A View to a Kill

(Here be spoilers if you are yet to see the James Bond movies...)

The Mission
James Bond (Roger Moore) recovers a coveted microchip from the body of agent 003 in Siberia. The microchip is traced back to industrialist wunderkind Max Zorin (Christopher Walken), who has been selling duplicates of his revolutionary microchips to the Soviets. It transpires that Zorin is a former KGB agent who has turned rogue, and Bond uncovers the madman's schemes to monopolize the microchip market via the destruction of Silicon Valley in San Francisco.

Jimmy Bond Yo!
Roger Moore is really starting to show his age now, his hair looks quite thin at times and he seems increasingly out of touch with the more modern direction the franchise seems to be heading in. He just doesn't have the same enthusiasm for the role anymore, and he apparently expressed some dismay during the making of this film (mostly at Zorin's psychotic nature).

Bond snowboards in the film's pre-credits sequence but later seems nervous and a bit of his depth when forced to partake in horsejumping (he still manages it though). He's such a connoisseur of fine wine that he can determine exact kinds of wine by taste and, unsurprisingly (for such a lifelong bachelor), he is revealed to be quite the cook and makes a rather snazzy quiche from leftovers (there's something about this that is just so quintessentially particular to Roger Moore's version of James Bond). He appears in a tux for what seems like the first time in ages, and expresses utter pop-eyed bemusement at Zorin's horse auction, and is more gentlemanly than ever when he meets Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts), resisting the temptation to bed her and opting to sit guard over her through the night instead.

When Bond realises what he's dealing with (IE. A psychopath), he doesn't even bother to try and reason with Zorin and keeps their interactions down to an efficient minimum. He's also prepared to give up his life with zero fuss in order to save Silicon Valley, and General Gogol (Walter Gotell) actually awards Bond the Order of Lenin for helping to take care of KGB business. Zorin's own personal database lists Bond as "usually armed, high dangerous".

Villainy
Max Zorin is a Nazi eugenics experiment that fell into the hands of the Soviet Union at the end of WWII. He is super intelligent but also rather unhinged, and worked for the Soviets as a KGB agent before turning rogue as an independent entrepeneur. His plans in A View to a Kill are codenamed 'Main Strike', and involve a massive synthetic earthquake that will allow him to extort and wrestle control of the burgeoning microchip industry in America. He's smart and confident, and doesn't engage with Bond in wit games when 007 goads him. Perhaps as a reference to his fascistic origins, he also has a fondness for airships.

Zorin is also a younger adversary than what Bond usually faces, and his sociopathy means that whilst he seems to have a fondness for his main henchwoman he doesn't actually have the ability to care for anyone, making him one of the most horrid villains yet to be seen in the franchise - especially when he massacres all of his own men by machine gun near the film's end! Unlike previous master villains, he's not motivated by idealism or even by financial gain, he's just nuts and his plans seem to have been formulated just to give himself something to do. Walken stands out as a better actor than those usually sought out for villain roles in the series too, his responses to the usual Bond cliches are always interesting and he adopts a more cultured and neutral accent as opposed to his usual New York inflections.

The other major villain is Zorin's henchwoman, May Day (Grace Jones), who is perhaps every bit as memorable. She's incredibly loyal to Zorin and obviously in love with him, they seem to be as much friends as colleagues - treating the world as their oyster with a typically 1980s 'greed is good' attitude. She's rather aggressive and androgynous, has a habit of hiding in the backseats of cars before murdering people, and operates as Zorin's bodyguard and sparring partner. Her fury overtakes her inclination for self-preservation when she realises that Zorin has left her for dead, and she goes out with a bang.


Buddies and Babes
I guess the main Bond girl here is Stacey Sutton (played rather uncovincingly by 80s sex symbol Tanya Roberts), heir to an oil dynasty who finds herself being bullied by Zorin (he wants to buy her company). She doesn't really figure into the main plot until around the film's halfway point, and is a throwback to blander traditional Bond girls after the more proactive female protagonists from Octopussy and For Your Eyes Only. Bond also hooks up with Pola Ivanova (Fiona Fullerton), a KGB agent that Bond treats as a mix between old friend and old enemy, and she appears in a few scenes prior to Sutton's introduction into the plot.

M (Robert Brown) is a complete non-entity in his scenes, and he, Q (Desmond Llewelyn) and Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) all accompany Bond to the horseraces to do some group spying. This film marks the last time that Maxwell will play Moneypenny. Bond is later assisted by Sir Godfrey (Patrick Macnee, riffing on his famed character from the 1960s television series The Avengers), a horse-expert who goes undercover as Bond's personal butler. Bond takes advantage of this role reversal to humoursly berate Sir Godfrey at every opportunity. Bond is also helped in San Francisco by CIA agent Chuck Lee (David Yip), a rather pointless character who is given very little to do.

