I recently decided to throw in A View to a Kill on Blu-ray, since I picked up the Bond 50 boxed set with all of the films. It was barely watchable to say the least. I'm being generous.
I'm not sure what the heck the Bond producers at the time (Cubby Broccoli, and Micheal G. Wilson) were thinking by allowing a geriatric looking Roger Moore come back for one last round as 007, but they're damn lucky it didn't completely backfire on them. This film could have easily been the end of Bond had it bombed financially, and boy it should have bombed in my opinion. There's simply no way to take this entry seriously when Roger Moore was 57 years old, and not only was he not convincing enough to believe he was doing the physical scenes as James Bond, but he looked like he should have been playing the lead Bond girl's father, not a potential love interest! The film plays like it's a satire of itself, and more than makes a big joke out of the character Ian Fleming created decades before. I can't imagine had Ian Fleming was alive to see this film, he'd have been the least bit happy with the direction it took.
The real crime? This film had all the elements needed to make an outstandingly cool Bond film, but was wasted on such an over the hill actor in Roger Moore. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Roger Moore as Bond, particularly when he didn't look like he was pushing 60, but his being in A View to a Kill prevented it from being what it could have been. Having said that, Christopher Walken did a great job playing the lead villain, Max Zorin, and Grace Jones did a nice job as the villain's sidekick, Mayday. In the end, it was wasted simply because Moore wasn't believable as an agent with a License to Kill on screen. The script needed to be altered to eliminate the campy jokes, and over the top humor, along with recasting 007 at the time. Had that been done, it would have been a respectable Bond film. Another head scratcher, the casting of an even older sidekick for Roger Moore's James Bond character, Sir Goddrey Tibbet, played by then way over the hill Patrick Macnee just threw believability out the window with this picture. Several of the scenes early on, when Bond and Tibbet are infiltrating one of Zorin's facilities is silly at best. When the only good thing about a film is its theme song (A View to a Kill, Duran Duran), that's when you know it has major issues across the board.
It now makes perfect sense why with the following film, The Living Daylights, the producers were more than happy to allow then newly cast Bond, Timothy Dalton, to make the character of 007 a serious, no nonsense 00 agent. There was even talk that it was Roger Moore (at the time of A View to a Kills release) who resigned from the role, and for his own reasons, but come on, can you imagine him coming back for yet another film, 2 years later? I know I can't. A View to a Kill really was like The Naked Gun franchise merging with the Bond universe, only in the worst way possible.
Nuff said...
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