Film Vault – A View to a Kill

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A View to a Kill
UK / USA – 1985
Directed by – John Glen
Starring – Roger Moore, Christopher Walken, Tanya Roberts, Grace Jones
Color – 131 Mins – Rated PG for violence and sexual content
Format Reviewed – DVD (R1 – NTSC)
MGM

“Somebody will take care of you.“
“Oh… you’ll see to that personally, will you?“

THE FEATURE:

It was the end of an era. Roger Moore’s final outing as James Bond came in 1985 with the fourteenth Bond picture, A View to a Kill. By this point, even the man himself was quite openly announcing to anyone who would listen that he was getting a bit long in the tooth to be doing Bond films. Indeed, 1983’s Octopussy was originally intended to be his swan song as 007 (and he had to be convinced to come back for that one), but the producers at EON, having failed to come up with an adequate replacement at the time, wooed Sir Roger back for one final hurrah. It’s a shame, especially for fans of Roger Moore like myself, that the film was perhaps the worst of his seven outings as Bond (yes, even the ridiculously over-the-top Moonraker is a more enjoyable action/comedy, in my humble opinion).

Let me clear something up beforehand though. I do not dislike A View to a Kill because the leading man looks ‘too old’, as is the common complaint about the final two Roger Moore films. Personally, I’ve always preferred Bond to be a seasoned veteran than some young pup, anyway. This is always how I envisioned the character looked when reading the later half of Fleming’s novels and virtually all of the Gardner books, which seemingly picked up 007’s career where Fleming left off. If one can buy a 60-something Sean Connery kicking all manner of arse in The Rock, I don’t see why we can’t accept an action hero in his 50’s, as was the case with Moore in AVTAK. He looks fine, people – although I can definitely see why some believe the romantic scenes to be a bit too Hugh Hefner in tone for their liking. Some of the actresses involved were young enough to be Moore’s daughters!

No, I dislike AVTAK because it just seems like a lazy, wasted effort. It’s not the worst Bond ever made, but it’s certainly the nadir of Bond in the 1980’s. The plot, which blatantly borrows from the Goldfinger formula, sees Bond sent on a mission to stop evil industrialist Max Zorin (Christopher Walken) from destroying the Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, there’s a great deal of Swiss cheese sized holes punched into the story. I tend to have a certain degree of leeway with Bond films when it comes to loose story threads or potential holes, but AVTAK’s plot is so poorly executed it becomes distracting. The sequences in France, and the entirety of the horse-racing subplot, are altogether tangential to the main story. Apparently, Zorin is using his microchips in the horses he owns to release adrenaline into their systems so they will win their races… and whether you think that is totally ridiculous or not is neither here nor there. Once the action shifts to San Francisco, the whole horse racing lark is dropped and never heard from again. Why bother then? The whole film could have just been set in San Francisco if we take out all the unnecessary padding.

The direction of John Glen also causes me to shake my head a little. Glen, who had worked on the Bonds since the 60’s and earned a promotion with every film, moving from editor to 2nd unit director, was named the director proper of For Your Eyes Only in 1981 and would go on to direct all of the Bonds in the 1980’s. Some criticize his style, deeming it to be a bit unimaginative for their taste, but I’ve never had that much of a problem with directors who choose to be, well, direct, as opposed to arty. The film industry needs its share of, shall we say, workman-like directors, and I mean that as no insult to Mr. Glen (who really hasn’t done all that much since Bond anyway, save for Iron Eagle III in the early 90’s… yikes). However, he must have gone off the boil for his third outing as director, because the way he chose to film certain portions of AVTAK, especially the big action pieces, is just shocking. Or maybe it was just the editor’s fault, I don’t know… but why are you filming extreme close-up shots of stuntmen (who only vaguely look like Roger Moore from behind in the first place), and lingering on their facial features for precious seconds at a time? This is not in any way meant to be a knock against the stunt team. I have a lot of admiration for the driving skills of Rémy Julienne for example, and his jumping of a Renault up a ramp and onto the top of a moving bus in this film is nothing short of outstanding – but we don’t need a shot of his face for crying out loud! You can clearly tell he’s wearing a crash helmet with a little mop of brown hair glued to the top of it, there’s not even a lame attempt to try and hide the fact that it’s not Bond himself performing his own stunts. Of course, the audience isn’t stupid, we all know that talented stunt performers do these sort of things in action movies, but we’re also willing to suspend our disbelief when watching a movie too. We rely on the directors and editors to do their magic and make us believe that it really is the same character in the film doing their tremendous feats of derring-do. A View to a Kill has got to be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen when it comes to these sort of gaffes. I would honestly be more forgiving if I saw a boom mic slip into shot or some blatantly exposed wires in the background.

