A View to a Kill

Roger Moore's send-off as the longest-tenured James Bond is a bit of an underwhelming one, and probably should have come sooner. The movie certainly isn't terrible, and is better in a lot of ways than its predecessor. I've lost track of how many times Moore's Bond has gone skiing (it's like three or four), something which every Bond seems to do except Connery, strangely; but he does so in the opening sequence, killing his only victims until the very end, and of all five, he actually directly personally offs zero of them. It's a bit unusual how sometimes he'll destroy a small army by himself, and others he'll barely harm a fly. I wonder if it's a conscious decision on the part of the filmmakers to mix it up from film to film, because while movies often follow similar story structures to previous entries in the series, if he was always involved in the same amount of violence people might wonder what the point is.

This is also a high water mark for number of different girls slept with, pretty impressive for a 58 year old. The problem is that it's hard to believe he could pull it off, he doesn't so much romance them as just let them fall into his bed. Even Moore himself he either didn't have chemistry with or downright didn't like the two main women. And it took me this long but I finally got fed up with his constant boring witticisms. When he's infiltrating the villain's base with the girl, he points to a hiding spot on a vehicle and says "Why walk when you can ride." Does every god damn thing out of your mouth have to be a quip, dude? It's okay to talk like a normal person once in a while. I liked Christopher Walken as the antagonist, he's one of the more psychotic ones in the series and actually has something approaching an interesting background. He's pretty much the highlight of the movie, although his penchant for theatrical executions over definite ones is his downfall as usual. Not a bad movie, but again, not a great one.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "A View to a Kill" by Duran Duran
Foreign locations: Siberia, France, California
Bond, James Bond: 32:05 (fake name), 1:12:10 (other fake name), 1:33:55, 1:34:30
Martini shaken, not stirred: Not ordered
Ladies seduced: 4
Chases: 3
Kills: 5
Non-lethal takedowns: 5