Three Blokes and a Chick Watch: A View to a Kill
If there’s something to be said about A View to a Kill, it’s that it’s 80’s. Very 80’s. If AVtaK (which in itself sounds like a failed Sinclair or Amstrad computer) was a person, it would grease back its hair, wear cheap suits from Woolworths, carry a brick phone and drive a DeLorean. It would use phrases like “oh yah” a lot.
I went into AVtaK optimistically; I have good memories of it. Fellow bloke Will wasn’t so confident.
“If we’re going to watch this,” he said while reaching into his bag, “I’m going to need this”. He revealed a bottle of Jack Daniels.
“I thought you like A View to a Kill?” I asked.
“I used to when I was younger,” he replied, pouring himself a sizeable amount of whiskey into a tumbler, “but it’s just so 80’s“.
I didn’t quite get what he meant, until I watched the film. I think it’s now probably one of my least favourite Bond films, having previously ranked quite highly on the basis that it’s the one with Christopher Walken.
Special mention goes out to Siy, who spent the entire movie horizontal on account of dying from some sort of plague. I doubt the 90-degree angle made the film any better to watch.
This recap should be considered A View to Some Massive Spoilers.
What’s the film about?
Bond is set up against Max Zorin, blonde psychopath and millionaire playboy. It appears that the reason for this is mostly because MI6 don’t like losing at the Royal Ascot because Zorin’s horses are blatantly full of steroids, despite medical evidence to the contrary. Dodgy horses aside, it’s clear that Zorin’s up to something involving microchips, which was the amazing new technology at the time. That’s about it.
Who are the characters?
- James Bond: Roger Moore’s last hurrah, and about time too because he’s looking about ready to cash in his pension. Age and wrinkles aside, it’s typical eyebrow-waggling laughs and drama from Moore as he tries his best to fit in with all the cool young kids. Unfortunately, one-third of the cool young kids consists of both Christopher Walken (who innately chews the f*ck out of the scenery every time he’s on screen) and Grace Jones (who’s just a very scary lady and yet creepily matches Moore somehow).
- Stacey Sutton: I’d call her the Bond girl for the film, but considering she appears just to give Bond a damsel to save and doesn’t really have any of the independent qualities that Bond girls usually have, I’m going to call her second fiddle to May Day. That’s right, I’m nominating the villainess as the Bond girl.
- Max Zorin: Like a prototype Albert Wesker (played by Christopher Walken), Zorin is a memorable villain despite not really doing a lot. Interesting back-story, keeps the weirdest of company and, as I don’t think I’ve already mentioned it yet, has the merit of being played by Christopher god-damn Walken. This guy…he’s un-f*ckin’ believable.
- May Day: Because someone was snorting something cut with battery acid when they thought that teaming Christopher Walken with Grace Jones was going to lead to anything other than one of the creepiest relationships ever put to film.
So what happens?
The film starts with this:
We open on an arctic environment. Some Russian types in a helicopter are assisting some ground forces in looking for Bond, who’s dressed in fur-trimmed white snow gear and scanning something. I turns out to be an equally dead agent half-buried in snow, and after digging in the corpse’s locket (free loot!) he finds a microchip and the Russians give chase. It’s pretty thrilling stuff! Bond throw a grapnel over a cliff and hooks it on to a passing Russian on a snowmobile – as the Russian flies off, Bond takes over the vehicle. Pretty damn cool!
The helicopter gives chase, and Bond leaps clear as it opens fire, tumbling over a shallow ledge as the snowmobile explodes (I’m digging this so far!). As the helicopter flies off to circle around, the ground forces move in towards the smoke of the explosion. Surrounded on all sides, Bond grabs one of the exploded snowmobile’s skis and-
Bond attacks two soldiers by defying gravity into their faces, and then peels off down the mountainside on his makeshift snowboard. It would be alright, but someone on the editing team must have had a nervous breakdown and completely lost their shit during production as someone decided that this scene should be accompanied by the Beach Boys’ California Girls. Seeing Bond leap from massive ledges and avoid pursuing Russians firing AKs is completely invalidated by the soundtrack. Why do they keep doing this to Roger Moore?! It’s like every serious scene gets painted in polka dots in some manner.
The stupid music is scared off (thank god) by the return of the helicopter. Bond takes cover from the gunner and his massive machine gun in the nook of a cliff ledge and preps a flare (alright, now we’re getting back on track. That last bit must have been a minor misjudgement). Bond fires the flare into the cabin of the helicopter, and the pilot loses controls and flies it into a cliff. Awesome! And then this happens:
A hatch emblazoned with a Union Jack opens on a nearby iceberg. Bond rushes over and clambers in, the Russians chasing him just watch on as they’re as stunned as the audience that someone might disguise a boat as an iceberg (much like the invisible car, how would you find the bloody thing once you parked it?!). Inside there’s some blonde piece who greets Bond. There’s some banter as the seat in the back of the boat folds into a bed, and it’s not long before Bond is undressing her.
