Bond-a-thon: A View to a Kill

It's always a shame when a great villain is wasted in a mediocre Bond movie. A View to a Kill is a mess of a movie. When it works, it works really well, but when it misses the mark, it really misses. With tonal shifts that move sharply from campy humor to intense violence and back again, one can't help but feel a little bit of whiplash. But a truly villainous Christopher Walken, a older but not quite out yet Roger Moore, and a killer Duran Duran theme song somehow make the whole thing still rather watchable to me. 

James Bond is on a mission in Iceland to recover the body of another fallen agent and acquire a small microchip he had recovered. He is discovered by several Russian soldiers in the area, which leads us into another ski chase, which then moves to snowmobiles before finishing with Bond snowboarding down a hill on a broken ski from the snowmobile, to the tune of The Beach Boys' "California Girls" no less (a touch I still can't decide if it's terrible or brilliant).  Upon his return to MI-6, it is discovered that the microchip recovered is a revolutionary design that would withstand the blast of an Electromagnetic Pulse. Upon comparison by Q (played by Desmond Llewellyn), they find the microchip recovered from the Russians matches ones currently in production by Max Zorin (played by Christopher Walken). Suspecting the company has a leak, Bond is tasked with infiltrating Zorin's company and trying to smoke out the mole. With Sir Godfrey Tibbett (played by Patrick MacNee), they starting looking into Zorin's company and Zorin himself, along with his companion Mayday (played by Grace Jones). In the course of their investigation, they discover Zorin is planning to flood Silicon Valley completely by manipulating both the Hayward and San Andreas fault lines, thereby cornering the microchip market all at once.

There's a lot to like about A View to a Kill. It's got an interesting, if absurd, storyline with a truly nasty villain to match with Max Zorin. Roger Moore is clearly officially too old for the role of James Bond, but gives a spirited performance nonetheless. Christopher Walken dominates the film though as the psychotic, energetic and strangely charismatic Zorin. I just love his performance here and it's almost enough to make the movie worth watching by itself. It has some fun and inventive action sequences, with both the Eiffel Tower jump and the climax atop the Golden Gate Bridge being notable standouts. John Barry gives the film another great score as well, sampling and updating some of his themes from On Her Majesty's Secret Service throughout. Duran Duran gives one of the all time great Bond title songs for this film as well. 

But at the same time, the film does have some big flaws. The age discrepancy between Bond and his love interests in the film have grown so wide that they are young enough to be his daughter, leaving a slightly uncomfortable feeling to the film. There is also Stacey Sutton (played by Tanya Roberts), a California State Geologist. Despite initially greeting Bond with a shotgun, she turns out to be one of the most useless Bond girls ever. She's so clueless,  Zorin's zeppelin is able to sneak up on her. She's shrill and annoying in almost every scene she's in, which is thankfully very few. Grace Jones as Mayday is also a curious character. For much of the film she is quite an intimidating and effective assassin for Zorin, but a late in the film attempt to redeem her character didn't quite fly for me given how much of a monster she had been for the bulk of the run time. There are also a glaring plot element that never quite made sense to me. Bond is able to get an invitation to Zorin's horse auction through Sir Godfrey Tibbett, but when they arrive Tibbet is posing as Bond's valet. This never really made sense to me. Surely, there would be someone there who would recognize Tibbet and wonder why the hell he was Bond's valet, especially since it was Tibbet that secured the invitation? Couldn't Bond just have gone as Tibbet's guest? 

Still, despite it's flaws, A View to a Kill is a reasonably decent Bond adventure. It falls somewhere in the middle for me in terms of overall ranking of the series. It kept me entertained in it's preposterous, comic book way, which is an improvement over the previous film, Octopussy. Does it rank among the best of Bond? No, of course not. But I did enjoy it for what it was.