Locations
A View to a Kill is primarily divided into two sections... the first is set in Paris, and features some stuntwork filmed on location at the Eiffel Tower, as well as scenes set at the extravagant Chateau de Chantilly. There's also some cabaret and recognisably Parisian street scenes. The second section of the film sees Bond return to America (his fifth film set there), this time to San Francisco. Most of the action takes place around the city's bay area and a mine in Silicon Valley, with a climax set on top of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Gadgets and Tricks of the Trade
Roger Moore's last Bond film sees him jampacked with gadgets... he uses a grappling hook to pull a man off a motorsled, has an electric shaver that doubles as a bug-detector, sunglasses that can see through tinted windows, a cassette tape filled with the sound of snoring, and a ring that can take photographs. He poses as James St. John-Smythe, a well-to-do playboy interested in buying horses at a prestigious horse auction run by Zorin, and also later adopts the name James Stockwyn whilst pretending to be a reporter for the London Times. Most resourcefully, he stays underwater and out of harm's way at one point by breathing in the air from the tires of his sunken car.

Licence to Kill
Two Soviet agents die when Bond fires a flaregun into the cabin of a helicopter over the Siberian tundra in the film's prologue. He doesn't kill again until the end sequence, knocking Zorin off the top of the Golden Gate Bridge and cutting his airship free of it's mooring so that it's two remaining (aggressive) passengers die in an explosion caused by their own dynamite.

Shag-Rate
007 is clearly post-coital with a Russian agent at the film's beginning, but I'm having trouble working out what her name was or who played her. It's highly likely that he then gets intimate with his rescuer, Kimberley Jones (Mary Stavin), during their five-day journey from Russia to the west. He also does his duty for Queen and country with the rather brutish May Day (which we thankfully don't see much of!) Shag number three for the film is with Soviet agent Pola Ivanova, with the two trying to outfox each other in a hotel spa tryst. And finally, Bond gets steamy in the shower with Stacey Sutton at the film's end.

Quotes
KIMBERLEY JONES (after rescuing Bond): Oh, commander Bond.
JAMES BOND: Call me James, it's five days to Alaska.

JAMES BOND: By the way, the name is St. John-Smythe. James St. John-Smythe.

JAMES BOND (as May Day takes her clothes off): I see you're a woman... of very few words.
MAY DAY: What's there to say?

POLA: Oh James, you haven't changed.
JAMES BOND: You have, you're lovelier than ever.

POLA (in spa): The bubbles tickle my... (she hears music) Tchaivoksky!

STACEY SUTTON: You can cook?
JAMES BOND: I've been known to dabble.

How Does It Rate?
Bond goes modern... with a Duran Duran theme song, snowboarding, microchip technology and a glow-light titles sequence, Roger Moore seems older than ever in perhaps the most '80s' of all the Bond films. As mentioned earlier in the review, Moore was at odds with some of the film's less-kitschy touches (such as Zorin's ruthlessness) and you can sense throughout that he isn't really enjoying himself as much as he used to. His time is clearly up, and he seems to know it - his old fashioned attitude is starting to hold the series back. My only other criticism would be the use of the Beach Boys song whilst Bond is snowboarding... it's an awkward and unneccessary comedic touch typical of the Moore Bond films, but thankfully this sort of thing is kept to a minimum for the rest of the film.

A View to a Kill wasn't very critically-favoured at the time of it's release but I actually like it a lot... it has a great adversary in Max Zorin (and Walken does well to go against the grain of the character where other actors would have overplayed his psychopathic nature) and some striking and entertaining supporting characters in May Day and Sir Godfrey. The locations are a little uninspired but for once the script picks up the slack, filling in Zorin's interesting backstory and feeding the intricate but believable mechanics of his plans to the audience piece by piece. A View to a Kill also continues the idea of a friendly rivalry between the Soviets and the west, I especially liked the fact that General Gogol sees Silicon Valley as a useful industry that inspires Soviet research through a healthy sense of competition. Somewhat bizarrely, Gogol has grown to be the most sympathetic continuing character the series has ever seen, even more so than the often crotchety Q!

One bit that stood out for me was when Stacey Sutton says "Shit"... it just didn't feel right in the context of the James Bond series. Another character later swears in similar fashion, and I'm thinking this might actually be the first Bond film to feature any direct expletives. Another sign of the changing times, I guess, so I can't really fault it too much. I loved the classical arrangement of Duran Duran's theme song that was used throughout the film, it reminded me of the way the iconic score from Live and Let Die was used, and it would have to go down as one of the better Bond theme songs (alongside those from Goldfinger, Live and Let Die and The Spy Who Loved Me). I also thought the epic, apocalyptic climax was pretty well-handled too. Roger Moore could have finished up his time as James Bond in worse ways, and despite it's 1980s touches A View to a Kill holds up pretty well.

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DIRECTOR: John Glenn
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum, with a title based on a short story by Ian Fleming.
KEY ACTORS: Roger Moore, Christopher Walken, Grace Jones, Tanya Roberts, Patrick Macnee, Fiona Fullerton, David Yip, Manning Redwood, Alison Doody, Willougby Gray, Desmond Llewelyn, Robert Brown, Lois Maxwell, Walter Gotell, Geoffrey Keen.

RELATED TEXTS:
- The Ian Fleming short story From a View to a Kill has very little to do with this film other than the fact that the title was inspired by it.
- Bond previously visited the U.S.A. in Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die and Moonraker.

AWARDS
Golden Globes - nominated Best Original Song (A View to a Kill)