In one sense, A View to a Kill could be seen as the one-film-too-late in the death rattle of Roger Moore as James Bond. By this time, Moore’s stunt double spends more time on screen than he does and the sexual-innuendo filled lines are more reminiscent of strangers luring children with candy than a man in his prime slaking his sexual fulfillment.
Of course, Connery went through the same motions, so we can’t knock Moore for being the first or the only. And, truth be told, A View to a Kill is still more entertaining than films like Moonraker or For Your Eyes Only. Like he did in Octopussy – but unlike he did in the aforementioned For Your Eyes Only – director John Glen offers a noir look at the James Bond hero. Gone are the perfunctory females and here is the powerful May Day (Grace Jones) as the female antagonist who one-ups and hooks up with villain Max Zorin (Christopher Walken). Also present is Bond’s foil Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts), who, while mostly a typical Bond girl, has some acting chops that make us want to watch her on screen.
In addition, there are two things to admire about this film. First, is its prophetic look at the power of Silicon Valley, the den and uterus of the all-powerful microchips – which are, anachronistically about one-thousand times the size of current microchips, but I digress. As modern news rhuminates on whether or not Apple has skirted paying billions of dollars in taxes to remain at the technological apex, A View to a Kill foreshadows the cynical greed that revolves around the power of progressive technology.
In short, the millionaire Max Zorin wants to eliminate most of Silicon Valley via a flood of Noah proportions, thus ensuring that Zorin and his microchips are the only ones available on the open market. Think of it as a an act of God who plays the stock market. Today, this would be tricky to accomplish because of the all-powerful and seemingly ever-present-in-everything you purchase, Cloud. But in 1985 the loss of anything technologically related was a wash. The disappearance of a computer was the erasure of information. There were no thumb drive backups.
The second thing to like about A View to a Kill is its use of a star as the prime villain, and I don’t mean Grace Jones – though we can give the woman her due as a singer. I’m talking about Christopher Walken. While he might be a walking, talking caricature of himself now (and most likely having fun being such), he was an Oscar winner only a few short years before this Bond film came calling. Aside from Telly Savalas, who was in the Bond film that is not necessary to mention…ever, Walken was – to that date – the biggest star to play the villain, and, I think this is what overtakes the plastic surgery-aided wide eyes of James Bond. Walken is a most believable villain. His pale skin coupled with strangely blond hair in this film is both an uncanny reminder of the tensions between the United States and Germany at this time, and the creepiness that every villain aspires to obtain. Walken just happens to possess it naturally.