Thankfully, the pre-credits cut in before we get anywhere beyond Bond snogging her (which is bad enough). There’s synthesizers and glow in the dark paint on naked ladies in the dark, pretty standard stuff for a Bond pre-credits sequence. The song is pretty good too, definitely in my top five.
London! Bond discovers that Moneypenny has spent her last seven month’s wages on some new clobber and a hat. He also finds that Bernard Lee has since succumbed to stomach cancer (RIP) and has been replaced, and that Q’s latest invention appears to be a remote control car with a head that looks like a bug. The Minister of Defence (or whoever the hell that guy was in For Your Eyes Only and Moonraker, I can’t be arsed to look it up, as far as I’m concerned he’s just that balding stuffy guy who isn’t M).
Q explains that microchips can be rendered useless by an electromagnetic pulse (you know, like in Small Soldiers). He then goes on to display that an E.M.P-resistant chip developed by one of their defence contractors matches the one Bond pulled off the corpse in Siberia (who turns out to be 003). The contractor itself was purchased by an Anglo-French company, Zorin industries, implying that Zorin might be giving away secrets to the Russians. When Bond questions Zorin’s integrity, the Minister sputters and harrumphs.
Minister: Max Zorin? He’s a leading French industrialist! A staunch anti-communist with influential friends in the government.
M already realises that the Minister is a pillock and that Zorin is clearly guilty as hell, so he’s already launched an investigation. By which he means he’s taking everybody out to the Royal Ascot. Amongst the crowd he points out Zorin to Bond, and gives him some more info.
M: Born in Dresden, fled from East Germany in the 60’s, French passport, speaks at least five languages; no accent…now the talk of the City and the Bourse.
I don’t know what the hell the City and the Bourse is, but no accent? Have you heard Christopher Walken speak? Alright, admittedly he doesn’t have a particular accent other than that of Christopher Walken, but that’s one hell of an accent!
Zorin’s horse wins the race, much to the disgust of Patrick Macnee, who’s just chilling nearby.
Patrick is Sir Godfrey Tibbett, another MI6 agent. He thinks Zorin’s horse Pegasus is on something a bit stronger than oats. As if on cue, the horse rears and loses its rag. Grace Jones (as Zorin’s associate May Day) intervenes, and I like to think they just told her to get in there and settle down a real startled horse as Grace Jones is a scary woman. I bet she’d have punched the horse and knocked it out if they asked her to. As she calms the horse, Tibbett agrees to set up a meeting for Bond with a French detective he knows who’s been investigating the Case of the Strung Out Super Horses.
Paris! Obligatory establishing shot of the Eiffel Tower! In the fancy-pants restaurant in the Tower, Bond observes that the champagne is a Bollinger ’75 (it’s his party piece to name drinks while tasting them, and then he usually points out that he prefers something a few years older). When the detective orders another bottle from ’79 in French, Bond also approves. The entertainment comes out on stage, and it’s some blonde piece in a white gown whistling at paper butterflies being dangled from fishing rods wielded by a stage hand in black at the back of the room. Only the bloody French, eh? The detective (I swear his name is Mr. Aubergine, again I’m too lazy to look it up) seems enchanted at the display, but Bond’s just a little bit creeped out, presumably not just because the performance is bizarre, but because the stage hand looks a little bit too much like a ninja for his liking.
Bond enquires about the horses, and why Zorin’s beat superior bloodlines. Mr. Orange can only say “this is a mystery”, clearly showing he’s an incompetent detective. He says that no drugs showed up on the tests. Bond watches the stage hand be assaulted by a real ninja carrying another fishing rod.
The ninja swings its butterfly on a fishing rod around and slaps the butterfly into Mr. Banana. Bond does nothing to stop this, instead watching intently (probably just happy that he won’t have such a large bill to pay, the stingy bastard). Upon examination Bond discovers the butterfly was hiding a (presumably poisoned) prong embedded in the now ex-detective’s cheek. If Horatio Caine from CSI Miami was here, he’d probably say something like “this was performance art to die for“, “he forgot to turn the other cheek” or “it floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee” (YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH). Bond pursues the ninja.