The cast is either terribly miscast or entirely dispensable – Christopher Walken is a natural when you think of movie villains, but for whatever reason, the character of Zorin just doesn’t do it for me. He’s supposed to be a Nazi concentration camp experiment gone wrong (or right in the eyes of his ‘father’, Dr. Mortner), a rogue KGB agent, and a complete psychopath. In other words, you wouldn’t want to mess with this fella. Yet he looks like a dandy wuss with a stupid hairdo, a cross between Elton John circa 1975 and Siegfried Fischbacher of Siegfried & Roy fame. I can’t take anything he does seriously. The fact that he needs Grace Jones of all people to act as his bodyguard is even more baffling to me. Obviously this is intended as a cute reversal of all the hulking Jaws and Oddjob henchmen seen in previous Bonds, but why waste Grace Jones with such a role? The character of May Day gets about five lines of dialogue, and in the ultimate cop out, is turned into a goodie just before the end. It makes you wonder if all James Bond is good for is sleeping with women and getting them to hate their boyfriends or employers…

Tanya Roberts is cast as one of the Bond girls, Stacey Sutton, a *snicker* geologist working for the state of California who supposedly holds a grudge against Zorin because he bought out her grandfather’s oil business. Look, I’m sorry if I come across as a complete dickhead here, but the rather vapid Ms. Roberts fooled nobody in this film. There’s a scene where she’s having dinner with Bond where you can literally see the actress struggling and stumbling in an effort to remember her lines. It’s hard to watch, although just a shade more acceptable than the seemingly brain-dead Denise Richards playing a nuclear physicist in The World is Not Enough. The only worthy Bond girls here are the smaller roles – May Day’s assistant, Jenny Flex, played by the gorgeous Irish actress Alison Doody (who is likely more remembered for her turn as the twisted Nazi-sympathizer Dr. Schneider in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) and Pola Ivanova, the KGB agent who has a brief interlude with Mr. Bond, played by Fiona Fullerton. It would probably have been a more interesting film if these were the two leading ladies, instead of being stuck in support roles.

The only worthwhile addition to the principal cast is that of Patrick Macnee as Sir Godfrey, who works in cahoots with Bond in the first half of the film. There’s plenty of humor in the scenes where Sir Godfrey has to pretend to be Bond’s unappreciated manservant. Not only is it a silly fantasy of spymania fans to get to see Simon Templar and John Steed working together, but Moore and Macnee do have a genuine chemistry when on-screen together that could have threatened to turn this picture into more of a ‘buddy cop’ type film than a solo mission. Elsewhere, David Yip (famous for his leading role in The Chinese Detective) shows up as Agent Lee of the CIA, a role which shows some promise, but his character is killed off before the part really has the chance to go anywhere.

Still, to be fair to the film, I did say it’s not my pick for the worst Bond ever. There are a few things that keep it out of the turkey pile completely, including some very Bondian locations, from the scenic Chateau of Chantilly in France to the Golden Gate Bridge. If you’ve watched any of the films in the Dirty Harry series or 48 Hrs, you’ll know that if you set a movie in San Francisco, a chase through the hills is mandatory. AVTAK ups the ante here by including a rather unique firetruck chase, which is most assuredly one of those moments where the Monty Norman theme music should instaneously swell up. Speaking of music, AVTAK also saw the welcome return of John Barry, absent from the series since 79’s Moonraker. Barry’s score included a reworking of his main composition from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which is particularly fitting during the pre-title sequence which features Bond skiing and later snowboarding through Siberian tundra. It’s also impossible to talk about this film without mentioning the stellar theme tune, composed by Barry and the band who would perform the song, Duran Duran, who achieved a monumental peak in popularity around this period of time. For his efforts with the scoring of A View to a Kill, John Barry received a well deserved Golden Globe nomination.

THE DVD:

For reasons unknown to me, A View to a Kill’s Special Edition DVD actually had worse sound and picture than the Octopussy SE DVD, a film which came out two years before AVTAK. I can’t exactly put my finger on why this is (it’s not a production fault with the DVD), my only guess is that a different type of camera was used in AVTAK. Regardless, for this reason alone, I would recommend the Ultimate Edition over the SE, as the picture has been cleaned up tremendously. Although if you already own the SE, don’t buy again unless you’re some kind of diabolical diehard.

The usual ‘making of’ documentary is one of the many worthwhile special features, in addition to an audio commentary spliced together with comments from John Glen and others, including Roger Moore himself. TV spots and theatrical trailers are also featured, but the best feature is the infamous deleted scene, called The Jailhouse, which should have definitely been left in the film. It’s a classic!

OVERALL:

While he still manages to pull off his usual style, charm, and humor, it is unfortunate that Roger Moore had such a lackluster farewell to Bond. Equally disappointing is the talents of Chris Walken being wasted with such a dire script. Although the film does seem to have its share of fans, I can’t help but feel rather ambivalent towards it.

Film – 2 / 5  DVD – 4 / 5

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