4 / 10
Official trailer
Moore’s Farewell
A View to a Kill is Roger Moore’s last Bond film, and it’s the one where the series should have let him go several years earlier. Moore was fifty-seven, older than any Bond before or since, and he looks it. He’s too old for the fights, the romance and the stunts, and the film seems to know it, keeping him out of the action as much as it can and giving much of the excitement to stunt doubles and to its villains.
John Glen directed it, his third Bond film, and it came out in 1985. It made money, and it has a handful of good things in it: Christopher Walken, Grace Jones, a great theme song and a couple of spectacular locations. The rest is tired, silly and badly paced. I give it a 4. Moore himself said later that it embarrassed him and that he felt far too old for the role.
This one frustrates more than it thrills.
Moore’s charm deserved a proper send-off, and the producers handed him a film that hides him behind stunt doubles and lets Walken and Grace Jones steal every scene they’re in. I’m grateful those two are here, because without them I’m not sure I’d make it through the horse-racing stretch. Most of the 4 belongs to them.
There’s something sad about watching it now. Moore had been Bond for twelve years, and he had kept the series going through the seventies and early eighties with charm and wit. This film asks him to do the same things he did in 1973, a decade older, and the strain shows in every scene. The farewell never quite admits it’s saying goodbye.
Max Zorin
The villain is Max Zorin, a French industrialist and former KGB agent with a secret: he’s the product of a Nazi medical experiment in which pregnant women were given steroids to create super-intelligent children. The experiment made him brilliant and also psychotic, and Christopher Walken plays him as a giggling, cheerful, completely unhinged sociopath who enjoys killing people.
Walken is the best thing in the film. He’s strange and unsettling, and his scenes have an unpredictable energy the rest of the film lacks. The moment where he machine-guns his own miners, laughing, while they’re trapped underground, is shocking and memorable. He’s also one of the few Bond villains who seems mad.
The film doesn’t give him enough to do, its biggest flaw. Long, dull stretches separate his scenes, and his confrontations with Bond rarely generate the menace they should. I’d happily trade twenty minutes of horse business for more of Walken giggling at people. With a script that gave him room, Zorin could have ranked with the great Bond villains.
For Writers
A Nazi experiment created Zorin and made him brilliant and psychotic. The backstory is lurid, and it gives Walken licence to play him as mad.
When you write a villain, a strange, specific origin can give an actor or a reader a key to the character’s behavior, even if it’s never fully explored. Give your antagonist one unusual fact about how they came to be who they are. Let it color their behavior without explaining everything.
Operation Main Strike
Zorin’s plan is to destroy Silicon Valley. He intends to detonate explosives beneath a lake along the San Andreas and Hayward faults, triggering a massive earthquake that will flood the valley and destroy the companies that make the world’s microchips. Zorin, having stockpiled chips, will then control the global market, and he presents the plan to a group of wealthy investors aboard his airship, dropping the one who refuses to join him out of the door.
The idea anticipated how important microchips would become, and in that sense it was ahead of its time. It’s also a plan that depends on a complicated series of events, explained in a long, dull briefing scene, and the film never makes the audience feel the danger to the people of Silicon Valley the way it should.
The plan is very eighties, and it’s clever: a villain whose goal is a business monopoly, achieved through mass murder. The problem is the execution. The film spends so long on horse races, Paris chases and Zorin’s personal life that the plan feels like an afterthought, and by the time the climax arrives, the stakes never feel real.
May Day
Grace Jones plays May Day, Zorin’s lover and bodyguard, a physically imposing, silent killer who can lift men over her head and throw them across rooms. She’s terrifying, strange and completely unlike any Bond henchwoman before her, and Jones, a singer and model with an extraordinary presence, is magnetic. Every scene she’s in has a charge of danger and strangeness that the rest of the film can’t match.
May Day also has the film’s only real emotional arc.
When Zorin abandons her to die in the flooding mine, she turns against him, helps Bond and sacrifices herself to save Silicon Valley, riding a bomb out of the mine on a railway cart before it explodes. That’s the scene I’d point anybody to. It’s the most moving moment in the film, I think Jones deserves every second of it, and it stings a little that the henchwoman gets a better exit than the hero.
Her scenes with Moore are as odd as anything in the series. The two had reportedly little chemistry, and a love scene between them is awkward enough to be comic. Jones is far more interesting as an enemy than as a lover, and the film is at its best when it treats her as a formidable adversary.
For Writers
May Day turns on Zorin when he abandons her, and her sacrifice is the film’s only real emotional moment. A henchwoman gets the arc the hero doesn’t.
Look at the minor characters around your villain, and give one of them a reason to switch sides. Let their change of heart cost them something real. I’ve gone into this further in my piece on character arcs.
For a secondary character, giving them a moment that changes them can create emotion the main plot lacks. Sometimes the most moving arc belongs to someone else.
The Eiffel Tower
The best action sequence comes early. Bond chases May Day up the Eiffel Tower, where she has just assassinated a French detective at a restaurant, and she escapes by leaping off the top and parachuting into the Seine. Bond commandeers a Paris taxi and chases her across the city, losing the car’s roof and back half in the process.