He follows the ninja up the Eiffel Tower and lets off several poorly aimed gunshots. He’s almost killed when the ninja wraps the fishing line around his legs and hoists him over the railing. James Bond is almost fished to death in this film. I’m genuinely not sure if that’s awful or awesome. Freeing himself from the fishing line, Bond follows the ninja (who’s clearly May Day) up further only to watch it leap off and open a parachute. Again, I like to think this was unscripted and Grace Jones decided to leap off of the Tower herself. Bond is momentarily taken aback and decides to get to the ground floor by leaping on the roof of a passing elevator.
On the ground, he runs to a parked taxi and demands to “follow that parachute”. The driver’s on break so he throws him out of the car and steals it (definitely the way to keep a low profile, Bond!). This prompts the French taxi driver to comically chase on foot for a bit yelling “Oh, oh mah car!” for a bit. Bond drives like a lunatic, losing the roof and the back of his car in the process (not a brilliant endorsement of the Audi, if you think about it). He sees the ninja land on a boat, disembarks from the half-car and leaps through the roof, ruining someone’s wedding in the process by landing on their wedding cake. Bond is apprehended by some angry chefs (waving butcher’s knives!) while the ninja leaps into a passing speedboat and removes its mask to reveal it’s GASP! May Day! Oh wait, that was obvious. Oh, and Zorin’s driving the boat because he’s a hands-on sort of villain.
M berates Bond for trashing half of Paris, having to pay 6000 Francs of damages and bailing him out of prison. Bond can’t quite see why he’s so annoyed as he felt it was justified in the means of “identifying the assassin”. Tibbett and Bond decide to go to the horse sale Zorin’s throwing undercover.
The chick poses the question of whether this is a good idea – if Sir Godfrey Tibbett’s known for breeding horses, wouldn’t he be recognised? I’m more concerned with how he’s associated with MI6 – M just says he’s “our department”. Does MI6 have a horse breeding department? These are important questions!
Either way, Bond’s wrangled it so he’s posing as the wealthy Sir Singeon Smythe, and Tibbett is pretending to be his chauffeur. Oh, what a wacky turn of events indeed! Hey, wouldn’t it make more sense if Tibbett went as himself and Bond went as the chauffeur? Bond would get a better view of what’s going on if he’s amongst the hired help! On top of this, Bond seems absolutely lost when Carpine, Zorin’s head of security, starts showing him the horses and gives him a catalogue of purchases.
Tibbett scouts the stables in the meantime, seeing some men lead Pegasus the horse into a stable. Once they come out, he goes in to investigate, only to find that the horse has vanished.
Bond makes Tibbett carry the bags when he’s shown to his room by “Jenny Flex”. May Day gives him the eye as she passes him in the corridor. Once in Bond’s room, Tibbett and Bond search for bugs using a beeping device. They find one on the lamp and leave out a tape recording of the two bickering under it. This implies that Bond and Tibbett sat for at least two or three hours doing their little back-and-forth, which just boggles the mind. The two exchange some words on the balcony out of the bug’s range, and watch Zorin greet another blonde woman (this is what, the third so far?). Bond immediately decides that he wants to shag her (you can see it in his eyebrows, and also the random sax solo might be a clue too). Tibbett does not approve.
Bond mingles among the guests at the party, mostly as an excuse to try and talk to the blonde piece he’s already marked for sex. May Day turns him away from the direction of Zorin’s office, still trying to place his face. Instead, Bond goes around the other side of the building and spies through the tinted windows using special Q branch ray-bans, seeing Zorin write the woman out a cheque. Nobody questions why he’s staring at a tinted window.
When the opportunity arises, Bond sneaks into Zorin’s office and rifles through his drawers. He uses a special device on Zorin’s chequebook to scan in the indents of what was written out (what, using a pencil and paper not good enough?). Emerging from the office, a man with a heavy German accent asks if he was looking for something.
Bond says he’s looking for the bar and the German offers to show him where it is, leading him back out through the crowd. Small talk reveals the German to be Dr. Karl Mortner, Zorin’s “breeding consultant” (eurgh). Bond quizzes him as to why Zorin’s horses are winners despite being inferior bloodlines, and we get this nugget of insight from the doctor:
Mortner: Selective breeding is important, ja…but more important is conditioning. And the desire, ja?
Bond: Are you talking about people, or horses?
Mortner: *Chuckles in a manner that might be considered suspicious* Ja, my principles apply equally to human beings.
Definitely not a Nazi, I’m sure.
Herr von Mortner is interrupted by Zorin, who presumably wants the Doctor out of the way before he starts goose-stepping around the place giving the ol’ Hitler salute an airing. Bond, not having a lot to say about horses, asks if Zorin rides . We get the following line from Walken, and I really wish I could share the delivery of this line because it’s classic Walken where he inserts a pause where one really doesn’t belong. Oh wait, I can!
