In a fast chase high atop the Eiffel Tower, James Bond, in 1985's A VIEW TO A KILL, climbs the stairs in pursuit of the killer known as May Day. Just when he's about to capture her, she takes a flying leap to escape. With a striped parachute to break her fall, she glides easily to the ground.
The killer, played by the strikingly tall and ultra-macho Grace Jones, has jet-black hair shaped like "Winged Victory." With Jones's rippling muscles and her sinister and sexy scowl, her acting is best when left to the physical. When she speaks, her limitations as an actress become immediately obvious.
Roger Moore, still at the peak of his Bond form, shows no sign of tiring of the role. (Okay so he's not and never was Connery's equal.) But this is Moore's last outing as the world's greatest secret agent.
Christopher Walken plays a rich Swiss industrialist named Max Zorin, a mean blonde with a big head of hair, who lives in a palace that the French kings would have envied. Even with all his riches, he scams to fix horse races so that an inferior bred horse can win.
Zorin's biggest scheme includes the ending of "the domination of Silicon Valley." So how is he going to wipe out the heartland of American chipdom? Well, just remember it's in California. You can figure out the basic idea.
Walken is surprisingly underutilized and restrained in the film. Why director John Glen didn't let Walken cut loose remains a mystery?
One particularly imaginative sequence in the picture has Bond about to be drowned in a sinking car. He stays alive by sucking the air from one of the tires until the bad guys leave the shore, figuring he must have died.
Bond films delight through their travel views of luscious locales as well as their action. In this episode, in addition to Paris, we have a magnificently sunny San Francisco, albeit mainly the touristy Fisherman's Wharf area. Dozens of San Francisco police black-and-whites bite the dust when they chase a hijacked fire truck with Bond and his female companion, played by Tanya Roberts, going across the city's hills and bridges.
With a strong cast of supporting characters, including Walken, Jones, and Patrick Macnee from "The Avengers" and with Moore in fine form, the movie, nevertheless, is often a snoozer. The action sequences from steeple chases to fast inflating dirigibles are imaginative, but the story never establishes any rhythm or builds much sustained energy. The net result is a story that has us yearning for those much older Bond films that never lost your attention.
A VIEW TO A KILL runs 2:06. It is rated PG for comic violence and sexual innuendo and would be fine for kids around nine and up.
My son Jeffrey, age 9, gave it **, saying it was too hard to follow. His favorite part was Q's little robot.
By : Steve Rhodes
Source: rec.art.movies.reviews newsgroup
Rating: 0
This is one of the weaker James Bond movies out there, but it's still not that bad, if you don't mind a movie with a running time of over 130 minutes. It would have been better with about thirty minutes of boredom cut out and if, perhaps, the director had coaxed a better performance out of Christopher Walken. I like the guy and think he's a decent actor and definitely one of the strangest individuals on the planet (good to know I'm not alone), but as villain Zorin he's way too bland.
Roger Moore makes his seventh and final appearance as James Bond, and I think it was about time for the guy to step down. In this one, he just doesn't seem too enthusiastic about being the single most indestructible babe magnet on the planet. Of course, I wouldn't be able to manfacture much enthusiasm either if I had to sleep with Grace Jones. That's a nasty-looking woman right there.
The plot this time has Walken as an ambitious microchip manufacturer who plans to create an earthquake that will destroy Silicon Valley, eliminating his competition. Maybe that's where Bill Gates got the idea to send the CEO's of Atari and Commodore 64 to sleep with the fishes. Grace Jones, the least feminine woman out there (Sandra Bernhard being the runner-up in that competition) is his musclebound assistant, May Day. Her name, of course, comes from the phrase shouted by every man who's ever seen her topless. And as usual, it's up to James Bond to stop everything.
A VIEW TO A KILL moves slowly and is acted without much eagerness or excitement, yet has some merit as a Bond movie. It's got all the violence and chase scenes, some that are fun, some absurd. The sequence with Bond hanging from a fire truck ladder falls into the latter category (Latter. Ladder. Get it?), as does the entire last twenty minutes of the movie, which I'll just say involves a dirigible and the Golden Gate bridge. Still, nearly every James Bond movie is better than this one, which should be watched only by true fans of the series.
By : Andrew Hicks
more 007: A View to a Kill reviews: <<prev 1 2next>>
