Moonraker and A View to a Kill

We all know that James Bond movies are supposed to be fun and pretty outrageous.  They don’t take themselves that seriously but manage to have some fairly good action and some fun stories.  But what I don’t get is why everyone thinks Sean Connery was such a good Bond.  I thought he was boring as hell.  Sure he’s suave and good looking but his 007 films put me to sleep.  They’re just as silly as the other Bond pictures but they don’t have enough excitement or action to back them up.  The stuff they make fun of in the first Austin Powers movie wasn’t changed very much at all from the early Bond movies and just about all of that material comes from the Connery ones.

But then Connery stepped aside and we got George Lazenby.  But I’m gonna skip over him and the return to Connery to finally get to Roger Moore.   Now this guy is James Bond to me.  He’s such a smart alecky, smug bastard but he always gets the job done.  He brings such life to the character.  And what a character James Bond is.  He has got to be the worst goddamn secret agent in the history of the world.  Every person in the Bond movies knows who this guy is.  Even when he goes undercover he never fools anyone for longer than a day or two.  In The Man with the Golden Gun the villain has a fucking life sized cardboard cutout of the man.  James, the secret’s out buddy.

Almost all of the stuff that happens in the 007 series is farfetched.  I think we can agree on that.  But perhaps the one that is the most farfetched is Moonraker.  I guess they figured James Bond has been all over the world so what’s left?  Hey I know…space.  Let’s do James Bond in space.  Why not?

Our villain is Hugo Drax, played by Michael Lonsdale (The Name of the Rose, Ronin) and his big plan is to destroy all human life on Earth.  That’s quite different from the usual take-over-the-world scheme.  I mean, Drax does want to take over the world but he wants to do it by killing every human.  And not only that he wants to start the human race over again with only good looking young white people.  This sounds kind of familiar though.  Where have I heard this before?  Oh that’s right, Hitler.  So they basically had Hitler as a James Bond villain.  Interesting I guess?  But also very weird.  They even use the term “master race”.  I dunno.

But there’s a pretty funny part in the movie where Jaws falls in love too.  He’s fighting Bond on top of one of those gondolas that you would take up a mountain and in order to escape, James throws a chain over the cable and starts sliding down to safety.  Another bad guy is in the control house so he makes the gondola go faster so Jaws can catch up with James.  But the gondola goes too fast and smashes right through the station.  We see Jaws sitting in the rubble looking a little fazed.  A woman comes racing over to see if he’s ok.  They take one look at each other and fall in love.  So not only is Jaws not dead but he gets up and walks away with his new girlfriend. 

And this isn’t the only time that Jaws defies death in this movie.  In the opening scene Bond is pushed out of a plane without a parachute but steals one from a bad guy in mid-air.  Jaws goes after him to prevent him from opening the parachute.  Well of course Bond is able to open his chute and get away but Jaws’ chute won’t open.  He then falls onto a circus tent collapsing it.  He should be fucking dead but he’s not.  He’s in the rest of the movie.  I really think they stepped over the line with this one.  After showing the audience something like that they don’t want you to take this shit seriously.  The guy fell from thousands of feet.  There shouldn’t be anything left but some scraps of meat and set of metal teeth.  I mean, they do show a silhouette of someone falling into a safety net like from a high flying circus act and if that’s what they’re saying saved him then that’s some funny shit.  But why is it implied?  Why not really show it then?  It’s like watching a Wylie E. Coyote cartoon before the feature.

Another great thing is I love how casually Bond gets on the spaceship.  He sneaks aboard the ship by dressing like one of the henchmen and then sits down and then the thing takes off.  It’s like he doesn’t even realize that he’s about to go into outer fucking space.  The transition of setting from Earth to space in this movie is really quick.  They make launching a space shuttle look so easy and informal.  You think through the whole movie, “how can they possibly get James Bond into space?  What happens that they need him to go into space?”  But before you know it he’s there and the entire thing went off without a hitch.

So overall Moonraker is definitely one of the more bizarre Bond pictures.  The Roger Moore ones tended to get more outrageous in terms of action.  But this one has a particularly funny premise.

But A View to a Kill is really the crème de la crème of Moore Bond films.  Live and Let Die was trying to be hip I think. They were at least trying to broaden their audience a bit (by the way if you want to see one of the funniest villain deaths ever then check this movie out).  The Man with the Golden Gun was a fun solid movie and Christopher Lee (Count Dracula, The Lord of the Rings) is always great to see.  Having another secret agent in The Spy Who Loved Me didn’t really work in my opinion.  You know all about Moonraker.  For Your Eyes Only was another fine solid movie with a hilarious opening sequence that has nothing to do with the rest of the film.  And Octopussy was also fine.  But Moore’s last Bond film was A View to a Kill and he went out with a bang.

The stroke of genius that makes this film is that Christopher Walken plays the villain, Max Zorin.  His whole plot is to hold a monopoly on the microchip market.  Not a terribly evil idea really, just ruthless business.  Anyway Walken looks right at home playing an over the top character because he himself is an over the top character.  He barely tries to hide the fact that he’s crazy in this movie.  He’s different than a lot of the Bond villains in the past too.  Walken brings an immediacy to the role that is usually reserved for quietly plotting, debonair intellects.  We’re told that Zorin is a genius but he acts more like a straight up thug who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.  And the scene that best exemplifies this is towards the end of the movie.  The kinda evil plot that he has involves setting off a giant explosion underground.  So Zorin hires all these construction workers to dig him a gigantic hole and fill it with explosives.  After these guys finish their job he open fires on them with a machine gun.  This is like that theater scene in Inglorious Bastards.  All of these people are getting murdered while trying to escape.  And Zorin is laughing evilly while he’s doing this.  It really comes out of nowhere too because he sees that the job is done and then all of a sudden he’s killing people.  Usually in a movie like this you would see the bad guy maybe seal them inside with a bomb or something and kill them that way but to just whip out a gun and start mowing suckers down like this is something you never see.  Bravo guys.

Zorin’s right hand lady is May Day played by Grace Jones who was hilarious as Strangé in Boomerang.  She’s a beast of a woman.  I wouldn’t want to come across her in a bad mood ‘cause May Day will snap you in two.  She fits right in with the usual villain sidekicks but still manages to standout.  By the way is it just me or did anyone else think it was funny that Bond only has sex with her to escape being caught by Zorin and his guards. 

Moore is definitely showing his age a bit in this but he still looks into it.  He throws on this role so naturally that he could be 100 years old and still make it work. 

So the bottom line is if you’re going to see one Roger Moore Bond film then this is the one.  You can’t beat Walken man.

This is a clip from A View to a Kill where Bond is chasing May Day after she parachutes off of the Eiffel Tower.  The obvious stunt double for Moore looks pretty bad but I can’t get enough Zorin and May Day laughing at the end.  The two of them look so funny together and to see them share such a precious moment is priceless.