A View to a Kill – Happiest in the saddle …GENIUS.
Bond makes a non so subtle jab about fishing and Zorin decides he’s tired of the conversation and walks off. Nice one Bond, definitely a way to keep your cover by heavily inferring that you’re on to Zorin about the death of Mr. Aubergine!
Oh, Walken’s blonde in this film too, so that’s four blondes so far?
Bond tries chatting up the blonde he saw in Zorin’s office, and she doesn’t seem interested in anything (she genuinely looks a bit derpy, if you know what I mean). Zorin feels sorry for her and gets May Day to break up his lecherous old sweet talking, telling the security guy Carpine to keep an eye on Singeon Smythe (smooth, Bond!).
May Day cock blocks him, and as she ushers the blonde away Bond flirts with her, too (Jesus H. Christ will you give it a rest, Bond? Been on the viagra again, have you?).
That night Tibbett and Bond investigate the stable where Pegasus mysteriously vanished. They find that one of the stable partitions doubles as a lift to a secret laboratory. Meanwhile, the security staff is reassured that Singeon Smythe is all tucked up in bed as all they can hear through the bug is snoring. Yes, Bond recorded about an hour’s worth of snoring on top of the fake conversations with Tibbett. Back in the lab, Bond tries cracking a locked cabinet using a stethoscope while Tibbett inspects the horse. They deduce that the horse has had a microchip surgically implanted that releases horse steroids based on a transmitter in the jockey’s whip. Actually, Bond deduces all this after glancing at one of the test tubes for less than a second while Tibbett stares at him incredulously.
They are interrupted by a pair of thugs coming down in the lift. As they rush next door, we discover that the lab is adjoined on to a Zorin packing plant, because presumably all the horse meat from the horses that lose has to go somewhere, right? Actually, it’s just boxes of microchips. Tibbett and Bond engage the thugs in combat and there’s some comedy in the thugs getting packaged on the packaging conveyor.
Cut to May Day kicking the hell out of Zorin, the two are sparring in some sort of creepy foreplay. I’m not even sharing an image because this is very weird. Their foreplay is interrupted by a call from Carpine to say that there were intruders in the warehouse, and Zorin instantly jumps to the conclusion that it must be Singeon Smythe as Bond has made the usual good job of keeping his cover that he usually does. As Zorin and May Day check Bond’s room, it finally dawns on her that the geriatric man who attacked her at the Eiffel Tower and Singeon Smythe are one and the same man. The two are about to look for Smythe, but May Day returns to her room to find…well…this:
Zorin shrugs at May Day out of view of Bond, so she closes the door and presumably does the dirty with old man Bond. The film cuts away a little too slowly for my liking as we get to see the pair couple and make out.
In the lab, Mortner’s OCD comes to his aid as *GASP* someone’s left one of his test tubes in the wrong slot! Zorin’s not having any of it, and the next day Bond is invited to Zorin’s office so he can run a computer program to determine what horse would be best suited for him. In reality, cameras in the walls are taking pictures of Bond and the computer is building a profile of him to retrieve his details. Looks like Q shouldn’t have made his criminal profiling machine open source.
The computer converts the images of Bond to 256-colour gifs and sends them somewhere, along with a request for Smythe’s real identity. It takes literally seconds to get a response, a full profile of James Bond 007. Not only am I staggered that the 80’s apparently had dial-up connections fast enough to do this, but also we’ve established that MI6 has a serious problem about keeping the identity of its agents secret. Zorin just smirks at the computer as it informs him that Bond is armed and dangerous, and decides to end Bond with death by horse. Bond sends Tibbett into town to “wash the car”, which is what he was already doing (see Bond, that’s how you keep a cover!) as a ruse to get MI6 to trace the cheque Bond made a copy of in Zorin’s office.
Bond isn’t deterred by the fact that the horse he’s given is clearly insane, or from the fact that its name is “Inferno”. He rides off with Zorin.
Meanwhile, Tibbett asctually goes to get the car washed. Now that’s commitment to your cover! He’s unceremoniously killed by May Day, who hid in the back seat while he was trying to manually open the automatic gates to Zorin’s estate. Farewell, Patrick Macnee, your cameo sure was wasted.
