jumping escape, followed by Bond's pursuit in three or four different modes of transportation. The climactic scene involving Zorin's blimp and the Golden Gate Bridge recalls Hitchcock's North by Northwest--the Mount Rushmore sequence--except that the sense of vertiginous peril is even greater due to the larger amount of on-site cinematography than in Hitchcock's film.
Zorin belongs to the small category of movie villains who, like the Joker played by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, "...just want to watch the world burn." Referred to as "a psychopath," Max Zorin is indifferent to the massive damage he causes. In one spectacular set piece, he machine guns dozens of his workers he no longer needs to complete his mad project, laughing while he kills. He's so horrible that his menacing murderous companion May Day comes to seem sympathetic by comparison.
Roger Moore's Bond gets through all right, of course, ends up taking a shower with Stacey Sutton. He quips, kills, fucks, punches, nearly gets killed a few times, puts an end to an irredeemable maniac. All in a few weeks' work, no big deal.
I've written before in this blog that Roger Moore is my favorite Bond. A View to a Kill demonstrates one key aspect as to why I prefer him more so than the others. Moore possessed the right combination of debonair gentleman spy mixed with a relatable sense of humor; relatable due to its frequent corniness. When Sean Connery, previously playing Bond, made quips after moments of danger, he didn't put it across as well as Moore did because the latter is funnier than Sean Connery. Moore somehow, through his personality, made this bizarre aspect of the Bond character work.
The Moore films possess a sense of humor not found in the others. Timothy Dalton, though he makes a good Bond, I think, isn't funny as Bond. Neither is the current Bond, Daniel Craig. While the action sequences in the Craig films have become more and more sophisticated as compared with those in the past, I wouldn't associate the word fun with these most recent films in the series. The Roger Moore Bond movies are fun, balanced too with excellent action sequences and the usual beautiful women characters, gadgets, wide-ranging locales, and fascinating villains.
Vic Neptune
Roger Moore's last appearance as James Bond took place in this 1985 film directed by John Glen, maker of two previous Bonds, For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy, plus the two later Timothy Dalton outings featuring the famous secret agent. A View to a Kill, based on an Ian Fleming short story, features some of the zaniness of Octopussy and is in several spots quite funny. The villain, Max Zorin (a blonde Christopher Walken), is such an over the top violent lunatic that his outbursts of coldly dealt murder are weirdly funny in that he displays no qualms about adjusting the world to his liking. Told that Zorin is a psychopath, raised by a Nazi scientist who continues to help him with his catastrophic plans, Bond sets out to eliminate him, not bothering to attempt to save his life, even when he can try.
The movie covers horse racing, the disappearance of a thoroughbred, a young blonde woman, Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts), who gets involved with Bond but also resists Zorin's attempts to buy her father's property. Zorin has large plans for a piece of California real estate along the San Andreas Fault and in Silicon Valley, which he plans to flood, killing countless people and destroying the microchip industry. He will then substitute his own microchips--a mirror of the scheme of the megalomaniac Goldfinger in the Bond movie of that name, but with technology.
Zorin, an industrialist, flies about in a blimp. His right hand woman, May Day (Grace Jones), is a ruthless killer who proves herself a formidable opponent to Bond. This is also paralleled in Goldfinger with Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman), who, like May Day, beds down with Bond.
I saw A View to a Kill when it came out. As with its predecessor, Octopussy, I didn't like it, though I remember enjoying Tanya Roberts's lusciousness. She's blonde here (not with the reddish-brown hair she had in Charlie's Angels), her eyes are aquamarine, her voice hoarse and sexy; at twenty-nine years old she's the quintessence of gorgeousness.
Seeing the film again I appreciate it a great deal more. Being thirty-three years older, my critical faculties have sharpened. The movie has good pacing, isn't overlong, benefits from excellent action sequences, including one early on involving Bond chasing May Day up the stairs of the Eiffel Tower until she makes a spectacular base-jumping escape, followed by Bond's pursuit in three or four different modes of transportation. The climactic scene involving Zorin's blimp and the Golden Gate Bridge recalls Hitchcock's North by Northwest--the Mount Rushmore sequence--except that the sense of vertiginous peril is even greater due to the larger amount of on-site cinematography than in Hitchcock's film.
Zorin belongs to the small category of movie villains who, like the Joker played by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, "...just want to watch the world burn." Referred to as "a psychopath," Max Zorin is indifferent to the massive damage he causes. In one spectacular set piece, he machine guns dozens of his workers he no longer needs to complete his mad project, laughing while he kills. He's so horrible that his menacing murderous companion May Day comes to seem sympathetic by comparison.
Roger Moore's Bond gets through all right, of course, ends up taking a shower with Stacey Sutton. He quips, kills, fucks, punches, nearly gets killed a few times, puts an end to an irredeemable maniac. All in a few weeks' work, no big deal.
I've written before in this blog that Roger Moore is my favorite Bond. A View to a Kill demonstrates one key aspect as to why I prefer him more so than the others. Moore possessed the right combination of debonair gentleman spy mixed with a relatable sense of humor; relatable due to its frequent corniness. When Sean Connery, previously playing Bond, made quips after moments of danger, he didn't put it across as well as Moore did because the latter is funnier than Sean Connery. Moore somehow, through his personality, made this bizarre aspect of the Bond character work.
The Moore films possess a sense of humor not found in the others. Timothy Dalton, though he makes a good Bond, I think, isn't funny as Bond. Neither is the current Bond, Daniel Craig. While the action sequences in the Craig films have become more and more sophisticated as compared with those in the past, I wouldn't associate the word fun with these most recent films in the series. The Roger Moore Bond movies are fun, balanced too with excellent action sequences and the usual beautiful women characters, gadgets, wide-ranging locales, and fascinating villains.
Vic Neptune
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