A View to a Kill

What's the campiest, most ridiculous James Bond movie of them all? Several contenders, but my money's on 1985's A VIEW TO A KILL.  A film that inspires as many cringes as laughs and thrills.  It was Roger Moore's final go-round as agent 007, and boy does he look exhausted.  He had not reached sixty during filming, but appeared as if he were the picture of Dorian Gray.  Watching him doing the usual globetrotting and bed hopping earns more concern than awe.  I spent a moment or two wondering if Moore would actually suffer injury when he was shown in the sack with Grace Jones.

The plot takes Bond from Siberia to Paris to San Francisco as he uncovers a plot to destroy Silicon Valley in a particularly grisly fashion.  The villain is Max Zorin (Christopher Walken), a government contractor whose company is also involved in fixing horse races with implantable adrenaline chips.  He's a real baddie, one we learn has been more or less created pharmacologically by a Nazi scientist/physician!  Walken hams it up in what is to me one of his worst performances.  Be it mowing down coal miners with automatic machine guns while laughing or doing an exaggerated pronunciation of how a European would say the word "schedule", the actor delivers a truly embarrassing take on villany in the Ian Fleming inspired world.  I think it was Roger Ebert who once said that Bond movies were only as good as their villains.  Uh oh.

But the rest of the movie fares little better.  Preposterous storylines are always part of the fun, but veteran 007 screenwriters Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum, who contribute an entirely new story, probably should've mined another Fleming plot instead.  A VIEW TO A KILL gets sillier and sillier as it plays, quite a feat after, early in the movie, a chase in Paris is highlighted by Bond's car being split into two perfect halves.  The staircase banister slide is also pretty noteworthy.  The police and fire truck chase in SF is dumb but offers some low grade excitement.  Tanya Roberts, improbably playing a geologist, is a very weak Bond girl.  She and Moore have little spark, and their coupling is somewhat creepy.  As for Miss Jones, well, she's always a considerable presence, but the script ultimately lets her down, too.

As stated earlier, Moore hung up the Walther PK after this movie, and he spent subsequent years damning it and his performance.  It's unfortunate that his swan song was such a dopey enterprise.  The preceding, 1983's OCTOPUSSY, was also fairly silly (007 dons a clown outfit at one point) but would've been a better send off.  Moore was the Bond of which I was first aware and even if he wasn't the best one, he had a suaveness and elan that gave him ownership of Fleming's creation for many years.

Honestly, A VIEW TO A KILL, which sports that great Duran Duran title song, is still a lot of fun.  The typically lavish Eon production offers eye pleasing vistas and the pace is right as always.  Things just got a bit too broad, edging into self parody at times.  A more sober take would be necessary for the next Bond.