Back with Bond, and he’s having a little trouble with his horse. A bunch of thugs turn up on horseback, and Zorin pretends that he’s not planning to have Bond cut to pieces the minute he falls off. What follows is Zorin leading the ride around a track, and then signalling for various fences and hedges to be raised just a second too early to affect Bond but long enough to cause all his henchmen to fall foul of the traps. Bond overtakes Zorin, who decides to activate the steroids in Inferno – it turns out this is an even worse idea, as the horse is now frisky enough to leap the track’s barrier and tear off into the woods away from them.
Bond makes it to the road, where he sees Tibbett’s car driving along. He leaps on to the car, only to discover May Day driving and Tibbett’s corpse in the back. With Bond recaptured, Zorin opts for just having his men knock him the hell out and drive the car into the water (why didn’t they shoot him?). Bond wakes up just in time to escape the car, and survives on air from its tyres until Zorin and his crew are out of sight.
Zorin’s back at his track admiring the view when not-quite-a-baddy head of the KGB General Gogol turns up (presumably they were on the other end of the ultra high-speed dial-up connection). He’s annoyed that Zorin killed Bond without seeking approval, and that Zorin has abandoned the KGB for his own commercial ventures. One of Gogol’s men calls him a “biological experiment” and a “physiological freak”, offending May Day who hauls the guy over her head. KGB agents and Zorin’s men point guns at each other, and Gogol calls for calm. Gogol leaves, saying the Zorin will come back, as “no one ever leaves the KGB”. Zorin smirks.
Cut to another Zorin scene! He is the star of this show, after all. You remember that scene from Goldfinger, where he exposits his plans to a bunch of mobsters and a model map rises from the floor? This is that scene, except rather than break into Fort Knox Zorin wants to take over the microchip market by eliminating Silicone Valley. Just like in Goldfinger, there’s one guy who objects and is ushered out, which doesn’t sound too bad except for the fact that they’re all in a blimp (very 80’s!).
Establishing shot of the Golden Gate bridge, and May Day and Zorin look down at it from the blimp as they crowbar the film’s title into the film in an exchange that doesn’t even make sense. Here, you listen to the delivery of it:
A View to a Kill – Title drop! Drink!
We join Bond at the San Francisco harbour (oh right! He’s in this! I was beginning to think this was a Max Zorin movie). He meets with a CIA agent to discuss Zorin and his staff. Mortner is actually Hans Glaub, a WWII Nazi scientist (really? I didn’t get that picture of him at all!) who injected pregnant women with steroids in an attempt to produce (psychotic) super babies. Zorin is one of the super babies, which makes sense – only a woman pumped full of high-quality muscle enhancer could produce Christopher Walken. Both Zorin and Mortner escaped KGB custody to the West.
Zorin’s oil operations have been ruining the crab fishing sites in the area, and if there’s anything Bond hates it’s when crab fishing sites get ruined. He dons scuba gear (oh good, because there wasn’t enough of that in the film before last) at night and infiltrates the pumping station. He finds there’s already some people in scuba gear already skulking around and, seeing a pipe with a grate hanging loose from it, immediately decides that the best course of action is to swim inside the pipe. The pipe of a pumping station. You know, for a guy who seems to know a lot about everything, Bond makes some really dumb moves.
By sheer coincidence, Zorin is in the facility and they’re just about to test the pumps. He demands they increase it to maximum as his plan enacts within the next three days. They turn the pumps on just as Bond realises that he’s swimming towards a razor-sharp fan blade.
Almost minced by his own incompetence, Bond only escapes by removing his oxygen tank, which wedges itself in the fan. Now without oxygen, Bond almost drowns trying to fight his way out of the pipe’s grate. As the alarm is sounded, the other guys in scuba gear (Russian agents, as it turns out) go to make their escape, but not before setting charges to the station’s struts. Bond watches on as May Day and some guards dispatch one of the chaps in scuba gear, one gets away, and Zorin makes the other one turn off the bomb. Zorin then has the guy thrown head first into the pipe and, unusually for a Bond film, we get to see a rather gory death of the dude getting shredded by the fan1.
One of the scuba divers emerges from the water on to a beach at sunrise, and is attacked by Bond. Unmasked, it turns out to be some Russian bird he’s presumably shagged previously. They get into her car and make their escape.
At a spa, they share a hot tub together.
While he’s showering, she makes off with a tape cassette he tried to pinch off of her and runs outside to a car. It’s driven by Gogol, who seems to be rather fond of her (guy’s a pimp!) and as they drive away they discover Bond’s fooled them by switching the tape with the oriental one from the spa. The real tape is being listened to by Bond, and contains a conversation the Russian agents were recording while under the pump station – Zorin blathering about his plans, something about “main strike” in three days.
