I Watch Films: A View To A Kill

 

A View To A Kill

In Siberia James Bond 007 (Roger Moore) recovers a microchip. It turns out that this is a special one, designed to avoid being damaged by the Electro-Magnetic Pulse of a nuclear weapon. It’s been made by an Anglo-French combine, recently take over by Max Zorin (Christopher Walken).

Walken is already on British Intelligence’s radar – their horse section (?) is puzzled by the racing success of his stable. Bond consults the MI6 horse agent (?) Sir Godfrey Tibbett (Patrick Macnee) who informs him that both the British and French racing authorities suspect the horses are drugged, but there’s no evidence. He sends him to Paris to meet a French private detective on the case; while having lunch with him in the Eiffel Tower a mysterious assassin kills the private detective and escapes by parachute, Bond causing enormous damages across Paris while in pursuit. The mysterious assassin is revealed to be May Day (Grace Jones) Zorin’s bodyguard/companion/lover.

Bond and Tibbett go undercover at Zorin’s horse sales, the joke being that Sir Godfrey, slightly posher than Bond, is his manservant. They investigate, discover a secret horse steroid laboratory, also microchips, at his chateau in France. Bond also spots Zorin paying off an American woman. Zorin uses a computer (“I find a computer indispensable”) to identify Bond, kills Tibbett, tries and fails to kill Bond.

It turns out the microchips were leaked to the Soviet Union by Zorin, who is a KGB agent. Or was, it turns out that he’s been doing this horse race thing as an unauthorised side hustle and they want him to stop. He won’t. Also his horse scientist turns out to have been a Nazi scientist who experimented on people before turning to horses; Zorin is one of his experiments. Zorin heads for San Francisco where he flies over San Francisco Bay in his blimp. He makes a deal with other microchip manufacturers, promising to destroy Silicon Valley and leave them with a lock on the market.

Bond hangs around in San Francisco, meets a CIA contact, investigates an oil pumping station, meets some KGB agents also looking at the pumping station. He discovers the woman Zorin paid off, finds that he was buying an oil well. She, a geologist, is surprised to learn he’s pumping sea water in the oil well (fracking?), and then alarmed; this will make the San Andreas Fault unstable, possibly causing a giant earthquake that would destroy Silicon Valley.

Roger Moore’s final outing as James Bond and it just about manages to engage even now. It keeps losing the plot – the whole horse thing for the first forty five minutes, and then a lot of time wandering around San Francisco while Zorin flies around in his blimp. Yet the highlights are worthwhile. Zorin is a delight, when the computer warns him that Bond is dangerous, an assassin and usually armed he’s excited. May Day, “a woman of few words” is just Grace Jones, but on the other hand, she’s Grace Jones and you can’t ask for more than that. It’s hard to complain about a film with a blimp in. Zorin’s absolute self-confidence and ego are always going to be his undoing – he wants to set off an earthquake, while double-crossing the KGB, the British government AND the horse racing establishment! Yet he manages to put Bond on the back foot with a few henchmen (and women, May Day’s assistants Pan Ho and Jenny Flex getting almost as much screentime as Zorin’s henchman Scarpine).

Watch This: Roger Moore’s swansong as James Bond, he tangles with a young, technical villain through enjoyable setpieces
Don’t Watch This: A surprisingly old secret agent fights, shags and gets distracted by horse racing before bumbling through San Francisco