A View to a Kill (1985)

A View to a Kill (John Glen, 1985) Walken plays: Max Zorin - bleached, second generation Nazi; loves massacres, computer chips, karate, and horses (not necessarily in that order)

Synopsis: Walken would have the paradoxical honour of being the first Oscar winner to portray a Bond villain, but appearing in one of the worst films of the 007 franchise. In A View to a Kill, he squares off against Roger Moore at his oldest and saggiest in a half-baked Goldfinger rehash involving sinking Silicon Valley to monopolize the microchip market. Along the way, Bond is swept away to such exotic locations as...er... a mine, San Francisco, and a long, drab subplot at Walken's horse breeding estate. 

                                                                        Nay? Neigh. 

Meanwhile, in some of the most embarrassing 007 moments ever to grace the screen, Bond snowboards to the beach boys, Tanya Roberts' Bond girl singlehandedly sets feminism back 40 years, and even loveable gadgetmaster Q (Desmond Llewellyn) spends the film fucking around with a stupid robot. Despicable. Love that Duran Duran theme, though.

                 And YOU get a microchip, and YOU get a microchip, and YOU get a microchip! 

Walken, however, was born to play a Bond villain, and rises to the occasion in spite of the turd of a film he's stuck in. In a part earmarked for David Bowie, his Max Zorin may only be the blandest threat on paper (he's got a vaguely defined backstory as a Nazi test tube übermensch, but the film forgets this partway through), but Walken is as silkily sinister as can be throughout. He's a bit glazed the whole way through, but his flat affect only serves to make Zorin seem even more psychotic and dangerous, especially when paired with ferocious henchwoman/ambiguous love interest May Day (Grace Jones, who's even crazier to watch than Walken), whom he callously abandons to die when she's too sluggish escaping a mine he's trying to blow up. He also chuckles jovially while mowing down rooms full of henchmen in a shockingly violent sequence, and goes ballistic, throttling Bond with an axe on top of a blimp during the climax, before gleefully falling to his death off the Golden Gate Bridge. As you were.

                                                                          "Wheeeeeee!"


Wacky Walken Dialogue: "Intuitive improvisation - it's the secret of genius." How a screenplay so risible generated gems like this is beyond me.

DOES HE DANCE: [I don't think so?? Which would be even worse, considering the theme tune's chorus is "Dance into the fire"] He does do karate with Grace Jones though, and even turns it into a limber bit of seduction. Hot.

Overall Walken-o-meter: 7/10 cowbells. Walken is perfectly cast, and is all the more eerie for doing such horrible actions with such utter remove. Still, there's an inescapable feeling that, with a better film and clearer character to support him, Chris could have really dug into the darkness and concocted an unhinged arch-fiend for the ages. Instead, we get yet another pleasantly Wacky Walken diversion. Still, I'll take it.