A View to a Kill
Please have some respect for Roger Moore, who died on May 23rd, 2017. May he rest in peace.
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 This is what happens when you get your grandfather to play a 30ish secret agent.
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A View to a Kill is a 1985 British-American spy film and the fourteenth James Bond movie, released in 1985. It is also the seventh and final movie in the series to star Roger Moore in the title role. The film received mixed to negative reviews from critics and is widely considered to be one of the worst James Bond movies ever made, alongside Die Another Day and The Man with the Golden Gun.
Plot
A silicon chip is captured from the Soviets and found to be identical to a prototype British design capable of withstanding the intense electromagnetic radiation of a nuclear blast. The British suspect industrialist Max Zorin of leaking details of the design to the Russians. When James Bond is sent to investigate he finds that Zorin is stockpiling silicon chips and mysteriously drilling near the San Andreas fault.
Why This Film Should Dance Into The Fire
- One of the movie's biggest criticisms was Roger Moore was still playing Bond at age 57 (he was 45 when he was first cast as Bond in Live and Let Die, the oldest Bond at the time of their debut, although at least back then he had the excuse of looking younger than he was), despite the fact that, while the movie didn't pinpoint Bond's exact age, it was still obviously treating Bond as being younger than his actor was. Sean Connery himself said "Bond should be played by an actor 35, 33 years old. I'm too old. Roger's too old, too!"
- The scene where Max Zorin just casually mows down his miners with an AK47 is WAY too violent for a PG movie and it became one of the reasons why Roger Moore left the role of 007.
- The sets look unbelievably cheep.
- Very slow pacing.
- Unfunny humor.
- The film can be way too camp at times.
- Stacey Sutton, while beautiful to look at, can be very screamy at times.
- Sequelitis: Widely considered one of the worst Bond films, with Roger Moore's advanced age being one of the most frequent criticisms (even Moore himself thought he should have been replaced with a younger actor at least two films prior).
- Padding:
- The events in Paris only further the plot by informing Bond of Zorin's horse racing, something which MI6 could have found out for him.
- As noted by some, aside from the use of microchips in Max Zorin's scheme to implant them into his horses to enhance their stamina, his horse races are largely detached from his actual plan in Silicon Valley (and feel like something from a Dick Francis novel), yet it takes up nearly the entire first act of the movie.
- The two KGB agents investigating Zorin's ties to Silicon Valley. The man is captured and killed by Zorin and May Day, while the woman escapes and turns out to be an old flame of Bond's, Pola Ivanova. Even though this is how Bond finds out about Zorin's plan to destroy Silicon Valley, the scene with Pola goes longer than necessary since she never appears again. The scene was intended to feature Anya Amasova, but Barbara Bach declined to reprise the role, and rather than scrapping the scene, we spend ten minutes watching Bond get it on with a random girl from his past.
- The title is a typo as it's supposed to say "From a View to a Kill".
Good Qualities
- Good score by John Barry, plus the Duran Duran theme song.
- Christopher Walken gives a great portrayal of Max Zorin.
- "Don't worry. It's all wrapped up."
- Some of the action scenes are decent.
- Decent cinematography.
- There's enough goofiness and nonsensical bits on display here that some consider the film "so bad, it's good".
- Roger Moore and Patrick Macnee have great chemistry and the scenes of them pretending to be master and servant are hilarious.
- May Day is one of the most memorable henchmen in the series and Grace Jones has considerable presence.
Reception
This was the first Bond film with a premiere outside the UK, opening on 22 May 1985 at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts. The British premiere was held on 12 June 1985 at the Odeon Leicester Square cinema in London. It achieved a box office gross of US$152.4 million worldwide with $50.3 million from the United States and Canada. On its opening weekend in the US and Canada it grossed $13.3 million from 1,583 theaters over the four-day Memorial Day weekend, the biggest opening for a Bond film ever at the time, but not enough to beat Rambo: First Blood Part II which was number one for the weekend with a gross of $25.2 million from 2,074 theaters. Although its box office reception was excellent, the film's critical response was mostly mixed. On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 38% based on reviews from 60 critics, which is the lowest rating for the Eon-produced Bond films on the website. On Metacritic the film has a score of 40% based on reviews from 20 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
One of the most common criticisms was that Roger Moore was 57 at the time of filming – and had visibly aged in the two years that had passed since Octopussy. The Washington Post's critic said "Moore isn't just long in the tooth—he's got tusks, and what looks like an eye job has given him the pie-eyed blankness of a zombie. He's not believable anymore in the action sequences, even less so in the romantic scenes—it's like watching women fall all over Gabby Hayes." Sean Connery declared that "Bond should be played by an actor 35, 33 years old. I'm too old. Roger's too old, too!" In a December 2007 interview, Roger Moore remarked, "I was only about four hundred years too old for the part."
Moore also said that, at the time, A View to a Kill was his least favourite Bond film, and mentioned that he was mortified to find out that he was older than his female co-star's mother. He was quoted as saying "I was horrified on the last Bond I did. Whole slews of sequences where Christopher Walken was machine-gunning hundreds of people. I said 'That wasn't Bond, those weren't Bond films.' It stopped being what they were all about. You didn't dwell on the blood and the brains spewing all over the place".