1985 - A View To A Kill
Alternate Title - A Horse To Ride
PG - 131 minutes
Director - John Glen
Stars - Roger Moore, Christopher Walken, Tanya Roberts
The movie opens with the producers covering their asses by letting us all know that Zorin does not portray a real company or person. Good thing they told me because my Aunt Zorin would have been crushed.
Yet again we are forced to watch James Bond ski. The twist this time is that Bond is wearing Elton John glasses as he does it. If you edited all of the skiing footage from the Bond movies, it would probably equal the average running time of most of the movies. After abandoning his skis, James switches to a snowboard and does a wicked face kick to the bad guys. A Beach Boys song immediately starts playing as if he were surfing. It makes no sense, whatsoever. Bond then gets into his iceberg submarine. Yes, it’s as stupid as it sounds.
Moneypenny. This is the last time we see Lois Maxwell as Moneypenny. I assume it’s because the character finally committed suicide after three decades of Bond fucking with her head and heart. Perhaps it’s for the best because she’s an elderly lady in this movie and they even dress her like your grandma going to Sunday mass. I expected her to pinch Bond’s cheeks and give him a Werther’s Original.
The villain in this one is Zorin (not a real company or person) and his sidekick is Mayday. That was a long sentence to say that the villains are Christopher Walken and some black chick. I seriously can’t get over how elderly Moneypenny looks in this one. Roger Moore doesn’t look like a young man either. Picture how old Christopher Walken looks now; Moneypenny looks like his mother. They even pair Bond with an even older man so that he looks young by comparison.
The awesome car chase scenes from, For Your Eyes Only are a thing of the past as Bond steals a taxi while in Paris and it turns downright retarded. He does what can basically be called vehicular parkour which is an oxymoron but it’s pretty much what happens. He even ramps the car off of a trailer and gains more air than he would if he were going 300 miles an hour. The car is even cut in half while Bond drives around in the front half of it before jumping onto a cruise ship. I consider the movie, Ronin to have the greatest car chase scenes of all time. That movie takes place in Paris and so does this one however this one I now consider the be on the opposite side of the spectrum from Ronin. It’s anti-Ronin.
Brace yourself because most of this movie is about horse racing. Specifically, because Zorin (not a real company or name) is a dirty cheater at horse racing. Also he’s into some weird shit, sexually speaking. He appears to be involved in some mix of martial arts and rape-fantasy role playing.
45 minutes into this movie I realized where I have seen this plot before. Bond pretends to be interested in buying a horse from eccentric millionaire Zorin (not a real company or person) but that’s just a cover for his true cause. Zorin surrounds himself with servants. His right-hand man is a black woman. Bond is in the kill or capture business. Tarantino basically took this plotline for his movie, Django Unchained.
Love Ben Hur? Watch as Bond ruins it in an epic horse riding scene. While chasing Christopher Walken around a track, Zorin (not a real company or person) has his henchmen push buttons that make every jump seem bigger or longer to every other jockey. If it’s meant to be a real cheat then it’s horrible because it’s painfully obvious when the pieces are moving. If they don’t physically see the bars being raised then they sure as hell will hear the high-pitched electronic whirring of the machinery.
Basically, Walken’s plan is the ruin the Silicon Valley so that his company will control and privately distribute microchips. The plan’s name? Operation Main Strike. Alright, he’s not great at naming yet. We find this out and then have to listen to Zorin (not a real company or person) and Mayday complete each other’s sentence as they have the titular line of the movie while looking out over San Francisco aboard a blimp.
Huge chunks of this movie are simply Bond sleuthing around, trying to find out information on Zorin (not a real company or person). I could understand a couple short scenes of this but some of them go on for an excessively long period of time. It felt like they were just trying to pad the screen time for some sort of contractual agreement with the studio so they had Bond just look at paperwork at a painfully slow pace. Also, this movie has some of the worst ADR ever. Most of it is Bond throwing in a pointless joke, off screen.
Bond ends up foiling the plan after Christopher Walken shoots like 80 people with a machine gun which was pretty awesome to watch. Walken escapes in the blimp but Bond grabs a rope that is attached to it. Walken decides to swing the rope into the Golden Gate Bridge but Bond magically wraps the rope around the bridge with apparent superhuman strength and keeps the blimp tied to the bridge. Walken ends up falling off of the Zorin (not a real company or person) blimp. The blimp explodes.
This movie then ends with a super creepy scene where Q is controlling a drone that looks like Johnny 5’s child. Q only uses the drone to watch Bond fuck a girl in the shower while he sits alone in the back of a van. I don’t want to know what kind of masturbatory aids Q has fixed up in his years as quartermaster. They don’t call him Quartermasturbator behind his back for nothing.
Overall, this is a pretty good one. I wish it was about 45 minutes shorter because long stretches felt like a marathon to get through. Also, the car chase scenes were brutal. I did enjoy Christopher Walken as Zorin even though it was not a real company or person. Neither is Walken. His blonde hair and giant glasses made him look more like a child predator than a villain. He’s basically a predator in a giant white blimp instead of a dirty van. Good movie, too much horse riding and not enough cow bell.
P.S. - Goodbye forever, Roger Moore. May the coming years bring you more horrifying skin deformities. I will miss you as I venture into the Dalton additions to Bond cannon. I shall tell my children what you have done here. At least you can say that your version of Bond never raped a lesbian in a barn. That’s more than Connery can say!