![]() Very little suspense is generated here in what’s just stunt work for stunt work’s sake.ĭespite Christopher Walken’s remarkable talents, his character here isn’t all that memorable. And considering the way these guys drive, they don’t seem to have the necessary eye-hand coordination to handcuff him in the first place. Then there’s a rather amazing chase in San Francisco with Bond hanging from a fire truck’s loose stair but the direst consequences of failing would have been getting arrested by the clumsiest of police forces. There’s also a fairly good duel on horseback between Bond, Zorin and the latter’s thugs but it’s hard to imagine that 007’s plan to elude them by climbing on his Rolls Royce could have ever worked, considering that the vehicle looks as heavy a tank (even if May Day is later able to push it all the way to the middle of a large lake). This is an exciting scene though somebody conveniently forgot that: A) It would actually take 007 two elevators to get to the bottom floor, by which time the villainess would surely be long gone, and B) Hopping from the top of a structure of such shape would have the paratrooper crashing against the structure sooner than later (it’d be like jumping from one of Egypt’s pyramids and hoping not to hit anything on the way to the ground). Take for instance May Day’s jump from the Eiffel Tower and Bond’s subsequent pursuit by plunging on top of an elevator. Later action sequences fare much better but they all have more than the usual share of the silliness that prevailed during the Moore era. More than a chase sequence, this one has the feel of a “ Home Alone” clip, with the mischievous hero pulling all sorts of pranks on his clumsy pursuers and escaping in a cheesy iceberg-like boat that’s even less believable than the crocodile submarine from “Octopussy” (1983). It starts intriguingly on a serious note when 007 finds the frozen body of a fellow agent in Iceland, but on the turn of a dime it derails into a senseless stunt-show of sorts, well beyond the physical capabilities of the film’s protagonist. The pre-title one is perhaps the worst since those became a tradition in “From Russia with Love”. This is not due to a lack of action scenes but those included are strung together with long, slow stretches. If there is such a thing as a pulse in movies, there are sections of this one where a defibrillator would come in handy. “View” is one of those features that never get off the ground, something unprecedented in the James Bond series. His scheme involves the flooding of Silicon Valley in order to take over the microchip industry alongside the mighty and mysterious May Day ( Grace Jones), a woman of few words and murky intentions. Zorin, the product of a macabre WWII genetic experiment, is yet another bleached blond Bond foe in the tradition of Robert Shaw. “A View to a Kill” deals with James Bond ( Roger Moore) and his efforts to stop psychopath Max Zorin ( Christopher Walken), from implementing “Operation Main Strike”, a plan that is similar in name to Auric Goldfinger’s “Operation Grand Slam” but not quite as intriguing in nature. Since that summer of 1985 when “A View to a Kill” came out, there certainly have been Bonds with lesser villains and plots (“ Quantum of Solace”), others that were far more outrageous (“ Die Another Day”) and even some that were not as visually attractive (“License to Kill”), but the key to “View” remaining alone at the bottom of the 007 canon is how terribly it scores in just about every category used to measure these films. “View” has one of the series’ great title songs (by Duran Duran), it was filmed in some of the best locales imaginable (Paris, San Francisco), it was the first featuring an Academy Award winner (Chirstopher Walken), and yet, it is also the one where someone thought it would be a good idea to spice up a snowy chase scene with The Beach Boys’ “California Girls”. On the contrary, it represents a curiosity of sorts among the Bonds. ![]() It’s not that the picture is devoid of any interest. Thirty years have passed since the release of the 14 th James Bond film “A View to a Kill”, and it remains uncontested as the worst entry in the series.
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