A View To A Kill (James Bond 007)

Roger Moore was gifted a better swan song than Sean Connery. Both times.

But man, there is just no getting around it: Moore is too damn old for the role. The irony is he always was, but now it's just ridiculous.

Grace Jones will go down in history as the most legit terrifying Bond girl of all time. There is no part of Jones that doesn't frighten me or freak me out.

Christopher Walken as a Bond villain? Yes, please. Nothing says he's the most psychopathically evil Bond baddie yet than taking out a machine gun and opening fire into a group of his own damn workers just for kicks. It's like if Amon Goeth were a Bond villain.

I'll say this, whether you believe this franchise of all franchises really shouldn't be taking shots at 80's greed and excess, you may be right. That being said, I can't remember a better allegory of that in a movie from this era than the fact that at Zorin's, the stables are nicer than the servants' quarters. That says everything.

My favorite story about the movie is the fact that David Bowie turned down the role for Zorin. Not just because he wanted to do Labyrinth instead, but he also bluntly told the producers that the script was terrible. Now whether he was right or wrong (and I will never fully dismiss a script with that specific stables / servants quarters allegory) the absolute best thing about David Bowie was how he utterly lacked even rudimentary pretense. He wasn't aware that when you pass on a script you don't tell the writers it's because the script sucks. David Bowie spent his life cutting through b.s.. Many of his decisions were questionable (to put it mildly). But he was always embarrassingly honest about everything he felt and did, which is something. He's one of Gilda's two favorite celebrities for that reason (the other is of course Ice-T, for the same reason).

Third bad theme song in a row. This one puzzles me because it was supposedly a hit on the charts. I'm like "What?" I realize 80's music is definitely overrated, but stuff THAT bad wasn't routinely popular, was it? Was it? "Our House In The Middle Of Our Street" crawls into my brain upon thinking that.

Diana Rigg teamed up (and died) with James Bond, why shouldn't Patrick MacNee? Unlike Rigg's radiance in Her Majesty's Secret Service, MacNee is very much taking after Moore in having gotten a wee bit too old for this kind of thing.

Solid. I'm not going to miss Roger Moore because he was too damn old, but he made some great Bond movies. ****.