Mario's Musings (Quarantine and April Fools Edition): A View to a Kill
I’m writing this on April 1st, and I’m going to be serious: I love this movie. It’s terrible, but it’s amazing all at the same time. Released in 1985, A View to a Kill was Sir Roger Moore’s last outing as James Bond, and widely considered one of the worst of all time.
Some backstory: at the time in 2007, I was only a minor 007 fan, my knowledge being mostly from the GoldenEye video game on the Nintendo 64, some of the Pierce Brosnan movies, and the first Daniel Craig movie, which had just come out in 2006. I loved the opening title sequence, with the theme song performed by Chris Cornell, so I decided to go back and look at all the other opening title sequences to see what they were like.
Of course, there are great theme songs like “GoldenEye” by Tina Turner, “License to Kill” by Gladys Knight, “The Living Daylights” by a-ha, and “Live and Let Die” by Paul McCartney, but there was one above all that stood out to me: “A View to a Kill” by Duran Duran. Yes, the same band that gave us songs like “Rio” and “Hungry like the Wolf”. Outside of those songs, Duran Duran never got a second listen from me, but after that song, I became a legitimate fan of the band.
And while the theme song is amazing (seriously, listen to that and tell me you don’t want to rock out)… the movie is anything but. Well, it is, but for all the wrong reasons. First of all, it’s a good thing this was Moore’s last time playing Bond, because at the time of filming, he was 58 years old. Fifty-eight. Two years away from SIXTY. To be fair, he was 45 years old when he played Bond for the first time in Live and Let Die, but seriously, they could have picked up Timothy Dalton a lot sooner (highly underrated Bond, for the record). Second, everything that follows that factoid ties into the ridiculousness of this movie. The beginning of this film has Bond outracing Soviet soldiers in Siberia, and for some random reason THIS happens:
That’s not some fan edit. For no reason at all, “California Girls” by the Beach Boys just starts playing out of nowhere. It gets worse from there: soon you have Bond driving half a car through the streets of Paris, seducing women young enough to be his granddaughter, and I’m pretty sure Moore spent more time in his trailer than actually on set, since most of the action is done by a much younger stunt double.
But where this movies shines is Christopher Walken as Max Zorin. Wait a minute; Christopher Walken was a Bond movie villian? Yes, he’s amazing, and he has bleach blonde hair! And his main henchwoman, May Day, played by Grace Jones, was so memorable she ended up as a playable character in the GoldenEye video game’s multiplayer mode. Alison Doody from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is another one of Zorin’s henchowomen but not nearly as iconic as May Day. Also in this movie is a random cameo by Dolph Lundgren as a KGB agent.
Like Die Another Day after it, A View to a Kill is a horrible closing for a well known James Bond, but man, is it A LOT of fun for all the wrong reasons.