Bond goes to the Department of Conservation and visits the guy in charge of oil and mines, Mr. Howe, under the guise of a London Financial Times reporter. The guy is clearly on Zorin’s payroll, and hand-waves Bond’s concerns about Zorin pumping seawater into his pipeline by saying it’s used to “test the integrity”…which sounds quite credible, actually. Just as he’s about to go down in the lift, Bond sees the blonde vegetable from earlier approach Howe and hassle him about some conservation concerns. Partly from curiosity but mostly because his sexual appetite hasn’t be sated for at least several hours, Bond stalks her out of the building’s lobby and follows her in his car back to her stately home.
Rather than just knock on the front door like anyone else would, Bond decides to break in through a side window. This is getting more and more like a rape scenario by the minute. Sneaking through the house, he startles a cat and goes into her bedroom and then into her bathroom where it sounds like she’s having a shower and what the f*ck, Bond? What is wrong with you?!
She’s not in the shower. His lack of spy talent betraying him, the act of startling the cat alerted the woman, who ambushes him with a shotgun by stepping out of the wardrobe behind him. She thinks he works for Zorin (which is fair enough, he did just break into her bloody house) and he tries the old “I’m from the London Financial Times” gambit. She decides to call the police and, really, why don’t most of Bond’s encounters with women end like this?
The phone line has been cut, and Bond grabs her gun as a goon comes through the window. He blasts the guy out of the window and over the balcony. He engages in some fairly awesome combat with some more goons, but quickly realises that the gun is actually loaded with rock-salt. It’s down to fisticuffs as Bond takes on one goon with his amazing judo skills, while the blonde uses the never-failing style of “flailing around like a complete moron”. Her main contribution is to smash an urn of her grandfather’s ashes over the head of one of the goons.
The henchmen make a runner in the face of one old man and a flailing woman. The woman introduces herself as Stacey Sutton, and Bond introduces himself as “James Stock” (very original, Bond). Bond offers to cook, and makes a quiche. Is there nothing the man can’t do?!
Stacey is the heiress to an oil baron who was bought out by Zorin – the cheque he wrote was for the last of her shares, and the thugs were encouragement to accept the cheque. After wining and dining, Bond seems to think he’s not going to bed alone. Unusually, he doesn’t take the opportunity to pounce on the sleeping Stacey and instead tucks her in and switches off the light, which is fair enough as he’s old enough to be her father2.
The next morning, Stacey remarks there was an earth tremor that scared her birds during the night. She boots up her computer to check some readings.
The epicentre was near Zorin’s pumping station, and Stacey reveals that pumping water into a fault-line is a bad, bad thing (I’m surprised Bond didn’t cotton on to that, but I suppose he was to busy trying not to get cut into Bond steaks to think about it at the time). Stacey decides to go and see Howe about it, but gets fired for her tenacity. Bond brings in the CIA contact from earlier, and they try to work out what Zorin’s up to – they need more info on his oil fields, which can be stolen from City Hall. Stacey volunteers her City Hall pass and the CIA bloke goes to get some help from Washington. CIA bloke walks outside, gets into his car and is strangled to death by May Day, who apparently spends a lot of time hanging out in the back seat of cars (why does nobody ever check their back seat?!). May Day drives the car off before Bond and Stacey sees her, presumably to dump it in another of Zorin’s lakes (he gets more toxic blue mould that way).
At City Hall, Bond and Stacey root around in the file room in the dark, when they’re interrupted by Zorin and May Day switching on the lights. We get another cracker of a line delivery from Walken:
A View to a Kill – Alive and well – I can damn near guarantee that this was just one line in the script.
Oh, by the way, earlier on it sounded like Walken was trying to affect a vaguely British accent. He’s given up on that by this point! Zorin has Howe call the police, and then he shoots Howe and decides to set fire to the office with Bond and Stacey inside it.
Zorin: Intuitive improvisation is the secret of genius.
Christ, that makes Bond better than Einstein, then. Zorin and May Day lock Bond and Stacey in the lift shaft while their people set fire to the building. Why Zorin couldn’t improvise a reason to just shoot them is never explained, and he quickly realises that perhaps setting fire to the building while you’re in it is not such a good idea. Just listen to the urgency in his voice!
Trapped in the elevator, Bond manages to carry himself and Stacey out through the roof of the lift shortly before the meagre fire burns through the inch-thick steel wiring (that was quick!). The pair are luckily not cut in half when the cable snaps violently, and Bond decides now’s the time to leave her useless arse in the shaft as he climbs up towards the nearest doors.