The parachute jump from the tower was real, performed by a stuntman, and it’s a spectacular moment. The taxi chase is fun and silly, in the classic Moore style, with the car shedding pieces as it careers through Paris traffic and down a flight of steps, and for a while the film has real energy. It doesn’t last.
The Paris sequence is the last time the film feels like a classic Moore adventure, and I enjoy every silly second of that taxi shedding its roof. Then the story moves to a French chateau for a long section about horse racing and steroid-injected horses, and it loses me. The pace slows to a crawl, and I’d have cut that stretch in half without blinking. It takes the film a very long time to recover its momentum.
Stacey Sutton
Tanya Roberts plays Stacey Sutton, a state geologist whose family oil company Zorin has taken over. She’s the film’s romantic lead and its weakest element. The character spends much of the film screaming Bond’s name, falling over and being rescued, and her scenes with Moore, who was old enough to be her father, are uncomfortable.
The film tries to make her useful as a geologist who understands Zorin’s plan, and she has her moments, but the script mostly treats her as someone to be saved. After a series of Bond women who were agents, pilots and professionals, Stacey feels like a step backwards, a damsel from an older kind of adventure film.
Roberts isn’t to blame. She was given a thin part in a script that had little interest in her, opposite a leading man more than thirty years her senior. That’s a clear sign that the series had lost touch with its audience by the mid-eighties, and the Dalton films deliberately changed it.
San Francisco
The final act moves to San Francisco. A long sequence follows in which Bond and Stacey escape from a burning City Hall and are chased across the city in a stolen fire engine, with the ladder swinging wildly as Bond clings to it. It’s lively and a little absurd, and it goes on too long.
The finale takes place on the Golden Gate Bridge, where Zorin kidnaps Stacey in his airship and Bond hangs from the mooring rope as it drifts toward the bridge. The fight on top of the bridge’s tower, with Zorin swinging an axe, is the film’s most memorable image, and Zorin’s fall, laughing, is a fitting end for Walken’s character.
The bridge fight is well staged, with real stunt work high on the bridge’s cables. It’s the most exciting sequence in the second half. It also shows the film’s central problem one last time: the stunts are thrilling, and every close-up of Moore reminds the audience how much of the danger someone else is handling.
The Music
Duran Duran recorded the theme song, and I’m crazy about it. It’s a slick, dramatic, synth-driven pop song that became the only Bond theme to reach number one on the American charts, and it’s better than the film it belongs to. The band were huge at the time, and the song brought the series to a younger audience who had no interest in Roger Moore.
John Barry’s score is solid and atmospheric, weaving the Duran Duran melody through the action scenes, and it was one of his last for the series. He scored only one more Bond film, The Living Daylights, before leaving the series he had shaped for a quarter of a century. His departure marked the end of an era as surely as Moore’s did.
The film’s other musical moment is less fortunate. The pre-title sequence, set in Siberia, has Bond escaping Soviet soldiers by improvising a snowboard from a broken snowmobile, while a cover of the Beach Boys’ California Girls plays on the soundtrack. Few musical choices in the series are as jarring, and it sets the wrong tone for the whole film.
Moore’s Regret
Roger Moore spoke openly about A View to a Kill in later years. He said he was embarrassed to be in it, that he was too old for the part and that he found the scene of Zorin machine-gunning the miners too violent for his taste. He also said he was horrified to learn that he was older than Tanya Roberts’ mother.
This is a sad end for a Bond who had brought so much charm to the series. Moore’s lightness and wit had carried seven films, and by this one, the charm had turned into weariness.
He deserved a better farewell, and the producers should have found a new Bond sooner. Timothy Dalton arrived two years later, in The Living Daylights, and the series was the better for it.
For Writers
Moore was fifty-seven and visibly too old for the role, and the film suffers for it. A series that should have changed its lead waited too long.
Ask what your series character has left to discover. If the answer is nothing, it may be time for a change, a new challenge or an ending.
In a long series, it’s tempting to keep a successful formula going too long. Readers notice when a character has run out of new things to do.
Where A View to a Kill Falls Short
The age of the lead, the weakness of the script and the drag of the pace. The film has too many scenes of horse racing, too little tension and a romantic lead who is written as a liability. Its best elements, Walken, Jones and the song, can’t carry two hours of tired filmmaking.
It isn’t the worst Bond film. It has a strong villain, a memorable henchwoman, a great theme and two spectacular locations. It’s watchable in the way most Bond films are. It gets a 4. Watch it if you’re completing the series, or for Walken and Jones, and skip it otherwise.
Craft Note
Craft Note
A View to a Kill shows what happens when a series runs on habit. The locations, the gadgets and the formula are all in place, and the lead is exhausted, so the film goes through the motions.
Across a series, the formula that made earlier books work can become a trap. Each new instalment needs a reason to exist beyond repeating what worked before.
Before starting a new instalment, write down what your character will face that they’ve never faced before. If you can’t find anything new, change something fundamental.
The Verdict on A View to a Kill
Only for completists, or for Walken and Grace Jones. I land on a 4 because those two, the theme song and the Paris chase are real pleasures, and everything around them is a tired man being hauled through a script that didn’t care about him. Moore deserved a better ending than this, and the producers should have found the next Bond before they made him do it.
