MOORE BOND SEVEN: A VIEW TO A KILL

The final Roger Moore performance as Secret Agent 007 James Bond

year: 1985 rating: ***

The first and only time a disclaimer appears before the movie begins, telling us the villain isn’t based on anyone actual… Perhaps since the computer race was just starting, nerves could have been touched...

After all, Christopher Walken’s Zorin isn’t a bald cat lover yearning to take over the world with a simple little nuke… This guy has his sites set on Silicon Valley with microchips to – making a complicated plot point short – allow bad things to happen.

Roger Moore, surprisingly older than Sean Connery, looked young for his age… His sly boots in the eyes of a smitten Moneypenny and an ever-lecturing M is now old shoe. In fact, during one scene where the three are hanging out at a horse track, they all seem like contemporaries. But Roger Moore still pulls off the super agent with ease… Perhaps too much so…

At one point he tells fellow agent Tibbett (a new Felix type played by Patrick Macnee, probably to make Roger look young) that pretending to be someone else has become second nature… Moore's Bond has been around the block six times and this adventure is a breezy piece of cake, although there are some snags in the icing. 

Poster Artwork

The best parts take place at Zorin’s immense compound, a castle-like world onto itself, much like Drago’s lair in MOONRAKER…

Here’s where Bond gets to dangle the ladies and have his usual sneaking-around/close calls… Eventually cozing up to Stacey, played by SHEENA starlet Tanya Roberts, the plot shifts to San Francisco with a seismic warning and a hazardous oil tanker, where we experience a few neat action sequences along the way – but where’s our main villain?

In other films the heavy constantly reminds us of the danger Bond and the entire world faces… But a neglected Christopher Walken is out of the loop for so long that at one point, you might forget there’s any threat at all. This allows his wicked (and now extremely dated) henchwoman Grace Jones as May Day to do the dirty work.

A VIEW TO A KILL, complete with a catchy Duran Duran opening song and the usual variation on that particular theme, is a whimper to Moore's finale to the sublime bang of his previous venture, OCTOPUSSY, feeling like a big budget TV Movie of the Week… Begging for the next 007, Timothy Dalton, to dirty things up once again.