Stacey spends the next few minutes shrieking horribly for James to save her, and all it would take to shut her up is Bond yelling “I’m coming back, you blonde moron, shut the f*ck up or I’ll leave you down there!”. Bond manages to open the elevator doors, and then wedges them open with an ashtray, throwing down a fire hose from the wall for her to climb as he pulls her up (as Die Hard taught us, fire hoses are indestructible).
Outside, the police and the fire department show up. A fire truck raises a ladder up to the roof and Bond heroically climbs down the ladder with Stacey over his shoulders, much to the appreciation of the crowd below. There’s even an emphatic version of the AVtaK theme. For all his efforts, the Chief of Police wants to arrest him for the murders of the CIA dude and Howe. Rather than come quietly and iron out the fact that he’s actually a secret agent for MI6, he instead opts to steal a fire truck and lead the police of a chase across town that’s straight out of The Blues Brothers (which came out five years before this). There’s a sequence where Bond has to try and lock the ladder on top and ends up dangling from it as Stacey tears the truck around town, endangering countless lives just because Bond won’t iron things out quietly with the police (or maybe he’s worried that M won’t bail him out this time after the fiasco in Paris). Bond manages to lose the police by jumping the truck across a bridge as it raises (Elwood Blues would be proud).
Bond drives the fire truck overnight to an “abandoned” mine owned by Zorin, and finds it bustling with activity. It might have been more ideal to steal a vehicle that is a) not being searched for by the authorities and b) not a big red obvious fire truck. He uses it to flag down a truck carrying explosives into the mine, knocks out the driver and steals that truck instead. The guards on the gate only stop him and Stacey as he’s not wearing a helmet.
The foreman tells them to take a break and Bond makes a crack about women’s lib “taking over” when he sees Stacey wearing high heels in a jumpsuit (you know, this film’s been a little bit misogynist all the way through. More so than usual, I mean!). They sneak into the mine inside a mine-cart full of explosives and then hide inside the foreman’s office. Spying on Zorin as he activates a large detonator on one of the mine carts, Stacey finds a large interactive map under a blanket in the office. Stacey works out that Zorin has been pumping seawater into the San Andreas fault, with intention of flooding Silicone Valley via an explosion-induced double earthquake (pretty insidious!). This would leave Zorin as the largest source of microchips in the world.
The alarm is raised when Zorin tries to get into the office and finds they’ve locked it. He sends May Day and his two female assistants after them deeper into the mine. While looking for another way out, Stacey manages to slip into a massive hole that only a moron would miss (hint). Bond hauls her out and the two skirt around the hole, with May Day and the ladies in pursuit. Bond and Stacey ascend a shoddily made scaffold of wood upwards to the surface.
Zorin detonates some preliminary explosives to begin flooding the fault, killing a bunch of miners in the process and with intent to do away with May Day as well. Zorin begins mopping up the workforce around him with a machine-gun, making him one of the more badass Bond villains. He even begins laughing at the poor bastards being crushed by water and mining equipment.
Bond slips and falls to a lower beam, leaving Stacey to be pursued up the scaffold by May Day. All May Day manages to do is rip Stacey’s jumpsuit off of her (for no apparent reason other than it gives us a flash of bare leg) and then turns her attention to Bond. The two are swept up in the passing wave of water (actually they’re standing safely in the shaft above it and then jump in for no obvious reason, but I get the feeling we were supposed to think that the earthquake shook them into the water).
With his workforce slaughtered and the lake above drained into the fault, Zorin makes his escape outside. Stacey also makes it up the shaft outside at the same time. Zorin and his security man meet up with Mortner inside a temporary office outside the mine, and after pressing some button and turning some levers the office begins to inflate the blimp inside it, which is pretty damn pimp.
In the mine, May Day has finally realised that Zorin’s a complete dick. She wades through the destruction alongside Bond until they find the detonator amongst all the explosives. May Day mans (that’s an intentional expression I’ve used there) the crane while Bond fastens on the detonator, and May Day hauls both of them up with her inhuman strength powering the winch. They strap the detonator to a cart, but discover that the one they’ve chosen has a sticky brake – someone is going to have to hold the brake lever to keep the cart from stopping.
I’d like to pause to say that this sequence is pretty damn tense and really enjoyable – shame the rest of this film up until this point has been happy to plod along and not do much!
May Day decides to sacrifice herself by holding the lever – Bond calls for her to jump but she’s already made up her mind. She yells to Bond to get Zorin for her, and from his vantage above the mine Zorin sees May Day exit the mine just before the detonator blows. It’s a pretty cool way to say “f*ck you” to a guy.
Zorin is obviously not happy at this turn of events.
