Review of A View to a Kill (1985) by Vidyabum — 21 Oct 2021

I watched all 25 from Dr.No to Spectre (including Never say Never again), I feel this is the third worst movie in the franchise.

A View to a Kill is very simply the opposite of the 2nd worst, Live and Let Die.

In LaLD, Moore was in his first outing and not into the role. In here, he's in his last and very, very much beyond done with the role.

The man that used to play a prancing aristocrat enjoying socialising is now a quite too old man playing a playboy murderer.

Besides Moore himself being quite simply 58, and no amount of makeup was going to help with that, the movie is, in the image of Moore's films by that point, extremely overdone to death. The humour, the dialogues, the interactions, the plot, the everything, it is so "Moore's Bond era" but so dried up and tired, it is not even worth watching.

There is only one scene I truly remember from A View to a Kill, and it is a sort of spoof of Goldfinger. It's essentially the same scene as a famous one from Goldfinger, but done worse. The logic is worse, the directing is worse, the tension is worse, everything is worse. Like 20 years of Bond movies had passed on the scene and just slowly wrinkled it to petrification.

Moore admitted that by the end, he was too old for the role, and indeed, this movie may be the one that shows his age, and the series age and repetition, more than any.

There is little to say about the plot, characters or villain: none of them are good, and this movie, just like Live and Let Die, is skippable without a thing lost.