Bond leaves the mine just in time to see Stacey get snatched by Zorin hanging from his low-flying blimp. Bond grabs the blimp’s mooring line (heh, “Moore-ing” line) and hangs on for dear life. The blimp flies towards the Golden Gate bridge, with Zorin’s intention of being to slam Bond into the side of it to make him let go. It would have made for a nice surprise as the locale for the ending set-piece, if it hadn’t be all over the film’s promotional material (see the poster at the top of the page). Either way, what follows is one of the most memorable villain showdowns in Bond history (and it made for a pretty cool multiplayer map in the otherwise mediocre Goldeneye: Rogue Agent too).
A View to a Kill – This’ll hurt him
Zorin’s plan goes awry after Bond manages to not smash into one of the bridge’s cables, instead wrapping the mooring line around them, tying the blimp to the bridge. As much as they try to fly the blimp away, it’s stuck. The whiplash from one of the mooring lines detaching from the bridge almost launches Bond to his death, but he clings on. While concentrating on Bond, Stacey sneaks up and actually uses her ability to flail and scream like a moron to her advantage, clinging on to Zorin’s head. Distracted by the crazy blonde clawing at Zorin’s face, the blimp crashes into the bridge, wedging itself alongside one of the maintenance walkways. Mortner’s unconscious, and Stacey knocks out Scarpine the security guy with a small fire extinguisher before escaping out on to the walkway. Now royally pissed, Zorin grabs a fire axe and heads out after her.
Stacey leaps from the walkway into Bond’s arms (a bit of a stupid thing for him to yell at her to do, really) and the pair tumble backwards along the pipe. Bond has to hang on to Stacey for the third time in this film as she dangles from the bridge. Zorin vaults the walkway with no problem and menacingly walks toward Bond and Stacey.
Stacey gets a foothold just in time for Bond to leap out of the way of Zorin’s axe. The two grapple for their lives, Zorin gaining the upper hand and throttling Bond with the axe against one of the bridge’s lines. The desperate fighting ends when Zorin slips from the wires, with no purchase on anything as he hangs from one of the bridge’s vast, smooth pipes. There’s just enough time for him to chuckle in appreciation of the situation before he completely loses his grip and falls to his death. Definitely one of the best Bond villain deaths ever.
Mortner watches Zorin fall from the blimp. Angered by the death of his adoptive son, he does what any ex-Nazi worth their salt does in this situation: he grabs a stick of Acme dynamite from the blimp’s safe and lights it with intent to blow up the shcweinhunds. Bond uses Zorin’s axe to cut the mooring line and the blimp jerks away. Mortner topples over backwards and the dynamite explodes, the remnants of the the blimp drifting into the ocean.
Hauling Stacey up to him, Bond makes one of the worst one-liners ever as they look at the bridge below.
Bond: There’s never a cab when you want one.
I guess it’s difficult to come up with blimp based puns. The video game Everything or Nothing would offer a better one several decades later. Bond is tasked with investigating Zorin’s pupil, and he quips “Yes, we once played bridge together. He lost“.
Back in London, General Gogol is meeting with M. He has the Order of Lenin for Bond, on the grounds that Russian research wouldn’t get anywhere if they didn’t have Silicon Valley to steal from. Q is still using the useless reconnaissance robot he’s built to investigate Stacey Sutton’s house, and finds Bond in the shower with her.
Bond throws a towel over the robot, the two go down behind the curtain and we get one last “oohh” from Bond, presumably his back giving out, the viagra kicking in, his prostate acting up, or all of the above. Credits roll over some marvellous wide shots of the Golden Gate bridge.
So how is the film overall?
It’s a cracking film, actually. Shame all the good stuff happens towards the end though. An excellent last entry for Moore’s Bond, and the end of an era. I recommend AVtoK just on the basis of Christopher Walken’s Max Zorin alone (Grace Jones as May Day is pretty cool too), and there are some truly excellent set-pieces throughout. If you can make it past the dull bit at the beginning with all the horses, it gets a lot better.
I’d still rate this in my top ten Bond films, even though it is very very 80’s.
- Fair play to AVtaK, I actually had to rewind the movie to see how they did this. Originally I thought it was a dummy, but on closer inspection it looks like they just had a stunt man flail around near the fan and filled the water with red colouring to mask the fact that they weren’t actually getting chopped to pieces. ↩
- I know I keep mocking Moore’s age in this film, but he really is too sodding old to be Bond at this point in the franchise. ↩
Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | November 9, 2012 at 4:49 pm | Films, James Bond, Three Blokes and a Chick Watch | No comment
Tags: 007, A View to a Kill, Christopher Walken, James Bond, movie recap, movie review, Roger Moore